If Attenborough Speaks Will You Listen?

Last night BBC1 showed part two of David Attenborough's programme on global climate change Are We Changing Planet Earth?/Can We Save Planet Earth?. Primetime telly on a mainstream channel fronted by a widely loved and respected broadcaster telling us this is a "planetary emergency".

It's hard to think of what else you could do to try and convince people of the seriousness of the issue. Until the President of the United States, or a body like the UN or EU issues a widely supported statement saying we need to change our way of life to avoid catastrophe - this is surely as an effective a message as can be put out. Framed within the rest of the BBC's Climate Chaos strand, I think that this is likely to be the most public assault on UK consciousness regarding this issue we'll see until disasters start hitting.

I have to say though that I was a little disconcerted that we ended up getting a section wandering around an average home with an expert suggesting we turn the thermostat down, don't put our tv on standby, use eco light bulbs and only boil as much water as we're going to use. Man, if we're still stuck at the stage of cajoling people at this level you really wonder if anything is ever going to change. The suggested plans for larger scale reductions in carbon emissions seemed a bit specious and ill supported. Nuclear was again presented as a carbon free energy source, typically skirting over the issue of CO2 emissions during the whole nuclear cycle (similarly the emissions, and chemicals used in the production of solar pv cells and wind turbines were elided). Carbon sequestration was also featured without any detailed analysis. Don't we deserve a better investigation than this?

The programme suffered from mixed ambitions, combining an attempt to communicate hard science and the reality of the global situation with an aim of reaching a wide audience and convincing them to turn their TV off at night.

Within the Climate Chaos strand one would have hoped there was room for both ambitions to be realised without them conflicting in one programme. This was a valuable programme, but it could have had greater value - and we don't have time to muck around now.