More on the supposed Global Warming Swindle

Chris Merchant of the University of Edinburgh has put together a nice presentation that explains the logical fallacies of The Great Global Warming Swindle and explains what the climate science says. He uses clips from the documentary, which makes the download size 120 MB - you have been warned!

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/chris.

The programme made much of a heavily smoothed graph of solar activity against temperature, in an attempt to show that the currnt global warming is purely a result of solar activity.  There are several "interesting" features of this graph, of which the most blatant is that it stopped at 1980 - because the readings since then do not show the correlation the programme makers wanted.  In other words, they were lying.  Careful selection of time ranges like this is a common trick; It's used a lot by political parties when they want to prove that a given policy does or doesn't work.  For comment about this graph, see http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/the_use_of_damon_and_laut.php.