Ofcom: C4 climate doc 'unfair and biased'

Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle treated senior international scientists unfairly and was not sufficiently impartial, Ofcom has ruled.

The programme aggressively challenged the evidence that climate change is caused by humans and included attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, former Government chief scientist Sir David King and academic Professor Carl Wunsch, who all complained to Ofcom.

Channel 4 and E4, which repeated the show, have been ordered to broadcast summaries of the regulator's findings.

"Everywhere you are told that man-made climate change is proved beyond doubt," said narrator and filmmaker Martin Durkin in an introduction to the programme. "But you are being told lies... This is a story of how a theory about climate turned into a political ideology."

Ofcom received 265 complaints about Swindle - which first aired in March last year - and a 176-page analysis and scientific critique. In summary, complainants said "the programme was not presented with due impartiality and that as a factual programme it misled the audience by misrepresenting 'facts'".

In an extensive ruling, the regular found Channel 4 in breach of three rules from its Broadcasting Code. The IPCC, Sir David and Professor Wunsch had been treated unfairly, Ofcom said, and "matters of major political and industrial controversy" had not been handled impartially. In addition, the programme had not included "an appropriate wide range of the significant views".

The regulator cleared Channel 4 of being "materially misleading", however, and said the elements of the programme purely about science, rather than politics, were not in breach.