Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle

On March 8, Channel 4 screened The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary that branded as a lie the scientific consensus that man-made greenhouse gasses are primarily responsible for climate change. (See Indy Media summary).

It's amazing to see that denial is still so rife. What do these people achieve? Why can't they accept that shit is happening? Perhaps its a sensationalist position to attract more viewers they have so they can increase their advertising dollar. Maybe they don't really believe the lies they are peddling. Again, another case where the force of capitalism is stronger than the force of the common-good. Or they might believe their tripe and are part of a forming society that denies what is happening; a denial that is starting to show itself as angry.

Rightly, people need to be able to consider all aspects of this science.
I was shocked to read a story titled Scientists threatened for 'climate denial' (Telegraph (UK), 11th March 2007). After reading around I realised it was yet another extreme view on the situation. George Monbiot discussed this in his rebuttal of Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle story. As always he provides excellent referencing supporting good arguments.

I have now experienced the anger first hand.

I had a meeting with a quite senior person in the Company I work for. I'd sent out promotion of Climate Change, Despair and Empowerment roadshow and in it was the sentance:

• (The roadshow aims to:) unveil the false and "business as usual", solutions being touted by the major political parties such as nuclear power and so called "clean coal".
  

The manager ('Dave' - not his real name but I want to protect myself), said there had been complaints raised as I'd sent out email with a political agenda. I scratched my head over the weak connection to any political agenda in this statement but agreed that I can see how some may see it this way. There were three complaints. One of them was quite personal in its attack on my email, and the manager asked why they may have come across like this.

I'm starting to think that this is displacement theory in action. People are feeling angry at the reality of climate change. They are displacing their anger on the messengers. I guess anger is caused by despair, and like Al Gore said, "And there are people who go - as I say in the movie - from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step and what denial and despair have in common is they both let you off the hook. You don't have to do anything. And actually the mature approach is, that all of us have to take, we have to find our way to it, is to act to solve this. And we can solve it. Despair is completely unjustified."

So these people are those we most need to concentrate on. I'm glad there was only 1.

On a conclusive note, I discussed with Dave that we have to accept that climate change is reality and then, once enough are in agreement with what is causing it, we can start making changes. Although the results of climate change are not going to be good for our civilisation, I remarked that if our company accepts this change now and starts making strategic business plans around this, then we have an opportunity to get well ahead of our competitors.

I of course believe that capitalism is largely responsible for this mess we are in (people value money over anything else - consider the case of someone having a mortgage, they've got to feed the family and need to do whatever they can to make some dollars; Consider that we've been driven to want more and more. So we'll support companies who increase in value and pay us dividends. These same companies may have operations that cause environmental damage, and they often shield the general public and shareholders from this. Can we change the driving values of capitalism - that is keep the good bits whilst making all operations fully sustainable?

We need to change something. We need to first get past the anger, denial and despair.