Why you should watch The Great Global Warming Swindle

The Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fine test for whether someone is qualified to have an opinion about global warming. If that documentary impressed you, then you’re not qualified. Not because you’re on the “wrong side”, (there are smart people and interesting ideas everywhere, they may be mistaken but there’s nothing seriously wrong about that), but because it misrepresents the climate theories it criticizes in some very basic ways. If you watched it all through without noticing those mistakes, then you should temporarily stop having opinions about global warming right now, until you know more about it. Sorry. That said, I have no respect for those who disliked the documentary so much that they reported it to Ofcom, the British television regulators, in the hope, apparently, of preventing such views from being expressed at all. There’s something about non-comformist views that brings out the authoritarian in people, and this is always sad to watch, especially when their actions are counterproductive to a cause I support. Ofcom naturally ruled mostly in favor of Channel 4, thus handing a victory to the bad kind of climate skeptics: The clueless ones.