Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, has attributed the fuss around Frozen Planet's use of zoo footage of polar bear cubs in what was supposed to be a wild setting to the Leveson enquiry into press standards. It seems far more likely to me to have been instigated by the global-warming denial lobby. David Attenborough is the most universally respected man in Britain and he has just made a powerful programme highlighting the consequences of global warming. He did not actually discuss the mechanism of global warming through human-generated carbon dioxide emissions but the programme was still seen as a threat by this lobby. Their methods are always the same: not to address the scientific evidence but to distract by dirty tricks, attacking by scurrilous means the people promulgating the arguments in favour of reducing fossil-fuel burning. There is no real problem with the polar bear footage. To put a camera into a bear’s den in its natural habitat would have endangered the cubs, when the whole point of the programme was to show how climate change threatens the survival of such creatures.
The really shocking story this week is Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. At the moment the world seems hell-bent on conducting this experiment in global warming. And we are supposed to get irate because of a few seconds on footage in a zoo, rather than under the snowy wastes.
The really shocking story this week is Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. At the moment the world seems hell-bent on conducting this experiment in global warming. And we are supposed to get irate because of a few seconds on footage in a zoo, rather than under the snowy wastes.
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