You environmentalist hippy freaks belong in the 1960s. Global warming is a lie, watch the Great Global Warming Swindle!

it's okay everyone, we can forget the whole thing, realist has just said global warming is a hoax cause the tv told him/her so! if realist says it definately does not exist, thats good enough for me, i'm off to bangladesh for me hols!

The great warming swindle was indeed a swindle. It featured all the leading climate change sceptics, all 18 of them. Six of these have never held any position in a scientific institution. Six of them have resigned, retired or been fired from their academic positions.

In contrast about 2,500 scientists write, edit and review the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  http://www.ipcc.ch. In order to gain the approval of this number of scientists the reports have to be written very conservatively. They are not the wild flights of fancy some claim they are, they probably under-estimate the problem slightly.

Who do you think are right, 2,500 scientists or less than 20 sceptics? Answers on a post-card please.

Science is never 100% certain of anything, but it can achieve a consensus and there is an overwhelming consensus on climate change.

Believing the opinions of an handful of sceptics, because they tell you the answer you want to hear, is a dubious way of arriving at the truth. I'll stick with the 2,500 scientists thank you, unless it is shown they are in error. So far they have not been shown to have made any error major enough to discredit their opinion, despite the increasingly desperate attempts of the sceptics who started scraping the bottom of the barrel a long time ago.

Remember, those 2,500 scientists did not start off believing in climate change. They were persuaded by the scientific evidence. The graph at  http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/3.html proves beyond any reasonable doubt that we are affecting the climate.

Wake up!

In order to support its (at best) tenuous argument, the program was forced to fabricate data and misrepresent scientists.

Its most credible scientist, Prof Carl Wunsch took legal action against the program for being the 'closest thing to pure propaganda since WWII'.

One graph had data added, another (decades old) graph was mis-labelled, volcano emission figures were lied about, the effect of inputs on atmospheric carbon concentrations was misrepresented, evidence against the claimed strength of solar cycle forcings was ignored, scientists were misrepresented. Basically most of the 'evidence' in the program was either fabricated, misrepresented or logical fallacy (see 'straw man' argument)

It made some credible comments, but it is far from reliable as gospel on climate science. For that I'd recommend journal articles or textbooks on the subject.