Tag Archives: Martin Durkin

Review of Climate: The Movie (The Cold Hard Truth)

From CFACT

By Peter Murphy

Our (mankind’s) ability to control the weather and change the planet’s climate is greatly exaggerated. More precisely, it is a fruitless and wastrel endeavor and unnecessary besides.

That is the main takeaway from the new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Hard Truth), written and directed by Martin Durkin and released last week. The film can be viewed here.

Climate will always change, no matter how many square miles of solar panels and wind turbines desecrate the landscape and oceans, regardless of how many strip-mined electric vehicles the government attempts to force-feed us, and no matter how many trillions of dollars are printed and spent by politicians and virtue-signaling multi-billionaires.

Climate change is a natural phenomenon primarily influenced by solar activity, including sunspots, solar winds, and cloud formation. That’s right: the sun impacts Earth’s climate, something I learned by drawing pictures in kindergarten science, yet is disregarded by the vast climate change mega-industry of governments, corporations, media, grant-receiving scientists and professors, and the entertainment world.

Instead, said industry is obsessed with carbon dioxide, which is a trace atmospheric gas comprising four ten-thousandths of the atmosphere, or 0.04 percent, that is essential to human, animal, and plant life. Indeed, CO2 makes the world livable and thriving, yet is falsely labeled a “pollutant” that somehow threatens the existence of Earth itself and must be curtailed. In fact, carbon in the atmosphere has been much higher at temperatures cooler and hotter than today, at levels resulting from temperature changes, rather than the cause of them.

Climate: The Movie features a series of interviews of prominent and credentialed scientists, including Steven Koonin, NYU professor and former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration; Richard Lindzen, retired atmospheric physicist from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Roy Spencer, meteorologist at the University of Huntsville in Alabama and an award-winning veteran of NASA; Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer at Harvard and the Smithsonian; and others, some of whom were blackballed for daring to challenge the prevailing climate change group-think narrative.

Another major feature of the film is data. How warm is the planet today compared to previous decades, centuries, and millions of years ago? Based on rock formations, temperature can be estimated going back as long as 500 million years. At the present day, it turns out Earth is in a colder period than the planetary norm. Measured over thousands of years, the climate has been quite stable, ranging within a few degrees, and now in an overall warming trend by about one degree since the late 1800s, during which average global temperature has varied modestly up and down.

Another key data point is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was four and five times higher than the levels of today, at 2,000-plus parts per million, including during ice ages. Yet, such realities have eluded climate obsessives like John Kerry and countless others who assert that nameless scientists warn of exceeding 400 parts per million means the planet is headed to a proverbial danger zone.

In sum, the climate changes of recent decades and centuries have ebbed and flowed in an unremarkable, non-threatening fashion.

The film also discusses the importance of accurately measuring global temperature change by making apples-to-apples comparisons, which the climate alarmist industry routinely ignores to fulfill its political narrative. Temperature records of 100 or more years past were commonly taken from thermometers in sparse areas when the U.S. was a more rural nation. These readings do not properly compare to results taken in dense areas of today due to the “urban heat effect,” studied by Dr. Spencer. By contrast, temperature data measured by satellites, ocean or rural-based thermometers show smaller vicissitudes over time.

How did it get this way? How did climate change alarmists become a pervasive influence? Money. It always comes back to the money, primarily from government.

After a global cooling period in the 1970s, when actor Leonard Nimoy (“Mr. Spock”) and many others warned of the coming ice age (even as man-made carbon emissions were sharply increasing since World War II), temperature reverted slightly upward. This spawned a movement championed by then- U.S. Senator Al Gore, who became Vice President in the Clinton administration, which sharply increased funding to study global warming.

Government research funding typically chases problems to “study” and solve, the film asserts. The climate change issue, with its growing alarm bells, unscrupulously parroted in the media for decades, has since gone far beyond government research grants to subsidizing big corporate industries (e.g., solar, wind, EVs) to purportedly lower the temperature.

Politicians from President Biden on down who peddle climate exaggerations, dutifully echoed by most national media, will go on ignoring the science and reality presented in Climate: The Movie. To otherwise embrace the scientific evidence from this robust film would mean the end of the climate gravy train and the climate alarmist crusade to expand government power and control over society.

Watch the Game-Changing New Film That Explodes Climate Change and Net Zero Lies

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

A potentially game-changing film on the fraudulent climate change narrative and the collectivist Net Zero project hits global social media screens today. “Climate change is an invented scare of self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment hungry for power and money,” says writer Martin Durkin. The attitude of middle class environmentalists can be summed up as “how can we stop people buying cheap things in shops”, observes Baroness Claire Fox. On the science side, the 2022 Nobel Physics laureate Dr. John Clauser asserts: “There is no correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide – it is all a crock of crap.”

The new film is a long-awaited sequel to Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle film shown on Channel 4 in 2007. The outcry from activists at the time led to the banning of sceptical climate science views across most mainstream media, bans that continue to this day. The new film is called Climate: The Movie and features many top sceptical climate scientists. It lays out the politically-supressed views surrounding natural climate variation in riveting and persuasive detail. As Durkin notes at the beginning, his new film is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry. “When I hear people pontificating about a rise of one and a half degrees, I think what have they been smoking,” says Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton.

“There is no climate emergency. There is no evidence of one,”  comments Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace. Around 20,000 years ago, CO2 was at the lowest level it has ever been in the history of the Earth. The gas is currently 420 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere and has recovered from 180 ppm. “If it had gone down another 30 ppm, we would all be dead,” observes Moore. The film quotes other scientists noting that CO2 levels were much higher in the past at times of very high biodiversity levels on the planet. One of the numerous ‘scams’ identified in the film is that there is little correlation between CO2 and temperatures across the 500 million year record. In fact, recent ice core evidence shows periods when temperatures rose ahead of increases in CO2. The opinions and hypotheses surrounding unproven anthropogenic climate change simply do not stand up to past scientific observations.

“We should be very grateful that CO2 levels are beginning to go back up – there is not enough fossil fuel to get to historical levels, but at least we can make a start,” observes a mischievous Professor Happer. “CO2 is quite unimportant in controlling Earth’s climate,” says Dr. Clauser. For him, the behaviour of clouds is “hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effect of CO2”.

The science of climate features heavily in the film and clear explanations are provided throughout. “Compared to the last 500 million years the Earth is exceptionally cold,” explains Durkin. The reason there is ice at the poles is that we are in an ice age, observes Moore. “We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period, and they say it is too hot,” he adds. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware, recent surface measurement have been badly corrupted by growing urban heat. Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who has studied the urban heat effect in great detail, calculates that most of the measured urban warming since 1880 is due to the urban heat effect.

Many of the issues discussed in the film will be familiar to Daily Sceptic readers – from the biased UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only considering human involvement in the climate (it would be out of a job if it found humans were not that important) to the trillions of dollars spent on Government-mandated inferior green technologies.

The corruption of ‘settled’ science is widely discussed with click-bait, well-funded scientists feeding doomsday climate predictions into the public space via the unquestioning mainstream media. Few corruptions are more blatant than attaching bad weather events to long-term changes in the climate. Science writer Tony Heller calls it “absurd”, adding, “there is no basis to it, it is biased propaganda”. The capture of scientific journals is almost complete with any scientist questioning the ‘settled’ narrative unlikely to be published. Starting out in their careers, academics from numerous disciplines are more or less advised to keep their mouths shut about the narrative or lose students, grant funding, the ability to publish work and ultimately their jobs.

Universities and science bodies around the world have lost their hard-won reputations for the unbiased pursuit of truth through the scientific process. In its place is a grubby rush for cash in the interest of promoting an ideological fad. The Durkin film shows in clear detail that the science attributing all climate change to humans using hydrocarbons is far from settled, and is disputed by many distinguished academics of considerable scientific standing. Net Zero and the stories about the climate that accompany it is a political project. “If you are a climate activist, you are actually facilitating a huge validation of the Government running our lives,” says Claire Fox. Net Zero demands on governments mean they can “interfere in every nook and cranny”, she argues.

But it is towards the end of his excellent film that Durkin shows the true wickedness of the Net Zero agenda. In Africa, diseases and early deaths are widespread as developed countries refuse to sanction investment in hydrocarbon energy. Women still cook on dung fires causing lung disease and blindness. Agriculture suffers from a lack of tractor power and fertiliser. Meanwhile, diarrhoea is endemic and billionaires send pills to mask the symptoms. But Western banks will not lend money to provide hydrocarbon-powered refrigeration and clean water infrastructure. The greens think that Africans should not use hydrocarbon resources, and this sums up the “ruthlessness and depravity” of the agenda, says Dr. Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Climate: The Movie is available on YouTube, Vimeo, X, Rumble, BitChute and other social media sites from today. It is written and directed by Martin Durkin and produced by Tom Nelson.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.