Persistence of Vision

Climate Swindle film: bruised egos, but no offence

So says Ofcom

Published Monday 21st July 2008 11:55 GMT

British regulator Ofcom has rejected complaints that the popular polemical film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, misled viewers. The regulator said it was paramount that the public received alternative points of view - even if these were not endorsed by institutions or the major political parties.

While some aspects of the presentation "caused some concern", the regulator notes, such as failing to give guests time to respond after broadcast, the errors were "of such insignificance" that they could not be judged to mislead the audience.

Ofcom said it couldn't judge the validity of the facts on each side of the argument, but rather that its job was to decide whether the programme breached the Broadcasting Code, in which programmes must not mislead viewers in order to cause offence.

"Ofcom considers that it is important, in line with freedom of expression, that broadcasters are able to challenge current orthodoxy. It is self-evident that there will be strong disagreements over the ‘facts’ on an issue such as the causes of global warming - where some scientists disagree. Some may wish to challenge the evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. Channel 4, however, had the right to show this programme provided it remained within the Code and – despite certain reservations – Ofcom has determined that it did not breach Rule 2.2. On balance it did not materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offence."

The hour long programme, directed and narrated by Martin Durkin, was screened in March 2007, and has subsequently become a hit on DVD. Environmental activists blame the film, and the broadcaster Channel 4, for undermining public confidence in the theory that human CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for increasing temperatures in the late 20th century.

Ofcom ruled that Swindle did not pretend to represent the mainstream view, and clearly labelled its contents; it did not dispute that temperatures were rising (something it could legitimately have done, as temperatures have been steady for almost a decade, the British climate research centres Hadley and the Climatic Research Unit now agree).

The regulator quotes the Stern Report to back its belief that the science was "settled" before the documentary was broadcast:

"This view of human activity as the major cause of global warming does not appear to be challenged by any of the established political parties or other significant domestic or international institutions. "

Boiling point

Yet Ofcom said it "considers it of paramount importance that broadcasters, such as Channel 4, continue to explore controversial subject matter. While such programmes can polarise opinion, they are essential to our understanding of the world around us and are amongst the most important content that broadcasters produce. It is inevitable such programmes will have a high profile and may lead to a large number of complaints."

Ofcom agreed with a complaint from the former scientific advisor to the Government, David King, who complained he had been treated unfairly. The programme attributed a quote to him that he never made, and failed to give him a chance to respond after the programme had been broadcast.

Fred Singer, professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, was broadcast claiming that the UK's chief scientific advisor had said "that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the earth will be the Antarctic. And humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic".

In fact, in May 2004 King had said that "Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked" and that the earth was entering "the first hot period for 60m years" when there was no ice on the planet and “the rest of the globe could not sustain human life".

Swindle received 265 complaints after being broadcast, although Channel 4 says calls to the station supporting the programme outnumbered those complaining by 6 to 1.

Details of Ofcom's adjudication were leaked the The Guardian newspaper on Friday, earning the headline in Saturday's edition "Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film". You can judge the accuracy of that headline for yourselves, by downloading the adjudication here [PDF, 76kb].®

Ofcom Decision: A Humiliating Defeat for Bob Ward and the Myles Allen 37

By Steve McIntyre

Ofcom, the U.K. television regulator, has rendered a remarkable decision. People interested in what was actually decided will, unfortunately, have to consult the original judgment at Ofcom, rather than the BBC accounts (here, here) of the judgment.

BBC stated:

The Great Global Warming Swindle, a controversial Channel 4 film, broke Ofcom rules, the media regulator says. In a long-awaited judgement, Ofcom says Channel 4 did not fulfil obligations to be impartial and to reflect a range of views on controversial issues. The film also treated interviewees unfairly, but did not mislead audiences “so as to cause harm or offence”. Plaintiffs say the Ofcom judgement is “inconsistent” and “lets Channel 4 off the hook on a technicality.”

Ofcom rendered 4 decisions in relation to the program itself (page 6) and about alleged unfairness to David King (page 36), IPCC (page 43) and Carl Wunsch (page 70) separately. Today I’ll post on the program decision and will discuss the 3 ancillary decisions tomorrow.

As I’ve previously mentioned on hte blog, I had no involvement in the making or editing of the production. I chatted briefly with a production assistant in Sweden at the KTH conference in Sept 2006 on a pleasant fall day and agreed to an interview when they visited North America, but the interview was cancelled and I had no further contact with them prior to the show being aired. It turned out that I was mentioned in the credits, but nonetheless, as stated above, I had no involvement in anything to do with the preparation of the program.

When controversy arose about one of their temperature graphics in early 2007, I examined the graphic (reported on at CA here on March 17), identifying the exact error (as opposed to more fanciful explanations). I contacted the producers of the show urging them to fix the error, which they undertook to do. Last fall, they contacted me for assistance in responding to the various complaints, which I provided.

The Program
Ofcom stated that it had received 265 complaints about the Program, the bulk of them alleging misrepresentations (in breach of section 2.2) or a failure of due impartiality (section 5).

Misrepresentations
Among the complainants claiming misrepresentations were Bob Ward and the 37 professors (Myles Allen, Phil Jones et al) who alleged a wide variety of error here and David Rado of the 175-page complaint profiled by BBC here. Ofcom did not uphold any of the misrepresentation complaints against Swindle. Not one.

Ofcom summarized their judgement as follows:

In summary, in relation to the manner in which facts in the programme were presented, Ofcom is of the view that the audience of this programme was not materially misled in a manner that would have led to actual or potential harm. The audience would have been in no doubt that the programme’s focus was on scientific and other arguments which challenged the orthodox theory of man-made global warming. Regardless of whether viewers were in fact persuaded by the arguments contained in the programme, Ofcom does not believe that they could have been materially misled as to the existence and substance of these alternative theories and opinions, or misled as to the weight which is given to these opinions in the scientific
community.

Ofcom considers that, although the programme may have caused viewers to challenge the consensus view that human activity is the main cause of global warming, there is no evidence that the programme in itself did, or would, cause appreciable potential harm to members of the public …

Channel 4, however, had the right to show this programme provided it remained within the Code and – despite certain reservations – Ofcom has determined that it did not breach Rule 2.2. On balance it did not materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offence.

Not in breach of Rule 2.2.

That’s not to say that Ofcom said that Durkin’s point of view had been vindicated, merely that the complainants were seeking comfort in the wrong bed. Even though complainant Rado said that his complaint had been “peer reviewed” by William Connolley, Ofcom resisted the temptation to opine on scientific truth; instead they did the job assigned to them legislation - to determine whether there had been a violation of Rule 2.2, a possibility that none of the complainants seemed to have considered and for which their preparations were abysmal.

In addition to the general finding, Ofcom selected four major alleged misrepresentations (from the dozens of incoherently presented issues in Rado’s 175 page “peer reviewed” complaint) for individual consideration. Here’s a bit of advice from me to the complainants - you’d have been better off to pick your 4 best issues and stick to them, no matter how interesting the other ones seemed; write a blog on the other ones if you want, but the risk of presenting too many issues to a tribunal is that they’ll end up picking 4 issues to consider anyway and, by throwing too many spitballs against the wall, you end up being stuck with the choices that they make. Were I crafting the complaint, I would not have picked the 4 issues that Ofcom focused on as my priority issues. But the complainants failed to prioritize and got stuck with the issues that Ofcom selected.

The first specific issue related to the use of graphics. And indeed, Swindle contained an error in the temperature graphic in the first program, which was said to have been inadvertently introduced in the production of the graphic. Unlike (say) Inconvenient Truth, where errors have remained uncorrected even when one of their Scientific Advisers supposedly brought the error to the attention of the Inconvenient Truth producers, in this case, the producers promptly replaced the graphic, with changes being made even before the second showing. In the hearing, the GGWS producers candidly acknowledged the error and reported the correction. This undoubtedly helped them with the complaint; Ofcom noted the error but found that this error was “not of such significance as to have been materially misleading so as to cause harm and offence in breach of Rule 2.2″.

The second specific allegation considered was the alleged “‘distortion’ of the science of climate modelling.” Ofcom drolly noted:

Ofcom noted that, although the complainants disagreed with the points made by the contributors in the programme, they did not suggest that the overall statements about climate models were factually inaccurate.

Ouch. Ofcom went on to say (again finding for the defendant):

Ofcom notes that the creation of such models necessarily involved assumptions. The disagreement among scientists about the nature of those assumptions (as described by the contributors to the programme) is not an issue on which Ofcom can adjudicate. Overall however Ofcom’s view was that the passages complained of were not materially misleading so as to cause harm and offence.

Next they considered the claim “that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is promoted by environmentalists as a means to reverse economic growth”. I would have advised the complainants to have just dropped this sort of piffle as a complaint. Ofcom made short shrift of this complaint:

This sequence of the programme consisted of a brief historical examination of the environmental movement in the late 1980s before it had become mainstream. These were clearly views of a small set of people who took a particular position on the political motives of these campaigners. In line with the right to freedom of expression, Ofcom considers that the broadcaster has the right to transmit such views and the audience would understand the context in which such comments were made. The content was therefore not misleading.

cont...

Climate Swindle film: bruised egos, but no offence

So says Ofcom

Boiling point

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Ofcom Decision: A Humiliating Defeat for Bob Ward and the Myles Allen 37