The latest round of BBC green agitprop narrated by Sir David Attenborough hit British licensed TV screens (£159 per year, or a criminal record) last Sunday with the first episode of Wild Isles.
Co-produced by the WWF (also known as the World Wildlife Fund) and the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), it concentrates on nature around Britain. Even before the first programme was broadcast, all the parties involved were preparing the alarmist ground with news that 38 million birds had vanished from British skies in the last 50 years. This number comes from a 2020 RSPB report, but curiously missing was the information that the latest figure was similar to the total in 2012. In fact the RSPB noted that in terms of total breeding bird numbers, “the period of relative stability that began in the 1990s is continuing”.
The stand-out eco-scare in the first episode was the claim that in just the last 20 years, 60% of flying insects have vanished. Attenborough’s guesstimate-rich narrations are lightly sourced at the best of times, but it appears this claim arises from work by “citizen scientists” counting bugs on car number plates in England. The ‘Bugs Matter’ survey has been used to ramp up alarm with the Natural History Museum stoking additional concern with the opinion that 40% of insects in the world could become extinct within the next few decades.
Of course, nature relies on insects of every sort to pollinate plants and recycle natural detritus. In fact, a rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to an estimated 14% ‘greening’ of the planet over the last 30 years. Alarmist stories of decline and extinction might be more convincing if pollination was in obvious retreat, and we suddenly found ourselves knee deep in the smelly stuff.
The car license plate story is largely anecdotal. Over the last 50 years, car registrations have tripled in the U.K. There are only so many insects that can be trapped in narrow road corridors, and existing carriageways bear much more traffic than before. It could be argued that roads regularly swept by millions of vehicles provide the least reliable information on countrywide insect abundance. In addition, car shapes have changed from largely angular boxes to aerodynamic wedges, the latter much more likely to deflect insects out of the way than previous models. In congested England, the trap rate is said to be down 65%, while on the less crowded roads in Scotland it falls to 27.9%. Attempts were made to take account of journey times, distances and locations, but the compilers admit the results should be interpreted “with caution”.
Caution of course is not the Attenborough way these days, since the 60% guess was broadcast to its global audience without identifying the source or putting it into context.
This is not the first time Attenborough and the WWF have joined forces to push a narrative intended to promote the command-and-control Net Zero political project. A recent book by one of the world’s foremost authorities on polar bears Dr Susan Crockford, called Fallen Idol: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception, recalled the 2019 WWF/Netflix One Planet collaboration. One episode filmed hundreds of walruses falling off a cliff, a horrific scene that Attenborough attributed to “climate change”. A more obvious explanation was the unmentioned presence of a nearby pack of polar bears.
Introducing his film to the World Economic Forum elites at Davos, Attenborough commented: “If people truly understand what is at stake, I believe they will give permission to businesses and governments to get on with practical solutions”.
For its part, the BBC also makes no secret that it uses Attenborough’s nature programmes to spin a tale of climate Armageddon and destruction of the natural world. Last year, the executive producer of Frozen Planet II Mark Brownlow said, “Environmental storytelling is much more engrained in this series. We get the audience invested in our characters, which we then use to communicate a message.” In the course of the first episode, Attenborough used a computer model to claim the Arctic summer sea ice could all be gone within 12 years, despite recent evidence, displayed below, showing the ice extent stopped declining from around 2010.
According to Crockford, the BBC/Attenborough agenda demands a certain message be told about climate change and the people involved are “not about to let scientific facts get in their way”.
With the WWF on board for his latest programme, Attenborough is all set to continue predictions of huge declines in animal and insect life. This of course is the same WWF that claims vertebrates have declined by 69% since 1970. As we noted recently, this is a bedrock climate and ecological scare repeated endlessly across the mainstream media, and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to school classrooms. As we also noted, a group of Canadian scientists have pointed out the figure is a statistical freak due to the inclusion of 2.4% of falling wildlife populations. “If these extremely declining populations were excluded, the global trend switches to an increase”, they helpfully explained.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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