Campaign against Climate Change

This message from Operation Noah (the Churches' campaign on Climate Change).

It seems that local newspapers are being targetted with letters about The Great Global Warming Swindle.

It seems that they are coming from an extreme right-wing group...

=============================================================
Subject : [celink] That ch 4 documentary

Look out for letters in your local paper criticising Al Gore's film and praising the Channel 4 Global Warming Swindle.

The letter promotes the offer by the Hampden Trust of a free copy of the Ch 4 programme to show in schools.

Identical letters have been sent to the Belfast Telegraph and the Bexhill-on-Sea Observer!

I'm told The Hampden Trust is an extreme right-wing 'Freedom Association' led by a certain Mark Wallace.

fyi John Houghton's letter was published in The Tablet (copy below) plus one from Mary Colwell. This week has a letter from Ann Pettifor.

=============================================================
From Sir John Houghton FRS

Dear Sir
I am responding to the recent letter in the Tablet from Mr J.J.Thornton of Liverpool who had been impressed by Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle. That programme was a confused mixture of truth, half truth and falsehood and extremely misleading. It was so bad that the most distinguished scientist on that programme, Professor Karl Wunsch, is lodging a formal complaint with Ofcom that he was both misled and misrepresented.

Scientists possess considerable understanding of the reasons for large climate changes in the past and recognize also that changes in the sun have played some part. However, for the changes over the last 40 years, the increase of carbon dioxide is mostly due to fossil fuel burning (the carbon isotope signature provides incontrovertible evidence of that) and most of the warming is due to the increase of greenhouse gases. That there
is little doubt about this is clear from the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published last month and prepared by about 2500 of the world's climate scientists. Observations from space clearly demonstrate that changes in radiation from the sun cannot have been responsible for this recent warming.

More detailed critique's of the channel 4 programme can be found in the Guardian for 13 March (George Monbiot), the Independent for 14 March (Steve Connor) and the John Ray Initiative web site, www.jri.org.uk (myself).

Yours etc

John Houghton
(former Director General of UK Meteorological Office and cochair of Scientific Assessment for IPCC)

=============================================================