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.
"The science of climate change is complex; however the weight of scientific evidence shows that global warming caused by human actions is happening now, and is set to continue. There is certainly a need for ongoing debate on climate change and on what we are going to do to tackle it but this programme made little or no contribution to that debate."