Wednesday
Aug292012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The boy who cried warming
Aug 29, 2012 Climate: Sceptics A new global warming documentary has hit the airwaves. It's called The Boy Who Cried Warming and seems to be a very slick production.
Watch it here.
Reader Comments (57)
I wonder if there is a version suitable for medium bandwidth links. It seems unwatchable on my 500k ADSL link.
There are trailers and clips on youtube.
Download it and watch it at your leisure:
http://www.youtubedownloadersite.com/
Use the free version if you're strapped for cash.
Why are people not taught how to use punctuation?
If you are arguing that 'slick' trumps accuracy then you have worse problems than I even thought. The bastardisation of the 'scientific method' in the intro is not even a kindergarten version of the actuality. All predictions are false? really? stratospheric cooling, volcanic cooling, multi-decadal warming, Arctic amplification, sea ice loss... ? None of those things actually happened I suppose?
But I like the way you leave yourself with plausible deniability here - you know it's crap, yet you get to promote it anyway, just in case someone else falls for it.
straight to DVD with this one.
Monckton: "Science advisor to Margaret Thatcher"? Whoops! The farce is strong with this one.
Monckton: "no loss of sea ice in Beaufort Sea"....
Umm... http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.11.html
#fail
Frank. have you forgot to take your pills?
About half way through and enjoying it so far. I can see that some of it will annoy the toenails off some alarmists - cue rage, despair and as many insults as they can muster - but it seems like a decent overview to me.
"Viking beer maximum" (much better than the Medieval Warm Period).
Let's hope that Mann threatens legal action...
"...it will annoy the toenails off some alarmists - cue rage, despair and as many insults as they can muster - "
Indeed. What a dilemma when there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Don't you think it's odd that you are all more interested in provoking reactions than in being accurate? Tribalist much?
Frank,
The debate is over. The science is settled. 97% of skeptics think that all the predictions have failed. Only creationists and Gaia hypothesis fanatics believe in warming anymore. Look! It's cold out!
/sarc
I will say the sequence of the space shuttle taking off which then leads to Neil Armstrong's footprint on the moon is somewhat disappointing. Couldn't they dig up any of the Apollo footage?
In a scene worthy of An Inconvenient Truth the film fills the screen with a shot of succulent strawberries as the voiceover insists they cannot be farmed in frigid Greenland.
The writers of the extravaganza evidently never saw last year's Economist and Der Spiegel articles on expanding arctic agriculture, - and attendent brewing and distilling activity, whose illustrations amply confirm what Wikipedia reports:
How can we get in touch with them to tell them that there should be no comma in "Every global warming prediction has proven to be science fiction."
This elementary error damages the credibility of the whole thing. It shouldn't, but it does.
Here's the Wiki quote that got lost in the html noise above:
"[C]limate change – in southern Greenland, the growing season averages about three weeks longer than a decade ago...has enabled new crops like apples, strawberries,[ broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and carrots to be grown and for the cultivated areas of the country to be extended ."
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/climate-change/landscape-ecosystem/paleo-environmental/3947
(medieval)
There's one glaring mistake in the video = which if anyone knows the producers, should get them to correct. At one point the image is of a magazine article clearly dated some month in 1975. The narrator, says that in 1970, such and such magazine said......Someone goofed,. The narrator needed to say "in 1975, such and such magazine said....." I didn't note how far into the video this occurred.
Aug 29, 2012 at 10:10 PM Robert Blair
Its' terrible is'nt it . I blame the teacher's .
"Its' terrible is'nt it . I blame the teacher's ."
Without being too po-faced I trust that your dusting off of ancient quips is not meant to suggest that punctuation is not important?
Frank instead of cherry picking links that support your claims that this is all wrong why not get up a complaint you never know maybe you can get more then Gores "An Inconvenient Truth" and it's eleven material falsehoods!
Russell 1:54/3:20 AM
Grain crops won't ripen in Greenland, so sorry, no local brewing. They do grow some barley there, but only as green fodder for animals. Strawberries would certainly thrive, at least under glass/plastic. As a general rule strawberries taste better the further north they are grown (lots of sunlight in summer), the best swedish ones are grown in the Torneälv valley on the Arctic Circle (much further north than southern Greenland).
In Iceland barley growing on a small scale re-started in the warm 1930's after a 500-year hiatus during the LIA. Barley was actually grown in Greenland during the MWP according to contemporary sources, but only as a very marginal prestige item on the largest farms.
I would think the fairly substantial English wine industry would be surprised to learn that they don't exit.
The section on cap-and-trade was just politics, unrelated to CAGW, as was the Solandra section. Maybe of interest to some, but out of place in this movie IMHO.
Also, captioning of the presenters was pretty random. Some were captioned well after their first contribution, others not at all.
And throwing in a bit of creationism to appease the US loonies was completely unnecessary.
Overall, a bit of a missed opportunity.
Aug 29, 2012 at 10:42 PM | Frank
You can be such an idiot. Go back to kindergarten a learn the difference between prediction and knowledge.
I am probably the last person on this board to give grammar and punctuation advice but it seems to me the comma isn't misplaced if you treat the offending sentence as a couplet:
Every global warming prediction
Has proven to be science fiction
I have seen instances where people have used comma instead of "/" to separate the lines in rhyming couplets or poems, though I am not sure whether those examples were in English or in a different language.
Its a poor film by any measure. I wanted it to be good, but it bored the ar5e off me and so I doubt it will have any impact on the debate.
In contrast, the 10:10 'murder a denier' film was entertaining at least. And it was a massive own goal which made it doubly entertaining :-)
Seriously tacky
Aug 30, 2012 at 9:21 AM | sHx
I’m not a RAP fan at all, but if I were I should expect to hear
Global warming’s a prediction
And it’s only science fiction
Leaders pauperize the nation
Notwithstanding observation
Move over Medieval Warming Period we now have the Viking Beer Maximum!
Liked the film a lot, great production and a fun way of looking at the issues, of which there are probably too many but at least they had a go.
sHx,
I hadn't thought of the comma as a verse line break. Never seen that myself.
Doesn't scan very well - maybe I'm too fussy. I really think there's a caesura in the second line and not the first ...
On the importance of commas
Here is my page of sceptical comments from credible sources.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/critics.htm
The film uses Christopher Monckton as a science expert, a man who thinks global warming is part of a plot to create a communist world government.
Absolutely superb!
The cap and trade was off-putting, until I realised it was the same mechanism as the renewables obligation and more or less everything they said about cap and trade applied to renewables in Scotland.
The only down side is some idiot seems to have tampered with the YouTube video so that it shows Monckton (who has a very minor role) with his eyes shut.
In a film full of superb computer graphics & stuffed full of good interviewees, it's clearly intentional vandalism showing Monckton with eyes shut in an office.
e smiff; and what makes you think the IPCC junk science with Agenda 21 is anything but a scam to trigger Marxist World Government?
The alarmists are restless today!!!!!!
e smiff - what a great page! Many thanks for the link.
Thank you to everyone who is checking the film out, it is very rewarding to see the fruits of our labor. We really appreciate those who took the time to write comments on the film here, its amazing when you can see actual discourse on your project evolve (even criticism), as filmakers the objective is always to get people talking! I would respond to some of the technical issues people are having, but the thread seems to be taking care of this. I hope overall you enjoyed it, and if you did not, at least it didn’t cost you anything but your time!
Special Thanks to those personally donating, you are the lifeblood of “The Boy Who Cried Warming”
Jesse Jones
Producer/Writer (and for the coma I apologize)
@Jesse
You know you've struck a nerve when the believers crawl out of the woodwork to try and rebut your film with the same tired arguments. I like it, realising it's not aimed at sceptics like us who know this stuff. For people who may be wavering, it tells a nice story pulling those threads together showing it's about the money and politics. Not science. I also like the wolf theme and the comments from the scientists about how this saga is damaging the credibility of science. I especially like the Viking Beer Maximum!
Speaking of beer, has a date and venue been decided for a London meet?
Wikipedia is WRONG again,
"but if it began two weeks earlier, farmers could even grow apples and strawberries" - Hence it they cannot grow strawberries in Greenland even though the idiots edited that in. Seriously, do you people ever check the sources before copying and pasting off Wikipedia?
Embarrassing, Wikipedia continues making everyone more ignorant.
This is an informative video too - look out for Climate Elves
http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/monckton-will-help.html
Jesse Jones
Producer/Writer writes: "(and for the coma I apologize)"
It actually turned out pretty well, allowing for your coma.
No excuse for the footage mixing up the space shuttle with the Apollo missions and the British wine growing faux pas. Should have hit the cutting room floor.
Jesse Jones
Producer/Writer writes: "(and for the coma I apologize)"
It actually turned out pretty well, allowing for your coma.
HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA..............
Not so, TTY - please read The Economist. Potatoes have also become a commercial crop.
Without being too po-faced I trust that your dusting off of ancient quips is not meant to suggest that punctuation is not important?
Aug 30, 2012 at 8:27 AM Alleagra
Punctuation, like spelling, is important. But there are more important things.
If someone points out an error - ok, if they really feel they must. But there is a difference between simply pointing out an error and commenting on it with an air of exasperated superiority and an implication that its presence is due to someone's lack of education.
But commenting on a punctuation error with an air of long-suffering exasperation suggests that, for the commenter, the punctuation error made the whole thing worthless.
[plse disregard the last paragraph of my 1:19 AM post - I thought I had deleted it]
The sequel is even better.</a
Robert Blair, you win.
The production is good and I think it gets the message across to a general audience well. I think the most important part was the line about desensitizing the public with false and exaggerated alarms. Just look at the barrage of crap we hear on a daily basis. McDonald's causes cancer, diet soda causes cancer. high fructose corn syrup will kill you, saturated fats, trans-fats, climate change, zombie apocalypse, salt, mercury in fish, sugar, white bread, plastic bottles, drought, flood, famine, terrorism, economic collapse...and finally, stress. Just writing this makes me want to fry up some bacon for a nice BLT!