Wunsch felt he was swindled by the makers of "The Global Warming Swindle"
What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples, it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one: a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that piece of disinformation.
An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context: I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It was used in the film, through its context, to imply that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which are literally what I said, comes close to fraud.
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/channel4response
CARL WUNSCH: This is a long and interesting subject. We do know - and this is a legitimate point - that the earth has been warmer and colder in the past. This is what the geological record tells us, on timescales where people could not have had any influence on the system. As we look at what's going on today, there are people who claim to know that what we are seeing can't be due to human beings, because in the past, human beings could not have caused the change. Well, that's a non-sequitur. The changes that we're seeing today are consistent with a great deal of what we know about the climate system, where there's very little argument about the effects. So, for example, adding carbon dioxide very rapidly that is over periods of decades, which nature doesn't do itself, we can calculate, these are calculations that go back almost 100 years, how much the earth should warm on average. We tend to see that the pattern of warming where more of it takes place at the poles are consistent with an anthropogenic input.
Is there is no proof? Well, there is no proof, but science is very rarely about proof, science is about plausibility. Most of the people who work in this subject without guaranteeing anything will say, “It seems very likely that we are seeing human induced warming because it is taking place on time scales that nature does not normally produce”. There is the argument in that film that it's all due to the sun. There is absolutely no evidence, apart from the distortions they made in the graphs in that film in the version that I saw, there's no absolutely no evidence that what we're seeing is due to solar forcing.
Will I guarantee what we're seeing is due to anthropogenic causes? No. Do I think it's very likely that it is due to anthropogenic causes, and we should react on that basis? Yes, I do, it's very worrying.
There are a number of elements to the system like that. There's very little in science that we can say, “This must absolutely be true”. There's a whole range of depths of scientific belief. I will tell you that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I will tell you that quite definitely.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1977366.htm
