Much-loved actor and director Robert Redford launched the Sundance Channel fourteen years ago to broadcast independent and progressive films from around the world.

It is therefore surprising that the network chose to broadcast the notoriously inaccurate “Great Global Warming Swindle” this week.

When this pseudo-scientific “documentary” was first broadcast on British television to an audience of 2.5 million in 2007, real scientists were appalled. The British Antarctic Survey released a statement that “any scientist found to have falsified data in the manner of the [film] would be guilty of serious professional misconduct."

The film was so loopy that several of the individual scientists featured in the “documentary” released their own statements to show how their interviews were used out of context to support the flat-Earth view that climate change was not real.

Dr. Carl Wunsch, a professor of Oceanography at MIT released a statement that read in part:

“I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component… Many of us [in the scientific community] feel an obligation to talk to the media---it's part of our role as scientists, citizens, and educators… Channel 4 now says they were making a film in a series of "polemics". There is nothing in the communication we had …that suggested they were making a film that was one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading. I took them at face value---clearly a great error.”

The UK's Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific bodies in the world has released this statement today on the Ofcom ruling that the "Great Global Warming Swindle" television movie misrepresented the views of some of the world's most distinguished scientists:

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society said: "TV companies occasionally commission programmes just to court controversy, but to misrepresent the evidence on an issue as important as global warming was surely irresponsible. 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' was itself a swindle. The programme makers misrepresented the science, the views of some of the scientists featured in the programme and the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Media coverage of the Ofcom ruling on a complaint leveled at a UK documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle," has been quick and harsh.

And so it should be. We here at DeSmog have been relentless in debunking the misrepresentations of this climate change shock-u-mentary that appeared to be more about raising hackles and spreading misinformation than about reflecting the true state of climate science.

A press release has been issued by the original complainants to Ofcom, the UK's communications regulatory office, over the Channel 4 documentary, "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

In the release (full version attached below), Bob Ward, former spokesperson for the prestigious UK Royal Society, who submitted one of the 265 complaints received by Ofcom and who reviewed parts of the test complaint, said...

A new website has been launched containing all the nitty gritty details of the complaint to Ofcom, the UK's communications regulatory board, over Channel 4's documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

The website OfcomSwindleComplaint.net was set up by Dave Rado, one of the three concerned citizens who launched the original complaint to Ofcom over a year ago.