Christopher Booker seems quite confused regarding his opinion of the final episode of Frozen Planet.
In the Mail on 8th Dec, he starts off full of praise for the series’ “breathtaking footage” and “perhaps the most riveting sequence of natural history programmes ever produced” but soon decides that:
Sir David used the awesome shots of the frozen polar wastes to hammer home his belief that the world is facing disaster from man-made global warming.
No one can doubt the passion of his belief. But in putting across his apocalyptic message so forcefully, too many important questions on this hugely important subject were last night neither asked nor answered.
Then, in the Telegraph on the 10th Dec:
In fact, Sir David played it rather more cleverly than in previous forays. Accompanied by the usual breathtaking photography, he didn’t make his message too explicit. Instead he just conveyed that the polar ice caps are melting at an unprecedented rate, suggesting that this will cause a disastrous rise in sea levels.
The Carbon Brief wonder if he’d even watched the episode before writing the Mail peice.
Well that’s all fun but the Telegraph piece seemed to be more inconsistent than just whether he thought a message was being hammered home or if was all subtle and sneaky.
My point is that he’s happy to accepted that a lot of the warming on the Antarctic Peninsula is caused by changing wind patterns and their effect on ocean circulation. The problem with this argument is that the change in Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation has most likely been driven by greenhouse warming or by CFC related ozone depletion (or most likely a bit of both plus some natural variability) but Booker isn’t too keen on admitting that either of these phenomena are real. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
Andy Russell's weather and climate blog 