A new documentary, Climate: The Movie, by the maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin, is becoming a phenomenon, though it’s received almost no publicity in the mainstream media. It rejects the idea that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’, so that’s hardly surprising. But it has already racked up millions of views online and been translated into ten languages. I watched it on YouTube on Monday and can confirm it’s a dazzlingly entertaining film that distils the case against climate alarmism into a succinct 80 minutes.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to challenge the narrative about climate change is because it supposedly reflects the ‘settled’ scientific consensus. We’re told that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that global warming – or ‘global boiling’, as it’s now called – is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Climate: The Movie confronts this argument head on, not by disputing the 97 per cent figure, but by interviewing William Happer, a spry 84-year-old former physics professor at Princeton.

‘There’s this mischievous idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is determined by consensus,’ he tells Durkin. ‘In real science, there are always arguments, no science is ever settled. It is absurd when people say the science of climate is settled. There’s no such thing as settled science, especially when it comes to climate.’

‘There’s no such thing as settled science, especially when it comes to climate’

To underline this, the film features a cast of distinguished scientists, including the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics, who gleefully take on all the sacred cows of the environmental lobby. Are you under the impression the Earth has never been hotter? Not so, says Steve Koonin, a former scientific adviser to President Obama and now a professor at NYU. The geological record shows that for the past 500 million years the Earth was considerably warmer than it is now. In fact, we’re still in the late Cenozoic ice age, according to Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace. (Yes, he’s now in the sceptic camp.) ‘We’re at the tail end of a 50 million-year cooling period and they’re saying it’s too hot?’ he asks.

But surely there’s no disputing that CO2, a greenhouse gas, is responsible for the 1 per cent uptick in average global temperatures since the beginning of the industrial revolution? Oh yes there is, says the Nobel Laureate John Clauser, who points out that if rising CO2 levels were the cause of the temperature increase, you’d expect the former to occur before the latter. But evidence from drilling into ancient ice cores reveals CO2 only increases after the temperature starts to rise, usually following a lag of 100 years. Levels of this trace gas are far lower today (about 423 parts per million) than they were 500 million years ago (7,000 parts per million), and if CO2 is causing global warming, then why has the temperature barely risen since we started pumping out CO2 on an industrial scale in the 1940s? ‘I assert that there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change,’ says Clauser. ‘It’s all a crock of crap in my opinion.’

What about the increasing frequency of extreme weather events? Bunkum, says Koonin. There were more heatwaves in the US in the 1930s than there are today; the number of forest fires is going down; there’s been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes over the past 120 years – ‘Even the IPCC admits that,’ chuckles Happer – and no observable increase in drought. For good measure, the film points out that polar bear numbers are growing and the Great Barrier Reef is thriving.   

No doubt all of these claims would be disputed by climate ‘fact checkers’, but they can’t be dismissed because the people making them are cranks or conspiracy theorists. These are top scientists who just happen to disagree with the orthodoxy.

Sir Keir Starmer has announced that he would use the money raised by charging VAT on independent school fees to fund mental health support across all schools in England – the seventh policy he’s claimed will be funded by this tax raid. But it would be a lot cheaper, and more effective, to arrange for Climate: The Movie to be shown at every school in the country. An Office for National Statistics survey in 2022 found that 70 per cent of young people are anxious that rising temperatures will affect them directly by 2030. Just think how many of them will be relieved to hear Will Happer, a science adviser to three former US presidents, debunk everything they’ve been taught to regard as gospel. ‘The climate alarm is nonsense, you know, it’s a hoax,’ he says. ‘I’ve never liked “hoax”, I think “scam” is a better word – but I’m willing to live with “hoax”.’