Against the Grain

This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history, both current temperatures and CO2 levels are extremely and unusually low. We are currently in an ice age. It also shows that there is no evidence that changing levels of CO2 (it has changed many times) has ever ‘driven’ climate change in the past.

Why then, are we told, again and again, that ‘catastrophic man-made climate-change’ is an irrefutable fact? Why are we told that there is no evidence that contradicts it? Why are we told that anyone who questions ‘climate chaos’ is a ‘flat-earther’ and a ‘science-denier’?

The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon, and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, social ostracism.

But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to, and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.

This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticise or question the climate alarm has become is a breach of social etiquette.

The film includes interviews with a number of very prominent scientists, including Professor Steven Koonin (author of ‘Unsettled’, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Dick Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr John Clauser (winner of the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.

The film was written and directed by the British filmmaker Martin Durkin and is the sequel of his excellent 2007 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Tom Nelson, a podcaster who has been deeply examining climate debate issues for the better part of two decades, was the producer of the film.