Climate, the Movie: A Review
A lot of people should pay attention to Climate: The Movie, the latest film by Martin Durkin. This is because that whatever you think about catastrophic climate change, it touches on questions about democracy and free speech as well as climate science. But that might not be all that easy because just a day after it was released on March 21, it was shadow-banned by YouTube, making it difficult to do a Google search for it. In a way, this proves some of the points made in the second-half of the film; that information on climate change is censored and highly-controlled, even if it is true and undisputed.
Steven Koonin, GWPF annual lecturer and the author of Unsettled, appears in the film, making that point when he says he tells his students to ‘look at the data’, then make up their own minds. Tragically, far too many people — alarmist scientists, politicians, campaigners, journalists — make their mind up and then don’t even look at the data.
The first part of the film is about the science, about temperature and carbon-dioxide levels and their respective influences and timescales. It shows that the ‘climatic extremes’ so often reported are not extremes at all. Then it goes into the politics, examining the role of the establishment, the media and net zero, making the point that if we aren’t going to be mauled by the planet, we will be by our reaction to the putative climate crisis.
The film illustrates how corrupt some aspects of science have become; just looking at and relaying what the data shows results in censorship and marginalisation. It is good to see Prof Sallie Baliunas appear. I came across her work on Sun-like stars many years ago when I was in the same field at Jodrell Bank. Her work was impressive. But when it had something to say about climate change and the underestimation of the Sun’s influence, she was treated abysmally by the scientific community. As she relates, she took very early retirement and even that was some time after her suffering family urged her to stop. She became a shepherdess to seek solace. Her story is a stain on science.
Martin Durkin relates that the climate change story is a stain on the media as well, with its ready supply of uninformed, tunnel-vision journalists and commentators, who lack the ability to follow Steven Koonin’s advice, or even see why they should.
Science, especially the government funding of science, has not reached a state of competence and stability, responding only to the intellectual needs of inquiry or the practical needs of society. It is, as Covid showed so well, a fallible enterprise, subject to the same pressures of groupthink, fashion, incentive and ambition as any other human enterprise.
Martin Durkin’s film brings this out well in his consideration of science’s response to climate change. Science is self-correcting given long enough, but not on climate-forecast timescales, even those timescales that unequivocally show that climate models don’t represent the real world. Future historians and sociologists of science may not look at this episode in the development of science kindly. As Climate: The Movie shows, there are more climate scientists (it’s a wide term) around today than ever, and more money for them, and no room for any eggs other than those in the basket of consensus.
I know what some people will say; the same old people saying the same old discredited things, don’t watch it, it comes from a contaminated source. After all, 17 years ago Martin Durkin made The Great Global Warming Swindle, and the backlash was tremendous. Since then, there has not been a major movie questioning the ‘consensus,’ or asking if we are going about responding in the right way. This is a telling point; we should always be asking if we are going the right way. But what is to be done? James Randi, who knew a thing or two about being fooled once said; “Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.”