It's touted as an award-winning documentary on climate change, but if that's true I'd like to know whether the judges were the three wise monkeys. Here's why: the Thin Ice documentary made by Victoria University of Wellington and Oxford University in the UK is littered with factual errors and misleading statements.
The documentary is being toured around New Zealand high schools in a bid to drum up support for the upcoming climate treaty negotiations in Paris this December. I don't know who's paying for it but they must have deep pockets - barely 50 people 'crowded' into an 800 seat Auckland school hall, each paying a gold coin donation to see the film.
But it wasn't just the movie screening - it had an entourage. Vic University documentary maker Simon "I'm not a climate scientist" Lamb was joined by geologist and film producer Peter Barrett at the school, along with a Vic Uni undergraduate in a supporting role.
The gold coin donations were unlikely to even cover their airfares from Wellington, let alone accommodation, unless they managed to score $35 return flights each. Perhaps they pedaled the 700 km: "I hope you are cycling home tonight," the cheery undergraduate told the scattered audience members.
"Come closer," Barrett urged the people dotted around the hall. Few did. The screening began with a message from "Xena the Warrior Princess", explained Barrett, quickly realizing that Lucy Lawless had starred in that role long before most of the students in the audience were born. "Maybe that's before your time," he added, "but anyway here she is". Lawless gave her 'best supporting actress in a fictional documentary speech', urging viewers to trust the authority of the team who made the movie and to do their part for climate justice.
I was prepared to give the film a chance, on the basis that I like to see my opponent's arguments before critiquing them. But let's cut to the chase.
The film begins with Simon Lamb mocking skeptics of climate change by suggesting they are alleging a grand "conspiracy" of "dishonest climate scientists". His documentary, he said, was intended to be a neutral revelation of what the climate scientists were doing so people could make up their own minds about whether they were being honest or dishonest about climate. Within a few minutes I knew they were being dishonest, but no one in the audience would have known unless they were well briefed on the facts.
MISLEADING CLAIM #1: Antarctic ice cores show CO2 causing temperature increases over the aeons
Victoria University scientist Tim Naish made the claim in the doco while Lamb and producer Barrett imposed an ice core graph over thousands of years showing CO2 and temperature moving in "lockstep". What they failed to tell viewers is that a 2003 study by Caillon and published in the journal Science looked at 40,000 years of ice core history from the Vostok site, and found that the reverse was true, that in fact temperatures rose first and CO2 levels started to rise 800 years later.
As I explained in my book Air Con, this makes sense: the rising temperatures warmed oceans and released trapped CO2 bubbles as the water warmed. The CO2 did not "cause" the temperature increases - the temp increases caused the release of more CO2. The documentary Thin Ice is highly misleading in this respect.
MISLEADING CLAIM #2: You can trust the computer models, and they show a three degree increase in temperature but it could be double Again, Lamb plays the ingénue in this part of the documentary, going to great pains to tell viewers how clever the computer modelling is and how the models are actually understating the probable warming that's coming.
In reality, the computer models have been rubbished by peer reviewed climate journals, projecting global warming four times higher than reality, as I wrote in Totalitaria. The journal Nature Climate Change notes:
"The inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming is even more striking for temperature trends computed over the past fifteen years (1998–2012). For this period, the observed trend of 0.05 ± 0.08 °C per decade is more than four times smaller than the average simulated trend of 0.21 ± 0.03 °C per decade. The divergence between observed and CMIP5- simulated global warming begins in the early 1990s."
MISLEADING CLAIM #3: CO2 is responsible "for most, or possibly all" global warming
Simon Lamb made this claim in the documentary, without citing any actual studies to back up the claim. So let me do the honours. Far from CO2 being responsible for the majority of warming, the actual peer reviewed science suggests not, as I wrote in Totalitaria:
New research from respected climate scientist Mojib Latif and others shows the big warming periods like the late 1970s through the nineties, previously thought by climate scientists to have been caused by CO2, were in fact most likely caused by natural cycles in the oceans, or what Latif calls "climate shifts".
This is particularly important, because the last IPCC report in 2007 said it could only detect a possible "human signature" in climate change since the 1970s. That claim was based on the assumption CO2 was the primary driver. The latest research shows CO2 had little if anything to do with warming since that time. Ergo, the "human signature" detected by the IPCC scientists does not appear to exist.
"These shifts
have a profound effect on the average global surface air temperature of the Earth," Latif says in a news release on his study. Changes in oceanic patterns turn "the world's climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of the Earth."
For a full review, google Review of climate change documentary Thin Ice.