The series’ seventh episode, hosted on camera by British naturalist David Attenborough, will investigate what rising temperatures will mean for the people and wildlife that live there - and for the rest of the planet.At press time, nearly 84,000 people had signed a Change.org petition to air the episode. Discovery Channel hasn’t elaborated on its decision, although a Los Angeles Times blog reported Tuesday that:
The ruckus surprised Discovery executives, who had not screened all of the episodes until last week.
“Up until today we had not made any programming or scheduling decisions, and today we made our announcement,” said Katherine Nelson, Discovery Channel spokeswoman.
I don’t believe it’s controversial, the only controversial element in climate change is to what degree it’s anthropocentric, what degree humans have been responsible, but the facts of climate change are scientifically established facts and I don’t think we go beyond that.The comment does make the eighty-five-year-old documentarian sound a bit wishy-washy on the subject, but Media Matters is undoubtedly making too much of it. Attenborough penned an op-ed for The Independent back in May 2006, in which he acknowledged that he’d been “skeptical about climate change” before going on to say:
Now I do not have any doubt at all. I think climate change is the major challenge facing the world. I have waited until the proof was conclusive that it was humanity changing the climate.Media Matters also highlighted a comment made during a radio interview by Dr. Mark Brandon, a polar oceanographer at The Open University who served as an academic consultant on the series, in which he said:
If you were to imagine an episode where people just talked about, you know, humans are doing this, humans are doing that, that wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the story. What would make perfect sense if you’re telling the story of the polar regions is to talk about how they’re changing in the context of the animals and the environments that you’ve shown through the previous six hours of episodes.“On Thin Ice” debuted in the UK on Wednesday night, and reviews were just starting to roll in at press time. According toThe Telegraph’s TV critic, James Walton, the episode did, in fact, focus on the impacts of climate change rather than mankind’s contribution thereto. Although the episode started with dire warnings about global warming’s toll on the polar regions, including a shot that cuts to an oil refinery:
The longer the programme went on, though, the clearer it was that Attenborough remains a BBC man to his bootstraps. At times, indeed, the result felt virtually like a parody of the Corporation’s determined commitment to the sort of balance that proves its worth by annoying both sides…
…Aerial photos of the Arctic showed that between 1980 and 2010, 30 per cent of the sea-ice has disappeared. For thousands of years the Wilkins ice shelf off the Antarctic coast was a solid Yorkshire-sized block, some 200 metres thick. Now it looks like a collection of huge white London Olympics logos.
Even so, the only cause of the melting that Attenborough mentioned was a shift in wind direction. At no point did he suggest any human involvement in climate change - and whenever possible he pointed out the animals that have benefited from the warmer conditions.
Sir David retorted that “by showing the glories of the world” the series would “help persuade people that this planet is worth saving”…That’s not an unreasonable sentiment. As award-winning science journalist Michelle Nijhuis recently suggested, “It’s not (always) about the Lorax.” That’s a clever way of saying that although, “there’s a lot of genuine tragedy on the environmental beat,” perhaps environmental are too quick to reach for the “bad news” frame when “other-than-tragic” narratives are available.
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