Global warming: Too hot to handle for the BBC

Green groups protest after corporation calls off day of programming dedicated to climate change
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 06 September 2007

The transformation of climate change from a scientific to a political issue became clear last night when the BBC dropped plans for a day-long TV special on global warming.
The scrapping of Planet Relief, an awareness-raising broadcast similar in concept to programmes such as the poverty-focused Comic Relief and Live8, and planned for early next year, marked a watershed moment: it showed that opining about climate change is now as significant in Britain as scientific fact.
Environmentalists and politicians fiercely criticised the BBC for abandoning the programme, for which Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross had been provisionally lined up as presenters. The corporation said that it had decided it was not the BBC's job to lead opinion on the global warming issue. However, critics complained that the effect of the decision was to imply that there was no scientific consensus on the reality of climate change and its human causes, and accused the corporation of being swayed by increasingly vocal climate-change sceptics.
Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, said: "The consensus about global warming in the science community is now overwhelming, so accusing the BBC of campaigning on such an undisputed threat is like suggesting it should be even-handed between criminals and their victims."
The green activist and author Mark Lynas said that the decision showed "a real poverty of understanding among senior BBC executives about the gravity of the situation we now face.
"The only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of extreme right-wing climate 'sceptics' lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance," he said.
Planet Relief was a working title for the TV special, which was being developed by Jon Plowman, head of BBC Comedy. While the event might have been similar in scale to Comic Relief or Children in Need, it would not have involved fundraising.
It was intended to raise awareness of the issue of climate change. The BBC had been in discussions with the National Grid about the possibility of calling on viewers to participate in a mass electricity "switch-off" or if that had not proved feasible, to turn off the electricity at selected iconic landmarks.
The abandonment of the programme came about after an intense in-house debate about exactly how the corporation should treat the global warming issue, now becoming increasingly politicised in Britain. It could be broadly said that action on climate change, while favoured by many across the political spectrum, has a particular appeal for radical groups, not least because industrial capitalism is seen as being the principal cause of the problem.
By extension, some voices on the right regard it as just another radical cause, oppose it instinctively and seek to cast doubt on its scientific basis. The BBC has been under fire, especially from right-wing commentators, for proselytising in its presentation of some concerns, and some senior executives had doubts about the Planet Relief proposal in particular, suggesting it would leave the corporation open to the charge of bias.
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival this month, Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron said: "It's abso- lutely not the BBC's job to save the planet." The head of television news, Peter Horrocks, wrote in the BBC News website editor's blog: "It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject."
However, a spokeswoman for BBC1, the channel on which Planet Relief would have been shown, insisted that last night's decision was not made "in light of the recent debate around impartiality." She added: "BBC1 aims to bring a mass audience to contemporary and relevant issues and this includes the topic of climate change.
"Our audiences tell us they are most receptive to documentary or factual-style programming as a means of learning about the issues surrounding this subject, and as part of this learning we have made the decision not to go proceed with the Planet Relief event. Instead we will focus our energies on a range of factual programmes on the important and complex subject of climate change."
Mark Lynas dismissed the argument that Planet Relief was dropped for purely editorial reasons as "PR guff". "This is all to do with the fact that climate change is such a political issue and it's too hot for the BBC to handle," he said. "It's intellectual bankruptcy. The entire scientific community is telling the world that it's the biggest threat to human civilisation. What more evidence do you need?" Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said the decision was very disappointing "considering the huge potential for the BBC in helping us more quickly make the shift toward a low-carbon society."
Andrew Neil, who presents the Daily Politics and This Week on the BBC, said: "I'm delighted the BBC has cancelled it. Our job is to cover these things, not to comment on them. There's a great danger that on some issues we're becoming a one-party state in which we're meant to have only one kind of view. You don't have to be a climate-change denier to recognise that there's a great range of opinion on the subject."

Iced Lemming

August 2007

Around 600 naked volunteers formed a “living sculpture” on Switzerland’s largest glacier earlier this month to raise awareness of climate change and glacial melting.
Standing on the Aletsch Glacier with only a warm sense of self-satisfaction to keep them warm, the assembled masses endured temperatures of around 10C while being photographed in the all-together by acclaimed New York artist Spencer Tunick.
Standing on a stepladder and bellowing through a megaphone, Tunick directed five separate camera crews and the eager participants who had travelled from all over Europe.
“The melting of the glaciers is an indisputable sign of global climate change,” said environmental group Greenpeace, who co-organised the event.
A spokesperson for the campaign said the aim of the project was to “establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body”.
The spokesperson added that this was managed in an eco-friendly way to minimise any impact on the environment, before warning that Swiss glaciers could disappear by 2080 if global warming continues at its current pace.
Tunick’s previous projects have featured mass nudity in London, Newcastle and Amsterdam, but these events were dwarfed in May 2007 when the artist photographed 18,000 people in the buff in the centre of Mexico City.

Flooding risk from global warming badly under-estimated: study

By Richard Ingham AFP - Wednesday, August 29 06:36 pm

PARIS (AFP) - Global warming may carry a higher risk of flooding than previously thought, according to a study released on Wednesday by the British science journal Nature.
It says efforts to calculate flooding risk from climate change do not take into account the effect that carbon dioxide (CO2) -- the principal greenhouse gas -- has on vegetation.
Plants suck water out of the ground and "breathe" out the excess through tiny pores, called stomata, in their leaves.
Stomata are highly sensitive to CO2. The higher the level of atmospheric CO2, the more the pores tighten up or open for shorter periods.
As a result, less water passes through the plant and into the air in the form of evaporation. And, in turn, this means that more water stays on the land, eventually running off into rivers when the soil becomes saturated.
In a paper published in February 2006, British scientists said the CO2-stomata link explained a long-standing anomaly.
Over the last 100 years the flow of the world's big continental rivers has increased by around four percent, even though global temperatures rose by some 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.35 degrees Fahrenheit) during this period.
Today, as a result of the unbridled burning of oil, gas and coal, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are around a third more than in pre-industrial times in the middle of the 18th century.
The new study takes the 2006 discovery an important step further by projecting what could happen to water runoff in the future.
If CO2 levels double compared with pre-industrial concentrations -- a common scenario in climate simulations -- the effect on plants alone would lead to an increase of six percent in global runoff, it says.
Until now, scientists have generally estimated an increase in runoff of between five and 17 percent compared with the pre-industrial era.
But this is based only on one yardstick, called radiative forcing. In other words, it only measures the warming effect that greenhouse gases have on the water cycle and not the indirect impact that CO2, the biggest culprit, has on vegetation.
The "radiative forcing" yardstick also predicts that higher temperatures will increase evaporation, causing greater water stress and longer droughts.
Both forecasts are offbeam, says the new paper.
By widening the picture to include the CO2-stomata factor, the likelihood is that the risk of flooding will be worse than thought, but the risk of drought rather less so.
"The risks of rain and river flooding may increase more than has been previously anticipated, because intense precipitation events would be more likely to occur over saturated ground," it says.
"In contrast, the risks of hydrological drought may not increase as much as expected on the basis of meteorological changes alone."
Flooding is a major problem, especially in poor countries that do not have the money to upgrade drainage systems to cope with runoff from saturated soils.
Since June, nearly 3,200 people in South Asia have been killed by heavy monsoon rains and snow melt. More than 20 million people have been affected in the eastern Indian state of Bihar alone.
The authors of the Nature paper are led by Richard Betts of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, part of Britain's Met Office.

THE UK'S HOTTEST SPRING AND WETTEST SUMMER ON RECORD

Some 11 species burst into spring early this year - some by more than two months, as temperatures in Britain soared in April and May - but then the UK experienced its wettest summer ever with a number of casualties in the UK's live music scene. Glastonbury got muddy and The Glade and Reading go through -but Truck was postponed and Fflam, Lovebox and Wakestock were all cancelled. Statistics from The Met Office show that an average of 358mm fell in the summer of 2007, just beating 1956 (358.4mm) and comfortably ahead of 1985 (342.7mm) and 1927 (336.2mm). Heavy rain in June saw severe flooding in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the Midlands. About 7,000 homes in Hull and more than 1,200 in Sheffield were affected. In July large areas of England and Wales were left inundated after torrential rainfall led to rivers bursting their banks. Seven people died when the River Severn burst its banks in Gloucestershire, and more than 350,000 people were left without running water after a treatment works was submerged and in all an estimated £2.7 billion of damages was caused. In 2007 the UK had

* The hottest Spring
* The wettest Summer
* The second warmest Winter

Globally this was the world's second warmest year since records began in 1860. Temperatures in Greece reached 46C - as the rains hit Northern Europe a heatwave hit Southern Europe. The President of the Royal Meteorological Society, Geraint Vaughn, had predicted global temperatures will rise between 2C and 4C telling the Observer newspaper (2nd September) that humanity had to be "far more aggressive in our attempts to reduce carbon dioxide output and our use of fossil fuels".

links
http://www.virtualfestivals.com/latest/news/3882
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/6910593.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6909633.stm
www.guardian.co.uk/weathernews
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/