Know Your Place
Sunday, March 4
In your face, eco-hairies!
[Scene: The Channel Four current affairs documentary team are holding a commissioning meeting]
Crispin: Christ, not more meerkats, Max. I’m sick to my bootcuts of fucking meerkats! They don’t even make them talk or anything. They just sort of stand there on their back legs. In the desert! Who designed that place? The lighting is soo severe. Meerkats are completely 1998.
Tabitha: He’s right, peeps. Come on – it’s 2007! We’ve got to be up there, ahead of the curve in the ballpark. We need the next big thing!
[Jezza enters the room, sniffing and rubbing his nose]
Jezza: Guys, guys, I just had the most fantastic idea on the bog. Listen up, right. We get Charlotte Church right, she just got up the stick with that rugby playing guy, right, so her agent’s all over us. And we get Jade, right – she’ll pay us to be on the telly now. We get Paris Hilton, right, and we get, oh I don't know, Melvyn Bragg or something, you know, for the highbrow hit? And we put them all in a house, right, and we fill it with cameras, right? And what they've got to do, right, they've got to go to the country together, right, and do up an old property, right, and then they’ve got to cook a big meal in it, right, and it's got to be like, nutritious, yeah? You know, that organic shit, the advertisers lap that up. And every week, right, the viewer gets to vote on which meal they like, right, and we can have Nigella coming in as a surprise guest, yeah…?
Tabitha: Jezza, that – that is fucking genius…
Crispin: We’re really pushing the envelope here, people.
Tabitha: Yah, we are in a goood place…
Max: [disgruntled] Nah, that’s bollocks Jezza. That is just so completely last season. You’re trying to pass off Paul Smith as Marios Schwab, man. You’re a cunt.
Tabitha: Whoah, guys, guys... ease back on the pedal, yeah?
Jezza: Got any better ideas, you little troll?
Max: Yah, as it happens. Listen up to this peeps, it'll blow your Blahniks off. Right what's, like, the biggest news story around? What's in all the papers all the time?
[Pinterian pause]
Tabitha: Er … Madonna's baby?
Max: Completely 2006.
Jezza: Britney’s breakdown?
Tabitha: Man, that’s so big. Isn’t there any way we can get Britney…?
Max: No, you dumbfucks! Global warming!
Tabitha: Global what?
Max: Global warming! Don’t you watch the news? The planet’s heating up, right, because we’re all using the wrong lightbulbs or something, and all the eco-hairies are jumping up and down saying it’s the end of the world.
Jezza: So what’s new?
Tabitha: Christ, yah, they are so tiresome. Only the other day, right, I was in the Good Mixer, right, and I was just eating this prawn bruschetta, and some guy with, like, hair and stuff, starts telling me I’m killing mangoes or something. He was like really in my face and I was just, like, yah, will you just, like, go away?
Max: Well, listen, that's the whole point. Nobody likes to listen to all these hippies telling us we can't go on holiday and we have to shit in a bucket and then grow our food in it, or whatever. So, we do a documentary about how there’s no such thing as global warming. It'll annoy the tits off them, and they'll be so busy getting each other to write letters to us that they won't have time to propose any more stupid documentaries about trees or oil.
Crispin: That is totally weapon. But who’s gonna do it?
Max: I'm totally on to it. Remember that series we did back in 1997? What was it called, Against Nature? You know, the one where we slagged off all the eco-hairies? Well, the guy who made that – Martin Durkin – basically wants to do it again, except with added climate change.
Jezza [smugly]. What a short memory you have, Max. That series was so completely full of shit that we had to broadcast the only on-air apology in our history. Oh, and we had to say sorry to all the eco-hippies we stitched up making it. Or were you still on work experience at the time?
Max: Listen, you little twat. You've got no idea of the first rule of marketing: make it controversial! The fact that Durkin is a complete bullshitter who can't get any of his facts right and doesn't know one end of the camera from the other is a fucking bonus man! Every other fucking outfit in the multichannel world has got documentary-makers who know what they're doing. It's a complete cliché man. Durkin’s the dogs! The fact that he's knowingly wrong is what makes him brilliant! And he's got this fantastic coterie of bitter old Marxists around him, who’ll say anything to get on the telly because nobody’s listened to them since 1989. It's a surefire hit! We can call it The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Tabitha: Show of hands? OK, it’s all agreed. Brilliant work everyone. Lunch at the Groucho to celebrate? Spiked is paying.
Posted by Paul at 1:38 PM 
10 Comments
In the interest of a more balanced debate on Global Warming, I would of thought this long overdue documentary would be seen as a good thing.
Maybe the writer is essentially just defending his own biased entrenched position.
Perish the thought.
Posted by: 
Kernal Quartz at 7:10 PM
Quite right, of course. My entrenched position that human-induced climate change is happening, based on the opinion of the vast majority of the world's climate scientists, is in desperate need of questioning. After all, I have a real vested interest in it being right. I can't wait for the famine and ecological collapse, just to see the look on your face. And Martin Durkin certainly has no vested interest in being constantly commissioned to make factually inaccurate documentaries. I bet Channel Four don't even pay him.
It is always important to get both sides of the story though. After all, there's no such thing as objective truth is there? Next week on Dispatches: Jerry Falwell exposes the liberal conspiracy that is 'evolution.' Followed by David Irvine's powerful film 'The Great Gas Chamber Conspiracy.'
What's your real name, Kernal? Is it Frank Furedi?
Like the articles of that great scientist Christopher Monckton, some things are best left ignored. This will please the anti-HICC bods, but the science is pretty unequivocal, and that's all I'm interested in.
Nice blog BTW, Paul - I've added a link to you. Please pop along and see mine.
Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
Posted by: 
Keith Farnish at 5:21 PM
I wanted to give some friends a response to their questions, so knocked up a quick summary. Seems a shame to waste it, so here it is:
I don't want to spend much time on this, as I've seen most of before in other places - it's just it hasn't been put together in a big lump like that. Don't forget that in 90 minutes you saw virtually all the arguments, including all the scientific evidence, against human-induced global warming. The IPCC summary report (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf) has far more credible and evidenced information in it than that entire film digest, and that is just the summary. I really recommend you read it.
So to respond briefly:
1) Sunspots / Milankovitch cycles : They operate at different frequencies, so it is entirely possible that a combination of sunspot minimum, plus orbital eccentricity and global tilt maxima, could provide the conditions for significant global warming in themselves (although in reality the great geological scale changes combine many other factors such as plate movements, extreme volcanic activity, feedback cycles and so on), but those conditions are not in place at the moment - so the argument doesn't hold up.
2) Greenpeace man : Nothing I can add to this http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Moore. A trustworthy man? The thing is, showing someone's background as being counter to everything a person claims to be is not "smear", it is just exposing hypocrisy - I hate hypocrisy.
3) Water vapour is indeed the most important greenhouse gas. But this proves nothing as water vapour is not affected by human activity, and the atmospheric system is extremely vulnerable to change either way (cooling and warming) due to its extreme thinness compared to the size of the Earth. Thus, when you introduce not-insignificant additional amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into this fragile system, things start to change. What is surprising is that the Earth's temperature is able to stay so stable (around 14C) given the huge changes going on around it. Water vapour - which absorbs infra-red radiation globally more than it reflects it - acts as a buffer to prevent the changes in the atmosphere from being more rapid, thus keeping this delicate system relatively balanced. We are shifting that balance as there hasn't been so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 600,000 years.
4) 800 year lag. The abstract of the cited paper is as follows:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/ijlink?linkType=ABST&journalCode=sci&resid=283/5408/1712
Ice Core Records of Atmospheric CO2 Around the Last Three Glacial Terminations
Hubertus Fischer, Martin Wahlen, Jesse Smith, Derek Mastroianni, Bruce Deck
Air trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere.
To me that looks like an analysis of the effect of losing and gaining huge amounts of plant matter due to glaciation. The analysed glacial periods took place when the non-tropical northern hemisphere was still (as now) the main source of deciduous plant matter - which causes the global carbon "breath" every autumn - so glaciation would have reduced the ability of the planet to absorb carbon dioxide, hence the lag as temperatures fall, and the slow return of CO2 levels as the ice retreats due to the massive increase in global vegetation. The cause-and-effect is related to the large scale changes in temperature, not the extremely rapid, short scale one we are seeing now.
Related to the point about the ocean releasing CO2 as it warms : too damn right. A cold ocean can absorb more carbon dioxide due to the presence of greater densities of phytoplankton, but as temperature goes up then the phytoplankton die off and the CO2 is released (and absorbed at a slower rate).
The issue here is not that this shows a lag, as is self evident, but that is doesn't actually show what the programme was attempting to show. There are two different processes operating here - one in which the temperature of the sea is regulating carbon, and another in that we are affecting the temperature of the sea. Now, if we continue to increase the temperature of the sea, more phytoplankton will die off, less carbon will be absorbed, more global warming will take place, the temperature of the sea will increase...
Add to that that increased carbon dioxide adds to the "acidity" of the oceans, which also kills off phytoplankton, and you have a big problem.
I must reiterate this : the "respiration" of carbon by changing sea temperatures is not a cause, it is an effect, but we can cause the temperature (and acidity) of the sea to increase, which is a cause.
I can give you many potential vested interests either way, but to be honest, I'm only interested in the science - and there's a damn sight more good science showing we are causing global warming, than the other way round.
Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
Posted by: at 10:45 PM
Loved reading this!
Having watched the programme, and I consider myself well informed, it had me scratching my head. I was almost planning the long haul holidays.
I have to say though that I didn't find so convincing the arguments that the CO2 conspiracy came about because of some obscure BBC programme called the Weather Machine featuring an even more obscure Swedish scientist and because of Thatcher's determination to smash the miners!
I have to say having watched most of the programme it was convincing and this is worrying as I would mark myself as someone with an element of common sense.
After watching I leant towards believing the docu as I was sure Channel 4 would never put their necks on the line in such an important issue. Seems I am a little nieve!
People in white coats again!
Posted by: at 5:37 PM
Just wondering, why are people called Crispin always portrayed as being dickhead advertising execs. I'm called Crispin, and only recently has this come to my attention. Only mention it here as I work for a student campaigning organisation, People & Planet (http://peopleandplanet.org)and we do alot of work on climate change. Was therefore amused to see my (not very common name) here! Otherwise loved it though, nice one :-)
This lunch is call'd the "10 o'clock meet with Crispin."
He that stays awake through the day, and comes safe home,
Will demand a pay-rise when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispin.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly at stockholder events treat his neighbours,
And say 'you know who had great shit? Crispin, beyond a doubt.'
Then will he rub his nose and show his septum,
And say 'This deviation was entirely on Crispin's account.'
Old men forget; even the CEO shall be forgot,
But we'll remember, like a lightning etched Lichtenstein dot-printed on our brains,
What blow we did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in their minds as "Channel4" or "Weetabix" -
Max the Genius, Tabitha the Cheerleader,
Jezza the Rehasher and wise Crispin -
Be for their BMWs and parties freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the business man teach his son;
And Crispin's Meeting shall never go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
(coming soon, according to the eco-hairies)
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that shares his coke with me
Is my brother; be he ever so much a surly cunt,
After this Swindle shite takes off, he walks on water!
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
And ladies too, Tabitha, of course, will wake
And tell off the Greenpeace PC freaks
With words written at Crispin's meeting.
Posted by: Marion Delgado at 9:31 AM
