Bob Ward wants accuracy

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for the best documentary feature earlier this year, and no doubt helped its star to earn a share of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The film has had a big impact on audiences around the world, raising awareness about what Gore describes as ‘a planetary emergency’.

But the film contains many flaws – so many, in fact, that it is highly questionable what value it has in the teaching of climate change science to students and pupils. A few weeks ago, a High Court judge ruled that the distribution of the film to schools by the UK government should only continue as long as it is accompanied by written guidance that draws attention to the flaws.

Justice Burton identified nine problems, including its attempt to attribute Hurricane Katrina to climate change, and its oversimplification of the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature recorded over the past 650,000 years in Antarctic ice cores. The judge’s list was by no means exhaustive. For instance, he neglected to highlight Gore’s dubious attempt to link climate change to the spread of avian influenza and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis.

A political film
Many have sought to excuse the errors in An Inconvenient Truth on the grounds that it is ‘broadly accurate’ about the causes and consequences of climate change. But the problems arise because it is primarily a political film, seeking to motivate the audience to support efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. It makes the potential impacts of climate change seem more immediate and of greater magnitude than most climate scientists would agree is reasonable.

In short, An Inconvenient Truth misrepresents the evidence about climate change to achieve a political end. But, in doing so, it undermines the public’s confidence in the reliability and accuracy of sources of information about the science of climate change.

Political agenda
One of the most damaging consequences of the scientific errors in An Inconvenient Truth is that it has allowed others with a personal or political agenda to claim they should also be allowed to misrepresent the evidence to justify their views.

One of the most blatant examples is The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Channel 4 in March, which made a convincing, but wholly misleading, bid to persuade the public that the recent rise in global average temperature is due to solar activity rather than greenhouse gas emissions.

The high court ruling about An Inconvenient Truth has led lobbyists to plan to send copies of The Great Global Warming Swindle to every school, presumably on the mistaken grounds that two wrongs make a right.

Broadcasting Code
When I first saw the trailers for The Great Global Warming Swindle, I thought it might be a spoof, so outrageously inaccurate were its claims. But when I realised that many people had believed its content to be accurate, I concluded that it must clearly breach Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, which specifies: ‘Views and facts must not be misrepresented’.

David Whitehouse, a former BBC Science Correspondent, has attempted to claim that The Great Global Warming Swindle (and presumably all other factually inaccurate programmes) is exempt from the Broadcasting Code on the grounds of ‘free speech’. This is a ludicrous defence which ignores the responsibilities that must be attached to the power wielded by the broadcasting media.

Fuzzy thinking is also apparent among some of Whitehouse’s former colleagues at the BBC, who have spent the last six months wringing their hands over what impartiality means in the context of climate change. A few of its senior editors seem to think that they should put anybody on the air who sounds like they believe what they are saying, even if their views are not supported by the evidence.

Responsibility
But broadcasters also have a responsibility to convey accurately the fact that there is an overwhelming rational consensus among researchers about the causes of climate change. Of the many hundreds of scientific papers that have been published on climate change in the last ten years, only a few tens (constituting substantially less than five per cent of the total) dispute the interpretation that the rise in global average temperature over the past few decades is primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, an Ipsos MORI poll in June found that 56 per cent of the British public believe ‘many leading experts still question if human activity is contributing to climate change.’ This shocking statistic illustrates how badly the public have been let down by film-makers and TV broadcasters who appear to value opinions over evidence.

Bob Ward is Director of Global Science Networks at Risk Management Solutions, but the views expressed here are his own