In the end, the BBC declined to broadcast the last episode of Sir David Attenborough’s Wild Isles tale of ecological disaster and breakdown, tucking it away under an ‘extras’ slot on the iPlayer streaming service. Possibly the broadcaster shied away from the numerous unsourced, dubious claims, along with the promotion of organic farming practices that would quickly lead to shortages of food, followed by widespread economic and societal dislocation and ultimately death. Or it may have stepped back from promoting a bird-watching group, Flock Together, that determines membership based on skin colour and plays into the increasingly popular ‘the countryside is racist’ woke trope.
At the BBC, Attenborough is allowed to present unsourced claims as gospel truth, seemingly without the requirement placed on regular BBC environment journalists to temper claims using words like ‘could’, and phrases such as ‘scientists say’. But an increasingly long history of far-fetched claims means that anything Attenborough says these days needs detailed sourcing and treating with a great deal of care.
Of course, there are laudable environmental issues raised by this series, which was co-produced by the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) in collaboration with the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Sea-dredging for shell fish, unsustainable fishing, unnecessary use of pesticides and soil conservation are all significant ecological concerns. But Attenborough and his campaigning colleagues are aiming much higher. Tight restrictions on food production and rewilding on a global scale, along with the promotion of the collectivist Net Zero political agenda, no less. However, some ecological concerns are more equal than others. Few worries are raised by green political activists about the millions of bats and birds killed every year by wind turbines. Nobody is talking about the alarming recent increase in beached whales off the U.S. North Atlantic coast, at a time when widespread offshore wind farm sonar surveying is taking place.
Within two minutes of the start of the last Wild Isles episode, Attenborough stated that, “one quarter of all our species of mammals are at risk of extinction”. The extinction claim appears to come from work produced in 2020 by a group of British conservationists led by the Mammal Society for Natural England. Attenborough’s claim more or less repeats the heading on the press release. The actual extinction figure refers to 11 of 47 mammals native to Britain. But, elsewhere, the Mammal Society note that there are around 90 species of mammals living in Great Britain. The extinction claim highlighted on the BBC programme seems to refer only to animals classified as ‘native’, or “our” as Attenborough puts it. If one takes in the late arrivals, a distinction that seems somewhat disingenuous anyway, the percentage figure drops by over a half.
How reliable is the claim that even 11 species are facing extinction? Few details about methodology in the original survey seem to be available. A link to a PDF of the original paper produces type too small to read. In the press release, there is a note of “population estimates” and “quantitative analysis” undertaken by computer models.
Attenborough also repeated his improbable claim from the first episode that 60% of British flying insects had disappeared in just 20 years. The Daily Sceptic investigated this claim on March 19th, making the point that such a loss would have led to obvious signs such as lack of pollination and an accumulation of detritus, some of it rather unpleasant. The story seems to have emanated from ‘citizen scientists’ counting bugs trapped on car number plates. I noted that it could be argued that roads regularly swept by increasing numbers of cars provided the least reliable information on countrywide insect abundance. The story was followed up a few days later by Ross Clark in the Spectator. He raised similar concerns, calling the claim “extremely dubious” and adding that its methodology “raises multiple red flags which should be obvious to anyone with the most basic grasp of science”.
A basic grasp of arithmetic might be useful in another Attenborough claim that one third of birds are at risk of extinction. This claim appears to have been taken from one of the programme’s collaborators, the RSPB. It states that almost 30% of British bird species are seriously threatened with extinction. But closer inspection of the paper that produced the findings shows that only 245 species were assessed. Elsewhere, the RSPB states there are 405 species of birds to be found in the U.K.. Do the sums and the extinction percentage figure again falls by around a half.
Possibly some bird species are currently struggling – it happens in nature – but overall the birds seem to be holding their own. In pre-publicity for Wild Isles it was claimed that 38 million birds had vanished from British skies in the last 50 years. This number came from a 2020 RSPB report, but 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”.
Halfway through his green agitprop, Attenborough suddenly highlighted the activities of Flock Together, a bird watching group from Hackney for “people of colour”. The programme airs complaints that access to wild spaces “is far from equal” and people of colour were “more likely to face prejudice in the countryside”. This idea that the countryside is somehow racist is becoming increasingly fashionable in woke circles, with the Leverhulme Trust about to send in ‘hate crime experts’ to investigate ‘rural racism’. In last week’s Spectator, Douglas Murray skewered the notion that Britain does not sufficiently resemble a country “you, your parents or grandparents” left. Murray noted that if his grandparents had left for Jamaica, he might still find the place dominated by Jamaicans.
In his time, Attenborough has been a brilliant natural history presenter. But his recent years have been tarnished by a willingness to read out Thunberg-style claims of ecological disaster prepared by politically inspired eco-warriors with an obvious collectivist and increasingly woke political agenda.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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Some musings……I wonder why the Davos Deviants picked England to spark off civil unrest? Australia has ANZAC day and I understand that is venerated in the same way as Remeberance Sunday, so why us?
Does any other prominent nation honour and remember its war dead in quite the same way as we do?
Have they decided to inflict martial law or lockdowns or is the intention simply to set our towns and cities alight?
Dark days indeed.
Maybe just testing their new “draconian” anti-protest powers as laid out in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, to see how it works in practice?
Edit: could be Public Order Act, either way the police now have new powers.
It would appear that freelance photojournalists who work for CNN and the New York Times just happened to be within the Gaza strip at the time Hamas and many psychopath citizens blasted through the barrier and commenced their assault. What a scoop for them;
”On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.
What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20231108181516/https://honestreporting.com/photographers-without-borders-ap-reuters-pictures-of-hamas-atrocities-raise-ethical-questions/
Good reporting Mogs
Wow.
Now you’re on the right track.
Implication…
Slightly off topic. With many papers reducing staff due to competition from on-line, editors rely more and more on pre-cooked articles from Reuters and AP etc. Who these days are far from neutral:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/23/when-i-covered-climate-change-for-reuters-i-thought-co2-was-to-blame-for-rising-temperatures-i-was-wrong/?highlight=AP%20reuters
Reuters have links to the WEF….
CEOs of the big media companies have links to the WEF….
Hammas leader is a member of WEF….
Netanyahu is a member of WEF….
Braverman attended WEF….
Sunak is a member of WEF….
They’re all working for the same sponsor.
The DS, all the MSM are promoting the agenda of the WEF
Arguing here about who is right & who is wrong is following the agenda of the WEF.
Can you see it yet??
This lady who is Israeli and Arab Muslim, and is one of many, puts paid to the accusation of Israel being an ”apartheid state” ( 1min 30sec );
https://twitter.com/BrotherRasheed/status/1722121368232206476
How many Arabs live in Israel – how many have left since Oct 7th….. if so who is reporting on this – CNN, NYT, a n other of the TNI cabal?
I was in Bradford in 1991 and it was a tinderbox of cultural tension. Fighting between Pakistan Muslims and the English was commonplace. I knew then that this country had a big problem with immigration; after all, most of the refusal to integrate was coming from second generation immigrants. It could only get worse.
I haven’t been back since, but I doubt that all the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that have chosen to loudly protest on what has become England’s most sacred day of the year are doing so because they’ve integrated well. This idea amongst many sceptics that any trouble from all the ‘peace-loving’ Muslims would only stem from ‘agents’ is crazy. Batshit crazy. There are, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of Muslims living amongst us that hate Western values and need the smallest of excuses to show it. We will know what they really think of their adopted country this weekend. Anyone that turns up to protest is telling us what they really think of our values – I’m sure that will include hordes of virtue-signalling middle-class English.
Whatever happens this weekend the state wins. They are just a few moves away from the end of their game.
I think that Britain is about to reap the whirlwind of its much laudered and blinkered approach to multiculturalism!
We’re about to celebrate the lives of those who gave all, only for us to be defeated in our own country
I’ve come to believe the only people wearing the blinkers were us. It’s very hard to draw any conclusion other than mass immigration has always been the plan. Dilute Britishness, dilute a sense of belonging, generate panic, sow division and voila! You have a population ripe for the picking. The State will provide the answers to social unrest with more control, more surveillance, more restrictions. And it’s a 2-for-1 deal, as they also now have an abundance of people willing to work for less, so more ‘resource’ at lower cost. That’s all we are to these people – a tiny cog in their machine.
The destruction of European Christian civilisation has been the plan.
Mass immigration is just one of the means of achieving it.
Where did “we the people” go wrong I wonder? I guess many of us got lazy and missed what was going on at a global level, too busy bickering over local issues.
Not limited to us though. Consider France, or some USA states. There is no shortage of immigration across the Mediterranean at present, nor via central America.
So Rowley says no Law exists to stop the protests by our wonderfully integrated brethren ! There will be one afterwards that covers all of us , with maybe other familiar measures as well ! You couldn’t make it up !
Just one incident of a breach of the peace by a protester, just one, whether Plod acts or not, and Rowley is “decareered” in a heartbeat.
Climate Change Conference Cops And Robbers
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Well done, Sir Mark Rowley.
This is exactly the kind of leadership with backbone that is required.
The Police will do an outstanding job at the weekend, again, and deserve our support, gratitude.
Corbyn had 13m supporters, and these marchers are Corbynites.
Of course they should be allowed to march peacefully so that the whole nation can see them for what they are.
Placards marked ‘Socialist Worker’ always give the game away.
This mini clip of Douglas Murray shutting Piers Morgan’s nonsense down, with his ”..but they’re not all Hamas supporters” garbage, is what I’ve been saying for some time. There is no way anyone going out on a march by week 5 wouldn’t know what ”from the river to the sea” meant, so yes they are all terrorist supporters, therefore I shall continue to accurately refer to these protests as ”pro-Hamas”, because it would appear that at this point in time it is factually correct.
https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker/status/1722385754322559421
One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
Anyone who claims to know what everyone in a group of thousands believes is deluding himself.
The anti lockdown marchers were branded far right, radicals, anti-vax looneys, everything under the sun.
All I nanowire is that someone is making hay from all this division and conflict.
“Met chief says ‘no law exists’ to stop pro-Palestine protest on Armistice Day”
That horse has long bolted!
Why didn’t the local authority just deny permission for the protest in the first place??
Then offer any other days on which they wanted to have it?
Why did they allow it on this particular weekend?
Have there ever been other marches and protests allowed in London during the remembrances? If not, why this one?
(I really don’t know if other protests have been allowed on Armistice day? Please enlighten)
In recent years, Remembrance with all the military marches etc has been scheduled for the nearest Sunday to Armistice day. It just happens to be Saturday & Sunday this year – next year it’ll be Sunday & Monday. Some calendars are erroneously labelled as if they were always together.
Khan didn’t or should that be Khouldnt….
Actually it’s Khant but drop the ‘h’ and give it a cockney accent and…well
Listening to Toby on this week’s Weekly Sceptic podcast:
“People just seem to lose their reason and discount prior experience when they start to panic under the threat of tens of 1000’s of deaths which they think they might be held accountable for not doing more to prevent … I wouldn’t be prepared to bet that we wouldn’t lock down again in the event of another pandemic”.
It is clear, 3.5 years on, that Toby still believes that there really was a pandemic and that those implementing the lockdown policy were acting in good faith in response to what they thought was a genuine public health emergency but simply panicked.
I’m not sure what to make of this…
Is he wrong that the hysteria of the population was used against it?
It doesn’t matter whether the covid terror was planned or just happened for the purpose of his point. Without the public’s hysteria and total buy in of the danger, there is no covid terror.
Thanks for that Michael. Actually I find this quite disturbing. Toby Young is not unintelligent so clinging to cock-up in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary seems absurd.
This line from Julie Burchill’s piece in Spiked – Queers for Palestine – made me chuckle:
“Didn’t the LQBTQ+ ‘community’ already have enough internecine squabbles, between those who believe that women can’t have penises and those who are insane?”
‘Police must be even handed with protests’.
So, if in 1942, Nazis wanted to march down the Mall, would they have stood by?
Every loathsome individual who takes part in these pro Hamas marches signals their Jew hatred.
Their slogan: first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
First they came for the Jews.
This is a common fallacy used to argue for limits to free speech. Basically, if we allow everything, then you can end up with the Nazis.
It’s completely the other way around. It was the Nazis that suppressed free speech and went on to commit the atrocities they did and to jail and murder anyone who disagreed with them.
A population committed to free speech would not have allowed the Nazis to do what they did.
“‘It’s controversial, but I think Hamas are freedom fighters’” – The organisers of the anti-Israel marches say they are peaceful. The Campaign Against Antisemitism spoke to attendees to see for themselves…”
Just like the Waffen SS then.
Good to know.
The ignorance displayed by those interviewed was staggering.
Worth looking into, following and wishing well.
But Michael Gove attending?
Seriously?!
https://www.dossier.today/p/inside-the-arc-a-dispatch-from-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=69009&post_id=138726321&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=97oj4&utm_medium=email
Thanks for the link. Excellent work there.