Climate scientist 'duped to deny global warming'

A leading US climate change scientist is considering legal action against the producer of the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" after being duped into contributing to the film. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now describes the film as "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two" according to a report in tomorrow's Guardian.

[Prof. Wunsch] says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.' He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator.

The documentary's producer, Martin Durkin, has denied that Wunsch was misled or duped and says that Wunsch's "interview, as used in the programme, perfectly accurately represents what he said."

However, this is not the first time Durkin has been accused of duping experts into contributing to his documentaries or of bending the facts to fit his own agenda.As Booman Tribune noted on March 6th, Durkin's last anti-global warming documentary "Against Nature" forced the UK's Channel 4 Television to make an embarassing apology after the government media watchdog group, The Independent Television Commission, ruled that it “distorted by selective editing” the views of interviewees; and ” misled” participants over the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”

Recently, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" had been hailed by various conservative websites in the US including Pajamas Media, Blogs for Bush and Free Republic.