The Great Global Warming Swindle (TV)

This film by the documentary-maker Martin Durkin presents the arguments of scientists and commentators who don't believe that CO2 produced by human activity is the main cause of climate change. It's a controversial film that was roundly attacked by some scientists and enthusiastically received by others, and the arguments it contains are an important part of the wider debate on the causes of climate change. The film was shortlisted for the Best Documentary award at the 2008 Broadcast Awards. The argument: Earth's 4.5 billion year history is one long story of climate change. This fact is pretty much accepted by those who think global warming is a natural process, and by those who think it's caused by man. In more recent history there has been: a mini ice age in the seventeenth century when the Thames froze so solidly that fairs could regularly be held on the ice; a Medieval Warm Period, even balmier than today; and sunnier still was the so-called Holocene Maximum, which was the warmest period in the last 10,000 years.