The Great Global Warming Swindle screened on Prime on Sunday night.

For those of you who didn’t see it, don’t bother.

For those of you who did, consider this advice given to the Bush Administration in 2001 by Frank Luntz, a communications advisor:

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed….Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.”

This is the strategy being followed by corporate America, and the think tanks they fund who are at the forefront of the climate sceptic industry.

10 out of the 16 interviewees in The Great Global Warming Swindle are connected with no less than 30 Exxon-funded Conservative Think Tanks based in the US. See our ExxonSecrets map.

It’s hard to outline the factual errors in the Swindle, because there are so many.

In the first sentence the words “leading climate scientists” is wrong. Only two real climate scientists were interviewed: one had his entire interview removed, and the other has complained about one of the graphs (about the relationship between climate and the sun) being utterly misleading.

Take another interviewee: Fred Singer. This man has been a scientific “expert” on a wide range of topics – commercial whaling, ozone depletion, the nuclear industry, second hand smoke – he has been a “rent a contrarian” for many, many years, and has published little – if any – research on climate.

Patrick Moore, also interviewed on the programme, was never a co-founder of Greenpeace, and is currently a lobbyist for the nuclear and forestry industries. The US magazine Mother Jones published an article on him recently.

There have been many, many pieces written about the Swindle since it first aired on the UK’s Channel 4 channel in March last year.
For a good summary of the eight common myths on climate change, the UK Royal Society is a good source.

For more specific information about the Swindle, check out the Australian Science Media Centre’s page, published after the documentary screened there last July.

The UK’s “medialens” published a full and detailed report on all aspects of the film.

And this is a “must see” - Australian ABC’s Tony Jones interviewing Durkin – it’s a real shame Prime did nothing like this to balance its programme.