Last night, I watched “Climate Change: the facts” presented by David Attenborough
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/climate-change-the-facts/video/ZW2018A001S00
That link won’t let me watch it in my Linux laptop, though it worked on my phone and the smart TV we watch in the house we currently rent to as we while away Winter as I try to get the house ready for Christmas…… I can’t in all honesty recommend it, it was just as disappointing as I expected. Most of my readers already know climate change is upon us, and will most likely realise it will be the demise of nature for millions of years, and our civilisation; watching this film will not make you change your mind….!
It presents why we have to act urgently, with well known talking heads like Michael Mann and James Hansen, though, for a British film, it left out Kevin Andersen…. It’s the heavily laid on hopium at the end that had had me writhing in my seat……
It also tells huge porkies. Like saying the UK generates 30% of its electricity from renewables while leaving out the fact all the wind turbines were idle for a week during a complete lull in the weather.
Then it presented electric vehicles, and hydrogen powered ones, as a fait accompli. But they really lost me when the BBC stated “the science is in, we have to stop eating meat”
As my friend Jacqueline recently wrote, “We need to change our entire agricultural system. ALL of it, not just the beef and dairy. We need local food production, agro-ecological, that means that it doesn’t damage the ‘environment’ in production, and that also means that the type of agriculture has to fit with the local ‘biome’. If we do that, we will have a healthy diet with small amounts of everything on healthy land, with healthy animals and healthy farmers and consumers. We’d be paying farmers directly and they wouldn’t be spending so much on pesticides, fertilisers and feed that only make the corporations rich.
As long as people say ‘get rid of cows’ instead of ‘change the entire industrial agricultural system’, we are still going to be destroying everything.
Incidentally, cows kept under appropriate conditions (silvo-pasture for example) so they can graze and browse don’t drink millions of litres a year because they get their water from the grass. And believe it or not, there are good farmers who grow food appropriately and keep cattle in ways that actually improve soil health and sequester carbon.”
The problem with shows like this is that they only concentrate on one admittedly serious problem; as we know here, we’re heading into all sorts of trouble. I was recently asked on social media, which was worse: climate change, economic collapse, peak oil, or the 6th mass extinction? This is of course typical human compartmentalisation; it’s not a contest I replied, it’s a perfect storm…… To his credit, Attenborough did mention the 6th extinction, after all nature is his specialty.
The real problem with this show is that Attenborough’s credibility is right up there, especially when governments and politicians virtually have zero, and his opinion, even if shaped by the BBC, carries a whole lot of weight. After watching this, millions of people will believe “we’re onto it”, and the solutions are at hand. Except they are not….
Damn the Matrix 