Robert W. Endlich
I was very pleased to be able to view and comment on the sequel to “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” (GGWS), a serial documentary directed by the UK’s Martin Durkin and released by Channel 4 in the UK in 2007. The sequel, released in 2024, is “Climate: The Movie.”
INTRODUCTION
It is useful to introduce “Climate: The Movie” by describing how the enemies 
of Martin Durkin, GGWS, and skeptics of climate alarm label the video and its director, Martin Durkin. A good example of this is in the Wikipedia listing for GGWS.
The previous phrase, “enemies of Martin Durkin,” might be too limiting. Writ large, this group also includes many/most left-leaning members of society. Some call them the “educated elites;” they include many in Government, especially members of the Biden and Obama Administrations, many in The Academy, most of the Mainstream Media, Big Tech, and many Hollywood elites.
However, just because they might have college or university degrees does not mean they are educated in the sense of having useful knowledge or being able to use that knowledge to think critically.
CONSENSUS DOES NOT DETERMINE TRUTH
The notion, espoused by Wikipedia, that “Scientific Consensus” is a thing of value leading to truth is mere sophistry. “Scientific Consensus” is more akin to High School popularity than a methodology to improve knowledge, in this case, knowledge of natural processes in the study Earth Sciences.
The Wikipedia piece engages in name-calling to achieve its aims: “Climate Deniers,” akin to “Holocaust Deniers.”
Wikipedia’s hit piece implies that before humans developed modern technology, harnessing the energy available in hydrocarbon fuels, climate never changed, a ludicrous idea. A collateral implication of this article is that human activity is an important cause of significant climate change. It is true that poor thermometer exposure and the Urban Heat Island effect gives the impression that temperatures are soaring, but well-exposed thermometers from rural sites show only a little warming is happening at present. This topic is well covered by “Climate: The Movie.”
Besides, if you look at any long-term temperature record on Earth, the average never flat-lines; the mean is always changing. And in this post I examine Don Easterbrook’s analysis of Greenland’s GISP2 ice cores and found,
“… the temperature changes of the 20th century, were and continue to be TINY in comparison with past centuries’ temperature fluctuations…which had almost no human CO2 emissions.”
Below is a quote from that Wikipedia listing on GGWS which seems to fit these elites: 
SCIENCE IS AN ITERATIVE PROCESS
Simply put, characterizations using consensus science are wrong on many fronts. Science is about facts, measurements, observations, and data. Science is an iterative process whereby critical thinkers, including scientists, students, and some academics, continually examine the natural world with curiosity and attempt to explain more of what they observe.
Critical and scientific examination might include observing several aspects of the natural world, then coming up with a hypothesis which might explain these. Thereafter, they make more observations to test the hypothesis with more data. If the subsequent observations match the hypothesis, the hypothesis is likely true, but if the subsequent observations of real-world conditions do not match the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is false.
There is an example on our CASF web site,
“With all the carbon dioxide in the air today, Surface Temperatures in New Mexico are hotter than ever before in the Instrumental Record.”
We tested this hypothesis with five rural stations from New Mexico having at least an 80-year period of record. The hypothesis fails. It fails directly, by using surface temperature data from New Mexico on record in the Western Regional Climate Center in Nevada, we see that the most fundamental assumption in the global warming alarm is shown to be wrong – colossally Wrong!
With this beginning, we use examples from our Web Site, including many from the Course I taught at OLLI-UTEP and NMSU-A in 2017 and 2019, “Weather, Climate, and Climate Change—What the Data Tell Us,” to illustrate the points here. The graphics from this course are also on the web site under the “Class Info” tab.
“IT’S THE WRONG WAY ‘ROUND’” OOPS!
In “Climate: The Movie” at about the 26:45 mark, Durkin says,
“Scientists have indeed found (from the ice core records) a relationship between CO2 and Temperatures. The trouble is, it’s the wrong way ‘round.’”
But of course. In High School Chemistry we learned Henry’s Law from the British Chemist William Henry, which he formulated over 175 years ago. Roughly,
“in aqueous solution, as the temperature of the solution increases, dissolved gases in the solution are driven into the air until the partial pressure of the gas in the air matches its pressure in the solution, and conversely.” (bold added)
This means the TEMPERATURE of water bodies at Earth’s surface containing dissolved air determines, to first approximation, cause the changes in the concentration of the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere above the water surface.
The climate alarmists say it is the Carbon Dioxide concentration that controls the temperature. Quoting Durkin again, “the trouble is, it’s the wrong way ‘round.’”
Wikipedia’s hit piece implies that before humans developed modern technology harnessing the stored energy available in hydrocarbon fuels, climate never changed, a ludicrous idea. While attempting criticism, the Wikipedia Hit Piece on Martin Durkin inadvertently blurts out the truth:
“The film also interviews deniers who view environmental policies as holding back developing nations from industrializing.”
Yep, this is true; the illustrative examples are in Africa.
Slide 7 from the presentation graphics is from “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” It shows a climate protest, with Hammer and Sickle banner, presumably from London. The roots of the global warming alarm come directly from the anti-Capitalist Left. When Big Communism failed with the fall of the Soviet Union, the anti-free market Left joined the Environmentalists. The Global Warming Alarmists are simply trying to subvert the West and its abundant societies characterized by free-market economies, by destroying ready access to inexpensive, reliable, and abundant energy. It IS a COMMUNIST PLOT.
Dr. Steven Koonin is a professor at New York University.
“I tell my students to check the data or the papers yourself…” “…They tell me I’m a Denier. I ask them what I’m denying…”
Koonin, at ~9:00 mark in the video disputes notions that today’s temperatures are “hottest ever,” “unprecedented.”
Koonin cites Mesozoic temperatures, during the Age of Dinosaurs:
“On a geologic perspective, this (today’s temperatures) is not at all unprecedented.”
URBAN HEAT ISLAND
Dr. Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, UAH, at the 21:00 mark,
“…most of the warming has been from the Urban Heat Island Effect.”
Roy Spencer, an acquaintance from my attendance at Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change Conferences, has a blog and posts on the Urban Heat Island Effect, a good example being here. Dr. Spencer’s other remarks here about climate change and research seem to me to be quite well thought out and worthy of reading.
We have in the Las Cruces area two close-by, century-long period of record climate monitoring stations, one at NMSU and the other at Jornada Range, 20 miles north of Las Cruces. My 10 Sep 2022 post, “ https://casf.me/have-climate-activists-lost-the-power-of-critical-thought ” also discusses the Urban Heat Island.
The section in that post, A STORY OF TWO OBSERVING STATIONS, shows that at the rural Jornada Range temperatures have fallen 2 F in the past century, while at NMSU temperatures have risen about 4.5 F. This seems to be a textbook example: the Urban Heat Island effect combined with poor thermometer exposure, exposure that does not adhere to the international standards , shows strongly rising temperatures, while the nearby background station, Jornada Range, shows temperatures falling, significantly so.
CARBON DIOXIDE’S ATMOSPHERIC HISTORY
As Plate Tectonics has become an established academic discipline, Dr. Chris Scotese has been the leading voice in describing “Where the present continental plates were back in Geologic Time,” with The Paleomap Project. The Climate Tab shows variations in the position of significant land masses since the Cambrian some 600 million years ago.
Robert Berner of Yale has devised a methodology for determining past <CO2> back to the Cambrian, some 600 million years ago, using these, among others, as tools: continental weathering, rainfall and runoff, Strontium isotope analysis, a General Circulation Model, Calcium-Magnesium silicate weathering of minerals, and land plant development. Berner’s publication is here.
(Durkin) 23:43,
“Over the last 500 million years, the amount of CO2 in the air has been far, far higher than today. Even with modern industry’s emissions, today the amount of CO2 is close to as low as it has ever been.”
Geologist, Matthew Wiliecki, ~24:10,
“If we look at <CO2> in the Phranerozoic, (Geologic time since the Cambrian) we would see concentrations of 7000 Parts/Million.”
Durkin:
“CO2 is plant food. The result of much higher CO2 was a much greener world.”
Wiliecki:
“Periods of elevated CO2 tend to be times of huge biodiversity on the Planet. “
A cartoon depicting Berner’s GEOCARB III time series of <CO2> since the Cambrian is in Figure 2 below. Note well the present <CO2> is about 424 parts per million or PPM. The mindless alarmists who talk about “increasing CO2 driving climate ‘tipping points’” have no knowledge that Earth has already done the experiment of <CO2> concentrations up to and exceeding 7,000 PPM during known geologic history. No tipping point occurred, if it had, we would not be here to discuss this subject.
Figure 2 quotes Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and his mention that in the last Glacial Maximum, called the Wisconsin Ice Age in North America, <CO2> fell to the lowest ever, between 180 and 220 parts per million. The title of a 2005 publication by Joy Ward et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, tells the story: “Carbon Starvation in Glacial Trees Recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits, southern California.”
MEDIA ELITES FORGET OWN PUBLICATION HISTORY
About the 29:23 mark, Tony Heller, who publishers the blog, Real Climate Science, blurts out the truth, “In the 1970s, the new Ice Age was the story.”
The Presentation Graphics also show three covers from TIME, “Big Freeze, Cooling of America,” two articles on the ongoing global cooling from the New York Times from 8 Aug 1974, and a feature article from Der Spiegel in Germany, from 1974, with a title having these words, “…new ice age approaching, odds of a warm future at best 1 in 10,000.”
CONCLUDING WITH SOME QUESTIONS
The existence of these magazine covers, feature articles, and graphics is never mentioned in the popular literature today. Does the notion that climate cycles exist in nature ever cross their collective minds? Is it that they cannot and do not do searches of the morgue of their own publications? Have journalists forgotten how to do any literature searches before sitting at the keyboard? Are there no critical editors left at these publications? Is the culture so devoid of critical thought that they think they can get away with such malpractice?