Margaret Thatcher and the Birth of the Climate Movement

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Directed by Martin Durkin (2007)

Film Review

Made in 2007, this film features a number of prominent climate scientists who raise surprisingly cogent arguments against the IPCC “science” on which the global climate movement is based. It also raises legitimate concerns about the politicization of climate science, as well as the tragic effect of climate activism on Third World development.

In the late eighties, Margaret Thatcher was the first prominent politician to raise concerns about global warming (aka climate change) and acid rain. The film suggests Thatcher’s primary motivation was to promote Britain’s nuclear industry, in part due to  deep mistrust of both the miners union and Middle East oil nations. In 1990 she authorized creation of the Hadley Centre for Climate Research and Prediction at the British Meteorological Office. The Hadley Centre would become a key contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (formed in 1988).

Thanks to the IPCC’s dire predictions linking catastrophic climate change to continued fossil fuel use, by 2007, when this film was made, climate research was already a $4 billion a year business.

The film interviews a number of prominent climate scientists who acknowledge the temperature on Earth is rising but dispute that the warming stems from industrialization and increased CO2 production.

The main scientific arguments they present are

1. Most of 20th century planetary warming occurred prior to 1940. Global temperatures fell for four decades after World War II (a period of massive industrialization) and only began rising again during the 1970s recession (when CO2 production declined briefly).

2. In the film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore showed graphs of ice core data linking periods of high CO2 with increase in global temperature. What Gore didn’t mention is that increases in atmospheric CO2 always lagged 500-800 years behind temperature increases (suggesting higher temperatures caused CO2 to increase, rather than vice versa).

3. The theory behind greenhouse warming is that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere by trapping heat. However data from satellites and weather balloons indicate that temperatures in the troposphere (lowest layer of the atmosphere) are remaining constant despite increases in the Earth’s surface temperature.

4. Astrophysicist Dr Piers Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn’s brother), who has been using sunspots and solar flaring to make extremely accurate weather predictions since the 1980s, explains in the film how warming and cooling, both in the 20th century and the last 400 years, correlate far more closely with sunspot activity than CO2 levels. In contrast, IPPC computer modeling, on which their dire climate predictions are based, fail to take account of either sunspot activity or atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, which comprises 95% of the Earth’s greenhouse gases.

A common claim made by the IPPC and climate activists is is that their views represent consensus among 2,500 climate scientists. Yet, as the film points out, the public is largely unaware of the ruthlessness with which this consensus in enforced. Any climate scientist brave enough to dispute IPPC findings is systematically vilified by their universities, the media and government agencies and private foundations they rely on for research grants. In fact, there are striking parallels with the systematic vilification doctors experienced when they disputed the official Covid narrative.

The most concerning section of the film features African social justice and public health advocates who call it “morally repugnant” for Western climate activists to use politicized climate predictions to force the most expensive form of power (ie solar or wind) on developing countries where 2 billion people still have no access to electricity. Without access to fossil fuels, Third World countries have no hope of industrializing (eg developing their own railroads and steel factories. In this sense, climate activists are inadvertently colluding with the World Economic Forum and global elites who seek to block Third World development to preserve developing nations as cheap reservoirs of mineral resources for their high tech industries.

Without access to cheap electricity (from coal or gas-fired power plants), roughly (as of 2007) four million Third World children die annually from the effects of indoor smoke (from wood and dung fires), with many of their mothers also dying prematurely.

More recent evidence pointing to the politicization of climate science comes from

1. Michael Moore’s excellent 2020 film Planet of the Humans

2. Cory Morningstar’s excellent articles in the Wrong Kind of Green, including “The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg“and other articles linking Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion to Wall Street and the WEF Fourth Industrial Revolution.

3. The analysis by Whitney Webb and Iain Davis (Sustainable Debt Slavery) about the WEF’s incorporation of climate change (Goal 13) into the WEF’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and their appointment of former Bank of England Director Mark Carney and Wall Street Investment Banker Michael Bloomberg to oversee its implementation

4. The 2023 report by Russian engineer and political analyst Dmitry Orlov indicating that all the planets (not just the Earth) are warming:

5. Matthew Ehret’s chapter on stochastic computer modelling in The Clash of the Two Americas Volume 4. In it, Ehret explains how the IPCC used the same stochastic computer modeling to predict catastrophic climate change that Neil Ferguson used to predict 500,000 Brits and 1 million Americans would die of Covid.