Astroblog: The ABC's war on Science

Thursday, June 28, 2007

The ABC's war on Science

While waiting for the ABC's science program Catalyst I was appalled to see an add for "The Great Climate Swindle". I really don't expect Aunty foisting pseudoscience on us. The director of television, Kim Dalton, had this to say:

...in the ABC's recently revised editorial policies, a priority is placed in allowing principal relevant viewpoints on matters of public importance to be aired. We want the ABC to be Australia's town square where people can debate, hear alternative views and learn from each other.

It was in that spirit that ABC television made the decision to purchase the year's most contentious documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, written and directed by British producer Martin Durkin.

Sorry Kim, the sad fact is that the alleged documentary is not a contribution to a debate, but complete rubbish. It gets the basic facts of climate change wrong, it ergeriously quotes the lone climate scientist out of context (the majority of its so called climate experts are nothing of the sort), and it uses, to not put too fine a point on it, made up data* to make it appear as if climate hasn't changed (and their graph of solar activity vs temperatures is a little, shall we say, imaginative and shows a spurious correlation due to arithmetical errors). And its not like these basic flaws weren't well known when Aunty purchased this piece of fiction.

What's next Aunty? "The Great Heliocentric Swindle" complete with faked data showing the Sun orbiting the Earth?

UPDATE: To be fair to the actual Science Unit of Aunty, the TV management ignored the advice of the Robin Williams of the Science Unit, whom I have the greatest resect for.

*Yeah, there could have been an honest mistake where the vertical scale was exagerated, and 1988 was removed from the graph and replaced with 2000, without adding in the data to 2000 (see this image here comparing their graph to the real data) and then this mindboggling bit of incompetence had to be missed during the fact checking and post production of the show. This graph was a key part of their "argument", and if they can't get that basic fact right, with all the publically available data out their, it speaks volumes about the "accuracy" of the rest of the show.

Labels: Climate Change, Pseudoscience

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 10:10 pm

Comments:

I'm glad Robyn Williams spoke out against it. I too have been building respect for him after listening to the Science Show podcasts for the last year or two.

On a side issue Ian, it is interesting that you refer to the ABC as Aunty because we use the same phrase to refer to the BBC.

# posted by