Two gulls eating a baby Adélie penguin alive as a voice over intoned that the animal was the “canary in the coalmine” for climate change. Welcome to the final episode of Frozen Planet II, narrated by Sir David Attenborough – and welcome to the day the much-loved wildlife show, long on life support, finally died, to be replaced by World Economic Forum ‘Great Reset’ green agitprop.
A tearful ecologist, Dr. Bill Fraser, told viewers that four decades ago there were 20,000 Adélie adults on an island in western Antarctica. Now, he said, there are just 400 breeding pairs left; the Adélie penguins are an “indicative species” of climate change, he said. But for some inexplicable reason, neither he nor Attenborough found it relevant to note that, in 2018, satellites had found a new colony of Adélies in a remote part of eastern Antarctica numbering over 1.5 million birds.
According to a report in the New York Times, the Adélies are not recent migrants to their Danger Islands home in eastern Antarctica. Photos taken in 1957 by a seaplane are said to have shown colony boundaries in virtually the same locations. “We are standing here looking at climate change killing off these Adélie penguins,” intoned Fraser. Presumably he would have had to adjust the ‘climate change’ remark if he was fortunate to find himself knee-deep in the little beasties over on the eastern side of the continent.
But all the animals more or less left the Frozen Planet II stage in the final episode, shown last Sunday on BBC One, as Attenborough ran through almost every ice scare in the alarmist book. He said humanity must stick to 1.5°C of warming agreed at COP26, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Stopping the climate, a non-linear system of which we have incomplete and, in parts, negligible information is a ridiculous ask. But Attenborough pronounced: “We can do it, we must do it. Then there will be a future for the planet.”
The programme started with Attenborough’s familiar claim that the ice caps are melting “faster than ever before”. Of course, Attenborough cannot actually know this. For one, the timeline is somewhat imprecise. But as we have seen in numerous Daily Sceptic articles, ice is highly cyclical. Two American glaciologists Laura Larocca and Yarrow Axford recently found that over half of the Arctic’s glaciers and ice caps that exist today, did not exist or were smaller 10,000 to 3,400 years ago. At the time, atmospheric carbon dioxide ranged between 260 to 270 parts per million, compared with the current 410 ppm, so its hard to see how carbon dioxide played a role in making them smaller. The scientists noted that the Arctic’s modern ice extent is “among the largest of the last 10,000 years”.
In episode 2, Attenborough made the incredible claim that all the summer sea ice in the Arctic could be gone by 2035. His claim seems to have been taken from the prediction of a climate model in a 2020 paper written by a group of academics working with the Met Office’s Hadley Centre. But plans for any boating around the North Pole might have to be put on hold. At this year’s September Arctic summer end, the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the ice extent was 4.87 million square kilometres, which was 1.54 million sq kms higher than the low point in 2012. Gradual recovery has been evident since the 2012 low point, and this year was the 11th lowest extent in the recent satellite record.
Detachable ice sheets and biblical levels of flooding are old favourites. “Calculations predict nearly half a billion people living in coastal communities around the world will be displaced by flooding by the end of the century,” warned Attenborough. “If the Greenland ice sheet slips into the ocean more rapidly, this flooding could all happen far sooner,” he added. It was likely that Attenborough was citing flood work by computational scientists working at Climate Central, who predicted similar figures in 2019. Under “high emissions” of carbon, models indicate 630 million people live in land below projected annual flood levels for 2100. “High emissions” pathways are often used by catastrophists since they assume global temperatures will rise around 3-4°C this century. Since global temperatures have spent the first two decades of the century plateauing, there would appear to be some way to go.
In 2019 Attenborough narrated a joint World Wildlife Fund-Netflix collaboration featuring walruses falling off a cliff in an episode of Our Planet. Attenborough attributed the horrific scenes on the Russian Arctic Chukchi Sea coast to “climate change”, despite a pack of nearby polar bears providing a more obvious explanation. Introducing his film to the rich and influential elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that year, Attenborough commented: “If people can truly understand what is at stake, I believe they will give permission to business and governments to get on with practical solutions.” Subsequently, the polar bear expert Dr. Susan Crockford wrote a book about the affair entitled, Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception.
In Frozen Planet II, groups of plump bears are shown wandering around in large packs on Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic. Without sea ice, the bears cannot hunt seals it was said, and they find other food including human food supplies. In fact the film shows the bears feasting on a walrus, of which there are thought to be around 100,000 on the island at certain times of the year.
Crockford notes that it is possible to refute the implied narrative of a struggle for survival brought about by human-caused climate change resulting in a sea ice death spiral. In fact Chukchi Sea polar bears are “unexpectedly thriving“, she reports. Sea ice along the coast of Chukotka and Wrangel was “very thick” last summer, and at September 1st this year Wrangel was still surrounded by ice. Although sea ice has recently declined, she goes on to report that more sunlight reaching the open water for longer periods has meant more food for the entire Arctic food chain. More food for fish and seals has meant more food for polar bears in the spring (when the ice is still abundant) and fatter bears means more healthy cubs, she says.
In Crockford’s view, this latest series is “deliberate emotional manipulation” meant to make viewers amenable to taking action on climate change. She is right, of course. The six-part series is primarily a political stunt designed to secure acceptance for the drastic lifestyle and economic changes that will be forced on populations through a command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Little attempt is made to explain that the climate has always changed, sometimes very rapidly, and that natural forces, many of them little understood, are at work. Instead we are led to believe that humans, a latecomer on Planet Earth, have the power to actually stop the climate. Cherry-picking of data is rife – the Adélies penguin story is an obvious example. Many claims are anecdotal and highly emotional, and don’t stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. As Crockford noted, the people involved are not about to let scientific facts get in the way. “This is calculated ‘climate change’ propaganda marketed as entertainment.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“This is calculated ‘climate change’ propaganda marketed as entertainment.”
Almost all BBC output is political propaganda marketed as entertainment or news or current affairs or sports coverage. The goes for most TV ads and probably a whole load of other TV, films that I simply cannot watch any more.
Very true, and most of us have known that for many years. But ofcourse propaganda depends on most of the people not having sufficient time or inclination to investigate every issue as they are very busy with work and raising families. I am totally aware of all the TV propaganda, the Attenborough nonsense and the endless screeching about a “climate crisis” for political purposes which most people simply have no clue even exists. They think it is all about “science”. ——As my brother said to me once “Why would they say there is global warming if it isn’t true”? A classic example of how the propaganda works for most people. ——But the bit you mentioned about TV ads was the bit of your comment that had me laughing the most even if all of this stuff is no laughing matter. Almost every TV ad features a white wife and a black husband or vice versa, and you will find it very difficult to see 5 white people in an ad. You would think in a country where only 13% of people are black that this would be almost statistically impossible, and it actually makes a mockery of their “colour blind” excuse. Just like the excuse they used in the absurd Bridgerton TV program . But imagine if we had a period drama set in the Congo in 1850 and a quarter of the actors were white, or imagine if there was a film about Nelson Mandela and George Clooney was the lead actor. There would be flames coming out from the eyes of the social justice people.——Diversity only ever works in one direction.
Western civilisation committing suicide before our eyes. The idiots. The sheep who are going along with this will regret it when it’s gone.
I was just muting the ads but I need to look away now. Luckily I don’t watch much TV, mainly old films and re-runs, and I have shelves full of old books enough to last me until I am gone so I don’t need to buy anything contemporary. As far as I am concerned the people who are pushing this crap have declared war on me.
I also mute the ads or record TV programs and skip past them. I refuse to watch anything I deem to be pushing political agendas, mainly around Equality, Diversity, Race, Gender or Climate. If I want to watch drama I do not want social justice messages crammed in there. If I want to watch sport I do not want to hear about “taking the knee” or “there are not enough minority referees” I do not want to know whether a professional football player is gay. That is none of my business. etc etc etc
Appalling climate porn from Attenborough! The poor little penguin the rain! No context and no data. It is blatant brainwashing of our young for political reasons.
The most ridiculous bit is actually Then there will be a future for the planet — the planet, an enormous ball of stone (mostly), will have a future regardless of the fate of any individual species of animals currently living on it. The hybris is breathtaking. Humans are incapable of ensuring an uninterrupted power supply to their homes in the face of perfectly ordinary storms or end periodic, long-lasting flooding of vast swathes of the countryside but they and they alone can save the whole planet which is mortally endangered by their mostly insignificant presence.
Attenborough is somewhat notorious for being in favour of human extinction, preferably human self-extinction through birth preventation. Considering this, I wouldn’t want to take any advice regarding human affairs from him as it’s very unlikely that that’s meant to be beneficial to members of a species he openly despises. Additionally, the I am the anti-messias who’s going to bring mankind death to save the world! megalomanic delusion doesn’t exactly speek for a rational mind.
Why does the BBC fund sorry would-be murderous lunatics like him?
Because they don’t have to worry about earning the money they stuff in that charlatan’s pockets
The BBC didn’t do that in, say, 1954, and hence, the stock US platitude The state is sooo eeeeeviiiillll!!!127 remains the same tired nonsense it alway was.
The prevailing political wind in 1954 was different. At least in the US there are some major media companies presenting a slightly different view (well, mainly just Fox). In the UK I think the dominance of the BBC because of it’s guaranteed income stream, the stamp of authority that comes from being the state broadcaster, and it’s long history as the only broadcaster, give it a big advantage.
What’s the German TV media like? Anyone decent reaching good numbers of viewers?
The prevailing political wind in 1954 was different.
Precisely. The problem is not that the BBC has a guaranteed income stream. The problem is that the BBC is controlled (and presumably, largely also staffed) by people paying lip services to what the BBC is supposed to do while they’re actually doing someting completely different: Instead of informing a supposedly intellectually mature audience to enable its members to form opinions of their own, they’re telling an audience they believe to be too infantile to think right about anything what the opinions of its members should be.
What’s the German TV media like? Anyone decent reaching good numbers of viewers?
By and large, I have no idea about that as I stopped viewing TV in the mid-1990s and haven’t been living in Germany since December 2010. The general situation is probably worse: There are two public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF. ARD was the original one, the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, second German broadcaster) was originally founded because it was believed that the ARD was organizationally too close to the SPD (social democrats, originally, today, its more genderqueer diversity whatevers seeking state employment) to report objectively about a CDU government. But that was in 1959 (original plan). Today, both of them are controlled by councils proportionally staffed by members of the established establishment parties and other organizations said parties consider socially important, eg, the churches.
The platitude is yours not mine. The problem started when the BBC stopped reporting the facts and decided to share their opinions with us. It’s difficult to say exactly when that happened but my best guess is around the early/mid 70s. I moved abroad in 1970 and returned to the UK in 1975. The starting point may well have been the protests around the Vietnam war. The Beeb looked across the pond and liked the prestige given to their US cousins affecting the political discourse and decided to follow the same path over here.
The arrival of the AGW scam poured fuel onto their self righteous fire. And the desire to be seen as still relevant in an age of social media ‘likes’ just fanned the flames.
And the matter is made worse by their choice of commentators, individuals without any relevant qualifications or background on scientific issues, which they demonstrate by only ever presenting one side of the argument.
This contradicts your earlier assertion: If the present-day BBC modelled its behaviour on US media companies, said behaviour can’t have been caused by the business model of the BBC being different from theirs.
A business model is a financial issue. Behaviour is a cultural matter. If you don’t have to worry about your income then you can choose your cultural approach without concern for any negative impact on your finances. The BBC sees itself as the state broadcaster and thus above such irrelevant issues as funding. US broadcasters are commercial animals and act accordingly.
The BBC’s behaviour is caused precisely because they are not commercial.
In the 21st Century the concept of a state broadcaster is only appropriate for a dictatorship. Lies are Truth.
The BBC will put anyone in front of a camera that is prepared to spout Liberal Progressive dogma. They will put a microphone in front a bin man as long as he tells the viewers that they need to cut emissions or be taking the knee. The BBC supposedly have a motto —Free Fair and Impartial—They are none of those things. Their world view is all to the Progressive Left despite the fact that half of Licence payers are not Progressives. So it is really remarkable that a Conservative government actually had an 80 seat majority just a short time ago. But as it turned out they are not really Conservatives which is why Labour now has a 36 point lead. The entire hand wringing political class pander to globalists and UN agenda’s instead of to the people who voted for them, but as we saw in Italy that can all change, but it can only change if the likes of the BBC are exposed for what they are.
Meanwhile in the arctic, sea levels are rising due to the ice sheets being weighed down by too many polar bears, and as the little icebergs they’re drifting around on sink under their weight, the killer whales are having them for breakfast – all caught on film by a sobbing camera crew singing sad songs of lament about climate change!
I believe that the Western Antarctic peninsula is the most populous area for homo sapiens in Antarctica. Maybe the Adelies want a bit of privacy.
No, they just want David Attenborough to stop feeling sorry for them!
Must be a case of That Attenborough guy has repeatedly been seen in neighbourhood. Better move elsewhere now before it gets even worse.
Nature programmes used to be more fun when they weren’t wrapped up in political soundbites. David Attenborough used to be a firm favourite of mine for his boyish enthusiasm and knowledge about his subject but his conversion to the religion of climate change has switched off that particular avenue of simple pleasure for me. The cherry-picking of images and statistics and the emotional manipulation of a public who are desperate for some sort of meaningful connection with the natural world but then get this emotional scattergunning of emotive scenes depicting penguins on their own or being stabbed to death by starving sea gulls. All we need are the massed violins of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing Elgar’s Nimrod and a few bloodied feathers floating in the freezing waters and the masses will be burning their cars en masse and demanding Net Zero social credits and CBDCs and all the nonsense that is coming their way. Attenborough has that annoyingly quiet and sincere voice that makes people want to adopt him as their favourite grandad (in addition to Morgan Freeman) and, more worryingly, believe every well spoken metaphor to describe the ensuing catastrophe that emanates from his mouth. I think he is being played. If you could get access to him and show him the alternative data and facts, I’m sure he would be interested but this is a BBC show and I can only imagine that the show’s producers and backers are not interested in a balanced perspective. Cue violins as I watch my car being towed away…
Attenborough being played.
No way. He is a humanity hating eugenecist and it’s about time he sat down with God to explain his actions. Evil piece of shyte.
Strong words, HP. Is he really a eugenicist? I had no idea. Is he a mate of Gates?
Excellent article Chris
No doubt the Woke left will demand a state funeral for this cretin when he shuffles off this mortal coil. Please God.
Today’s substack by Steve Kirsch
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=548354&post_id=79313774&utm_source=post-email-title&isFreemail=false&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1ODMwMjgzNywicG9zdF9pZCI6NzkzMTM3NzQsImlhdCI6MTY2NjE2MzQyMywiZXhwIjoxNjY4NzU1NDIzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNTQ4MzU0Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.3VXtFNBPJdnch-dKIXc5Dne9HfAT_thTanjLy_OfaMA
Really all you need to know about this overall topic is that the Nazi regime was the most environmentally focussed in history (Nazism is basically Nature-worship writ large);
And that the contemporary political movement was initiated by the formation of the German Green Party (the seed corn for all the other branches, including the British one) by former members of the Nazi Party immediately after the end of WWII.
OMFG. I don’t really like this hackneyed phrase but here, it’s absolutely appropriate: I don’t know what your smoking but you should absolutely stop it.
The German green party (Die Grünen) was founded in 1980 by a bunch of somewhat prominent ex-hippies, ie, the people who believed the USA was a fascist dictatorship which would need to be overcome by a violent (communist) revolution about 10 years earlier and who were the nucleus of all-things-woke of our times. They’d stone you to death it if became known that your grandfather once knew a guy who had been a passenger on a train someone who claimed to have heard of someone else who was claimed to have seen a real photo of Adolf Hitler had also used at an earlier date because of your irredemable contamination with fascist DNA if they were only allowed to do so (they’re still working on that).
Re:
‘The German green party (Die Grünen) was founded in 1980‘
Thank you for pointing that out, I researched the history of environmentalism in Germany a long time ago and have obviously become confused about organisational origins and dates in the interim.
The fact remains that there was complete continuity in post-war West Germany with the uniquely strong Nazi environmentalist (or conservationist) agenda and policies.
Hermann Goering’s Reich Nature Protection law of 1935 which “extended protection to rare or endangered plants and nongame animals, natural monuments and their surroundings, nature reserves, and other landscape areas in open nature” (sound familiar?) was kept in place, as was Hans Klose, the Nazi Director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection – name simply changed post-war to the Central Office for Nature Conservation and Landscape Conservation.
‘by a bunch of somewhat prominent ex-hippies‘
The 1960s western hippy movement has strong ideological connections with the early 20th century German anti-urban / nature-loving Wandervogel movement, which was subsumed into the Hitler Youth when the Nazis seized power in 1933.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandervogel
For those who still fall for the hippy ‘peace and love’ smokescreen, it’s worth remembering that the movement called those that it disagreed with ‘pigs’, had very few darker-skinned members, and one of the most famous examples of its communes was known as the Manson Family;
A long-haired and kaftan wearing grouping that murdered at least 9 individuals, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in 1969.
They used environmentalism as one of their main motivations / excuses, and have a look at this image of Charles Manson:
https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a5330/charles-manson-true-crime-industry/
Note the swastika.
Beyond any hippy connections founders of the German Green Party in 1980 included August Haussleiter, a prominent Nazi who took part in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Baldur Springmann a former member of the SA, and Werner Vorgel, another former Nazi stormtrooper was among the first members of the Greens elected to the Bundestag in 1983.
https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-features/the-nazi-roots-of-the-german-greens-318973
the people who believed the USA was a fascist dictatorship which would need to be overcome by a violent (communist) revolution about 10 years earlier and who were the nucleus of all-things-woke of our times. They’d stone you to death it if became known that your grandfather once knew a guy who had been a passenger on a train someone who claimed to have heard of someone else who was claimed to have seen a real photo of Adolf Hitler had also used at an earlier date because of your irredemable contamination with fascist DNA if they were only allowed to do so (they’re still working on that).
Nazism and Communism are two sides of the same tyrannical, anti-democratic and mass murderous coin. Just like rival football hooligan gangs the adherents falsely perceive themselves to belong to opposite ideological and practical camps.
To illustrate this point the Nazi and German Communist Parties conspired together in the Reichstag to undermine and ultimately overthrow the liberal democratic Weimar Constitution
And just to tie the whole thing back to the inherently fascistic and misanthropic Green ideology, it is worth remembering that alongside Nazi environmentalism already covered the Marxist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot murdered millions of civilians in Cambodia as a result of the Green-inspired ‘Clear the Cities’ programme.
I only watch match of the day now. Nothing else. Cancelled my tv license last week as I refuse to fund this woke left wing propaganda machine any more.