the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Posted on 23 March 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW

The Desmog Climate Disinformation Database documents, “individuals and organisations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.” It’s a who’s who of the organised climate change denial movement, in other words.

In Martin Durkin’s recently released film, entitled, ‘Climate – the Movie’, 17 academics, retired academics and bloggers were interviewed. How big a proportion of them have their own page in the DeSmog database? Go on, have a guess.

It’s 76%.

Climate change denial is like a kind of flying circus. This same old carnival troupe is wheeled out time and again to spread doubt about climate science. Why? Because that’s what they are good at doing, with decades of combined experience under their belts.

More than 2 dozen long-debunked myths

The first 42-odd minutes of this 80 minute long festival of misinformation, once the initial ‘elevator-pitch’ is done with, are dedicated to “The Science”. But instead of that, what one is exposed to is a veritable Gish-gallop of climate myths, with the phrase, “we are told” liberally scattered among them. In order of appearance, with the myth’s fixed number in our database, here they are:

With 25 myths (and a few more – see below), the list is rather long, so here is a one image summary with the ones we spotted check-marked:

Fig 1: most of the myths rehashed in the movie in one handy graphic (click for larger version)! To create your own “myth-bingo-card”, download it from here.

It would be fun to turn up at a Chinese takeaway with just the numbers, to see what you get. Mind you, it would be a pretty expensive surprise!

Additional myths and misdirections

There are a few claims that are not in our database. Did you know that at the height of the last glaciation, there was a “CO₂ famine” that, had it gotten any worse, would have made life on Earth go extinct? No, neither did we. The claim may have originated from a post at the Wattsupwiththat? blog from June 2017, which doesn’t present any actual evidence for it. 

After that, the movie drifts off into a mixture of stuff. Apparently, until the 1980s, climate change was just a scare caused by a few radical environmentalists. Then Al Gore came along, there was limitless government money all of a sudden for climate research (so long as you sang to the same hymn-sheet) and a Consensus was formed, with which “to bludgeon opponents”. Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Never mind the likes of Foote, Tyndall and Arrhenius, who in the 19th Century had pretty much worked out the greenhouse gas properties of CO₂.

Fig 2: The History of Climate Science and how far back it goes. Image source

Next thing, we are subjected to ‘Climate versus Freedom’, which is a mishmash of populist conspiratorial themes that mention the World Economic Forum, the EU and various other perceived bogeymen. The BBC, who only recently stopped giving deniers equal exposure, are not spared. The environmental movement is, the movie mansplains, the “sworn enemy of free-market industrial capitalism”. Tired old cliches abound, for example the meme that workers, ”don’t attend climate protests because they’re too busy working”. Meanwhile, “Big Government” wants nothing more than to control us, with comparisons made to Covid lockdowns. And on and on and on it goes. 

Finally, they insist that climate mitigation measures will hurt the poor. Erm, are they forgetting that adverse climate events are already impacting the poor disproportionately? In the final thrashings of the movie, Chinese coal-fired power stations get a mention (no surprises there). When, the film pleads with its viewers, will people realise that climate change is an “invented scare”, an assault on, “freedom and prosperity”? If you can get through to the end of this 80-minute assault on reality, medals, or maybe replacement head-vices, should be awarded. Arrhenius must be turning in his grave…

Other debunkings….

For two other takes on this non-documentary, see the review at DeSmog here and a short video by The Disproof here.