Finding Martin Durkin’s film on YouTube was more trying than it ought to have been (see my comment here and Jaime’s reply). Once I had found it, how did I find it?

Well, it has strong points, and weak points. Sadly, although the strong points greatly outnumbered the weak points, the weak points rendered the whole thing a missed opportunity. When metal fatigue caused explosive decompression on the old Comet 1, it was easy to overlook how well made the rest of the plane was. It only takes one serious flaw to crash a plane, or a movie, no matter how well the rest of it is put together.

(ASTERISK: The Comet 1 failures in 1954 (jet airliners! 70 years ago!) were not caused by the square windows. This is probably an idea that is impossible to kill. It certainly makes for a more memorable tale than describing the real place on the fuselage that the cracks propagated from. Subsequent marks did not have square windows, making this an obvious point of difference.)

The problem is quite simply that the film decides, not merely to prove that climate change is not an existential threat, but to show that CO₂ has nothing to do with atmospheric temperature changes at all. This occurs in a substantial block of the film from about 22 to 32 minutes in. And while the eminent talking heads in that portion make entirely cogent points, the narrative stitching those soundbites together would leave the uninformed viewer with the impression that CO₂ is not the driver of any of the recent temperature rise.

This is not true, and I don’t believe that the assorted professors believe it to be true. They may think that CO₂ has produced half of the recent warming, or below half. But not none of it, as the film would have us believe.

As I am fond of saying, if you debunk, you had better be damn sure of your ground. It’s a version of “When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” which is a lesson that Yevgeny Prigozhin did not live very long to ponder. But what it means in this sense is that your criticism of an untrue theory must itself not contain any obvious flaws.

It is also a natural quality of an authoritative film that it must present the opposition case with the diligence that the opposition themselves would present it. In terms of Teh Climate Crisis, this means the effect of CO₂ on the atmosphere and feedbacks. Nowhere is this mentioned in Climate : The Movie, let alone debunked. The well-known emission spectrum of Earth should have been presented, with an explanation of increasing CO₂ concentrations causing greater absorption on the flanks of its key frequency bands. In other words: it’s not nothing, but it’s not catastrophe. This is a position that is well supported by the data. “It’s nothing” – as presented or implied here – is a fatal flaw.

What about the good bits? Well, we had great punches thrown by a range of talking heads who will be familiar to climate sceptics, as will their observations. The vast quantity of funding for climate science (a problem for the search for truth that I term “searching in the wrong woods”), the personal jeopardy of anyone who takes a sceptical position, the censorship, the bandwagon and the forced consensus are all telling points. Less well fleshed out are the sections at the end where the problems of climate policy for personal freedom, wealth and third-world development are mentioned. Perhaps, to do justice to the whole field, a series of short films, each on a different subtopic, would have been better. I am asking for too much, I know.

The film ends with a problem we are all familiar with: China and coal use, and the fact that (I paraphrase) only the guilt-wracked Western nations are on board with the self-destructive Net Zero policies. The implication is that our wealth has peaked, and we are set for decades of decline, or rather our descendants are, for many sceptics – as exemplified by the talking heads in Climate : The Movie – are of an age that they will avoid the worst of the outcomes. And yes, climate policy will cause more problems than climate change.

The central flaw in the film means that I would not recommend it to non-climate obsessives, despite all its good points. I could not, in good conscience, leave them with the idea that a key argument of sceptics is to deny the greenhouse effect altogether. I don’t. And I promise there will not be a climate catastrophe, despite CO₂ interacting with infrared photons in the atmosphere.

This is the version of the film I watched. The description says it has an updated figure.