On thin ice? (another 'light' post)

I've just finished watching the final part of BBC's 'Frozen Planet' series called 'On Thin Ice', which was written and presented by David Attenborough. It's noteworthy for a few reasons. Firstly, the Discovery Channel in the USA only just decided to show this final episode, previously declining to show it to the American audience, likely fearing a backlash from Climate Change Skeptics. Reasons for the initial rejection are unclear, ranging from the patronising but innocent ie. "Who's David Attenborough?" (the series is being narrated by Alec Baldwin on Discovery) to the concerning; it's impact on the upcoming US elections. Of course, climate change campaigners had reacted to the announcement with anger.

This is a QR Code. Scan it with your smartphone to follow the link 

A more interesting response to it, in my view, and the one which has caused the bigger reaction from the makers of the program and the academics involved is..
wait for it.. a 275 word piece in the.. Radio Times (yes, you heard that correctly). In it, the 'half-skeptic' Nigel Lawson (a previous chancellor) argues that David Attenborough's stance on climate change shows that he 'seems to prefer sensationalism to objectivity'. He follows this with a number of statements which he believes would have been brought up in the programme if it had been 'objective'. They're just sentences, with no references, meaning I could just write the same piece in opposites and it would have no more or less authority than Lawson's text.

A Polar Oceanographer from the Open University involved in the series, Dr Mark Brandon, wrote a rebuttal to these claims, a document which was 'leaked' recently. After branding it 'effective' he dismisses Lawson's claims as 'patronising' and 'the usual tired obfuscation and generalisation'. I would tend to side with Brandon (suprisingly!) in that I thought the episode was reserved in it's tone and carefully steered away from sensationalism. The argument that it was not 'two sided' or 'objective' may be true if you were expecting a discussion on the relative causes of climate change and a discussion of the evidence. This was not the aim of the program, however.

Not a graph in sight!

What it aimed to do was show the changes that are currently happening to the Polar regions and the impact that these may have on the environment, as well as all of us. It fulfilled this aim pretty well; there wasn't a line graph in sight throughout the whole 45 minutes. Certainly, it was far from perfect. The part about the polar bear for me showed little, and yet was placed at the beginning of the episode and took up a lot of time. The commentary also relied too much on rhetoric for my view, but perhaps this is understandable for a prime-time TV documentary. Despite it's flaws, though, it finished off the series off where it should have, with a warning.

I'm glad that the final episode will be shown in the US. In my opinion it is needed to balance the series, as most of it is about simply the animals and their 'way of life'. It is likely that from seeing it, images of ice will stick persistently in the mind, and any subsequent attempts to say it is a fragile ecosystem will be unsuccessful. Of course, the number of people which choose to see it is another matter, and we'll only find that out once it in shown in March.

But, what's your opinion on this? What did you think of the episode? Comment!
PS You can still get a free Frozen Planet poster