Bree'sFilmAnnotation7

Bree Mobley, Annotation #7 “The Fallacy of Global Warming” 22 November 2011 882 words

“The Fallacy of Global Warming”, writted by Andrew Law and John Wright, 1999

The central argument of the film defends that human pollution and burning of fossil fuels is not the only factor contributing to the global climate change. This film presents that the Earth naturally undergoes changes in temperature over long periods of time.

The film begins by defining that climate is the long term average of all weather events. It is affected by three main attributes of our planet: the atmosphere, oceans, and ice masses. Both the atmosphere and oceans are able to store massive amounts of heat and energy. The atmosphere produces convection energy and generates wind because heat waves reflect off it. The ocean stores and moves heat and its currents are created by the Earths movement and the shape of the ocean basins. The scientists interviewed in the film challenge whether humans can really affect something so large and so complex. In order to figure out whether there has been a change in global climate and temperature, data needs to be compared. Scientists discovered data that was gathered in the late 1700s by scientists who were concerned with a particular few years of really cold winters. The Manheim group took observations over a wide region in the Northeast. The data collection was thorough but short-lived. And the group did not have any particular theory to apply their data to, thus no conclusion was ever established. Modern scientists can take the modern theory of climate change and gather data in modern times to compare to that data collected in the 1700s. To compare climate data from years before the 1700s and then even before humans were on Earth, scientists have to get creative in their data collection. Scientists have collected data from long standing tree trunks to compare the growth in trees to the climate that season. However, that only extends to the last glacial period. To gather data even further back, ocean sediments can be studied. The formation and types of dead plankton found in the ocean sediment is a good indicator of changes in climate change over time in different oceanic regions. The film then talks about how the Earth’s naturally occurring phenomenas like its rotation axis and relationship to the sun in addition to volcanic eruptions and forests can change our climate over long and short periods of time, respectively.

The film draws out technological, educational, and ecological sustainability problems. I provides a counter-argument to the highly media endorsed climate change theory.

The most compelling part of the film was what the data collection from tree rings and ocean sediment showed over thousands of years. There was a graph featured in the film that showed a pattern of large vicissitudes in climate and global temperature over thousands of years. The changes were very similar to global changes that the Earth has been experiencing in the last few centuries. The peak temperatures reached in previous years (in term of units of thousands and millions of years, not centuries) were similar to the global temperature increase that has defined the modern day concern for climate change. The least compelling part of the film occurred in how they initially described the purpose of theory, models, and data collection. The way the film presented these three important aspects of climate study was that no data collection would be relevant unless an initial theory was established so as to support the data found. I thought that this was a cheap shot at the obvious counter-argument that climate change is due to human pollution and our industrial world. I also thought that these components of scientific study were not really relevant, or as relevant as they made it seem, in the film.

This film best addresses an audience interested in a counter argument that recent global warming is a cataclysmic problem recently incurred by humans. Because it was a film created with university funding, it is also a film geared to educated individuals.

To enhance its environmental educational value, I would have liked to have been provided more information on what it was presenting. It showed a handful of graphs and diagrams and interviewed a handful of professors. However, a lot of the interviews that really spoke about the core of the film’s message sounded very biased. It would have been interesting to have been provided with each interviewer’s political opinion and not just what their scientific evidence suggested. That would have enhanced my personal education value. To enhance the environmental educational value, commenting on how the Earth’s species responded to climate change in the past sudden climate changes would have been interesting to here. Because whether or not climate change is a cause of human pollution or just a natural cycle of the Earth, it would be nice to be aware of the consequences.

There are no intervention points addressed in this film. It was more of an informative, educational film.

Additional information that I was inspired to seek out was the institution that produced the film. It is called Open University and located in the United Kingdom: [].

I also looked up some additional articles that have a similar viewpoint to the movie: [] []