Christopher Booker writes in the Torygraph …
awkward polar bears continue to multiply
Second only to the melting of the Arctic ice and those "drowning" polar bears, there is no scare with which the global warmists, led by Al Gore, more like to chill our blood than the fast-vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas, which help to provide water for a sixth of mankind. Recently one newspaper published large pictures to illustrate the alarming retreat in the past 40 years of the Rongbuk glacier below Everest. Indian meteorologists, it was reported, were warning that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared by 2035.
Yet two days earlier a report by the UN Environment Program had claimed that the cause of the melting glaciers was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast "atmospheric brown cloud" hanging over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia's dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
Furthermore a British study published two years ago by the American Meteorological Society found that glaciers are only shrinking in the eastern Himalayas. Further west, in the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, glaciers are "thickening and expanding".
Meanwhile, all last week, ITV News was running a series of wearisomely familiar scare stories on the disappearing Arctic ice and those "doomed" polar bears - without telling its viewers that satellite images now show ice cover above its 30-year average, or that polar bear numbers are at record level. But then "polar bears not drowning after all - as snow falls over large parts of Britain" doesn't really make a story.
The GOS says: One of the glories of British television - and of the BBC in particular - used to be the superb wildlife programmes including the greatest of all, "Life on Earth".
Sadly I've had to stop watching wildlife coverage on TV almost completely. It's bad enough that modern shows are not so much about the animals, birds, insects etc. as about the intrepid presenters and their races against time/tide/weather or what have you, as all television executives are now convinced that we're all so stupid that we can't watch anything that doesn't have (a) human interest and (b) artificially-created tension.
But the real turn-off for me and, I suspect, many others, is the knee-jerk attitude of the BBC about the environment and global warming. Every single programme has to include a dire warning that this habitat or that little creature is under imminent threat of extinction caused by human intervention - with the implication that only the wise and all-seeing television presenters either know or care how this might be prevented.
I'm afraid my personal reaction is to reach for the remote and search for some football. In the words of the little old lady who stood in front of me at the supermarket the other day and heard that she now had to pay for her plastic bags, "Sod the bloody environment!"
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