A fig leaf for global warming sceptics

The Guardian, Wednesday July 23, 2008

I take a special interest in Ofcom's largely damning verdict on Martin Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle (Report, July 22). I presented a programme for Channel 4 entitled God Is Green three weeks before. On the basis of that, I was invited to an Al Gore training day in Cambridge two weeks after the Swindle documentary was aired. As I entered the room, the former senator saw the Channel 4 ID on my conference badge and uttered words to the effect that I had a cheek showing my face there after all the damage I had done. Thankfully, his minders were able to put him right. He was not a happy man.

So serious is the climate threat that I gave up TV after that film last year to work with Operation Noah, a faith-based campaign that calls for leadership from religious and political figures on global warming. I have done more than 30 public meetings so far this year and am in no doubt that the Durkin programme has given many people a fig leaf for carrying on with business as usual.

Ofcom's report showed that Wag TV treated David King, Professor Carl Wunsch and the IPCC unfairly. Yet mysteriously it also found that "there is no evidence that the programme in itself did, or would cause appreciable potential harm to members of the public". Just when are we going to stop this denial? As a species, we put 26bn metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year: three times the amount of 50 years ago. The correlation between CO2 and global heating was established in 1896 by the Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius. But then they said there was no correlation between tobacco and lung cancer, didn't they?

Mark Dowd

Operation Noah