Is man-made global climate change a scientific conspiracy as skeptics and deniers stridently assert?

The answer is that it most certainly is not, according to a major new documentary being released for free by leading universities in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The film, "Thin Ice -- the Inside Story of Climate Science," follows the work of 40 scientists in the Arctic, Antarctic, Southern Ocean, New Zealand, Europe and the United States as they race to understand changes in the Earth's climate.

It was made by New Zealand's Victoria University and Oxford University in the UK to communicate the science of global climate change directly to the public without going through intermediaries, such as the media, executive producer and Victoria University Professor Peter Barrett told Xinhua.

Viewers follow Victoria University geologist Associate Professor Simon Lamb as he talks to climate scientists studying changes in atmosphere, oceans and ice sheets through measurements, core samples and computer modeling.

Six years in the making, production was underway in 2009 when the "Climategate" scandal broke and e-mails stolen from a British university were alleged by climate change deniers to be evidence of an international scientific conspiracy by "extremists and alarmists."

"These 'extremists and alarmists' are of course scientists studying the climate. Could these accusations be true? Were dishonest climate scientists bringing all of us into disrepute? As a scientist I had to find out so I decided to make a film about the scientists at the center of all this controversy," Lamb said in the introduction to the film.

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