Great Global Warming Swindle turned over down under

Via YouTube in about 10 parts, Australia's ABC TV ran a nice combo program on the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Sandwiched between a profile of director Martin Durkin and an interview with him--and followed by an hour-long, better-than-usual science panel discussion (pro/con)--is the airing of the movie itself so viewers can judge what's being discussed. They show the "international" version of the flick. International means different from the original release because Durkin had to change it after his impressive graphs and dodgy editing pissed off the scientists whose work and words they say he mis-represented. the documentary has dropped from 1hr 13 mins of the version I originally saw (Google Vid), to the now-54 minute version that Durkin is offering. (In order to retract that 20 minutes, the suggested volcanic correlations are gone, MIT's Carl Wunsch asked to be taken out, and more was wiped that I now forget.)

I should say that my fascination in the issue leans more to the reasons for such strong feelings about Anthropogenic causes for climate change. In other words, for the book we're exploring why Humans have such varied views on what Humans can and cannot effect, and how those views embody larger than life, cartoonish archetypologies. The positioning is amazingly fluid, if you'll pardon the term, depending on how events reflect or refract our preferred self-mythology as either caregiver or warrior, creator or ruler, etc.

That Greenland and Antarctic ice is melting lickety-quick and tiny Pacific islands are being inundated by sea-rise seems not to be in doubt. (Hard to doubt water lapping around your ankles as you cook dinner in your historically dry and cozy hut.) But, from the archetypal viewpoint, it's mostly the warriors and traditionalist rulers who are still frothing and fighting in earnest. Most of the Sages, Creators and Magicians - think Science or much of Business, think Architecture and Building, think Design and Product- and Community Development--these types have moved on and mostly scoff at the firebreathers. They see risk as opportunity more readily than those whose self-worth is derived by defining and guarding against "threat" to the tribe and by their all-too-human need to be needed.

I think the the panel discussions prove the above point: It's interesting to note that panellists like Dr Nikki Williams, the CEO of NSW [New South Wales] Minerals Council--a coal consortium--and Greg Bourne, ex-BP Australia CEO (a chemist) both have moved past the "human blame" argument to the more Legacy-positive solving and leveraging of the thing. (See Part V @ 5:40 for Williams' comments.) Likewise, my Risk Management and Insurance clients stopped buying the strained retroactive virginity argument years ago and started dealing with the real risk and opportunity for their balance sheets. But still, elsewhere the desperate struggle for "moral" high ground continues as "The Money" and the water seeks its preffered level of return.

In this case, like most human ones I think, the denial is not so much one of denying reality--we all twist facts and causality to our advantage. The denial is a limbic refusal to be "damaged," to risk a ding to our statue, to what Becker calls our personal "Immortality Project." A refusal to accept potentially ending up a peg or two lower from where we were after all the "hard work" and "deals with the devil" that we had to make to reach our current position of higher standing and control of our own image and imagery. In that struggle, facts are rarely useful tools. We fought hard to Matter, and we see it and our preferred Legacy slipping away. We started out pure and bit by bit second-mortgaged our idealism for a longer term progress we deemed (or, were convinced by a cohort) was worth the deal-making and averaging-down. When that future never comes, or worse, appears to have come is and is now wobbling or waning, well, to our consciousness and cosmologies, that's an existentialist Tsunami seemingly as deadly as the real thing.

Luckily, for many, and for mankind itself, all the money to be made seems to be the psychic balm that soothes and settles at least the exterior and, allows progress to hold.

The list of Episodes


Durkin Interview Video : Part 1




Durkin Interview Video : Part 2