Customer Reviews

The Truth About Climate Change [DVD]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I confess I am a huge fan of David Attenborough (along with Aubrey Manning and Richard Dawkins). I have watched his presentations with relish over the last 30 years. This sadly was not in the same league.

For me the case was not well argued and merely repeats the same populist mantras found in the media in general and also from the current crop of politicians, without any supporting evidence.

Ian Stewarts contribution "Earth: The Power of the Planet" was a greater contribution and at least he admited at the end that it is NOT the planet that is in danger of any of the current climatic and environmental changes currently observed as taking place but Humans.

Not a particularly enlightening contribution to the debate.

Clear and explicit message, compiled with Attenborough's famous clarity and gentle passion. Low average rating appears consequence of climate-change-deniers rather than quality of the film.

Sir David Attenborough is a scientist and naturalist of the hightest caliber and reputation. I was extremely pleased to see Sir David tackle the issue of climate change in this documentary, "The Truth About Climate Change". Published in 2006, this documentary program preceded the "climate gate" fiasco, which attempted to discredit the science behind climate change. Actually, the science behind climate change is sound, and this is presented very clearly in this documentary program. There is a growing body of evidence presented, from ice cores from Greenland to sedimentation from the ocean floor, to historical records and statistics that show that humans activities are not isolated from the changes we are seeing today. While there are cyclical changes in climate in earth's history, the present changes really appear to be directly influenced by human activity, such as emitting 30,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

This program is extremely well done, and should be viewed by anyone interested in this controversial issue.

I have a life long love of David Attenboroughs work and do not write this review with any pleasure.This is NOT a documentary but a propaganda work designed to lend credence to the rubbish pumped out to justify massive increases in taxes and fuel bills which by some odd coincidence will help to make the already rich very much richer!
Just to make my point let us actually consider what CO2 is,it is the absolutely essential FOOD for ALL plant life on earth and that is why around all our roads we see verdant green and healthy plants!
If we had a collumn of air 1km tall divided into its constituent parts then CO2 would account for 38cm! And man made CO2 would be barely 1mm with Britains contribution making up less than the width of a HUMAN HAIR,and yet we are supposed to REDUCE this by 80%! We can only do this by totally de-industrialising Britain AND killing off at least some of our own people. And by the way we had Vinyards in Northern England in the year 1085 and we have the evidence of William the Conquerors Doomsday Book,a tax gatherers tool,to provide the exact location and acreage! As we do NOT have vinyards in Northumberland NOW but DID back then then it MUST have been WARMER then than it is NOW,much warmer! And yet life on earth seems to have survived this "catastrophe"!

This film is crucial if we want to understand the present debate on climate change. The climate is changing as it has always done. But it seems to be changing more dramatically and warming up slightly though it is still a long way cooler than it was at the time of the dinosaurs. The position defended here by Attenborough is moralistic more than anything else. We are supposed to feel compassion for polar bears and to be afraid of the future. Such a fascination for apocalyptic predictions is quite typical of the Jewish or Christian tradition, with some roots in older Indo-European religious mythologies. This apocalyptic literature is often, and by far, the best and most inspiring inspiration in these traditions. But does it have any real foundation? According to Attenborough it is the truth, full stop, period, dead end, let's get ready for it. He follows the model of the now famous carbon dioxide and green house gases and global warming up theory. And exclusively this one. Then he considers the main cause is the production - or liberation - of carbon dioxide by human activities, particularly the use of fossil fuels. In other words he uses his pointer a little bit too much and of course ends up pointing at the Chinese and their becoming the first polluter in the world, ahead of the US, but he forgets to say they are at least four times more numerous for a level of development that is evaluated by the CIA to be around 80% of the US. When he is not pointing at people he is pointing at the only things we can do to reduce our production of carbon dioxide. And he does not see this totally negative approach cannot really work because people do not want to be made to feel guilty all the time, and then, in this perspective, we will have to set regulations and a cop behind every human activity. He forgets the basic human principle, and even vital principle for all that is alive at least on this planet, that has been totally negated by western development, by this short-sighted development at all costs, the fact that humanity has managed to emerge by using the basic living principle that all activities must produce more energy or value than it consumes and that the consumption of energy has to be as low as possible for the profit margin to be as high as possible. To be soundly economic life has to be economical. And our free and extremely wasteful consumption of energy - and everything else, including human life - is anti-economic because it is un-economical. That is the very first principle we must refer to: we must not use one gram of energy more than what we need. The second principle is also basic to all forms of life: a living being uses his environment to live - and/or survive - but it does not pollute it. And strangely enough humans seem to have been only interested in visible pollution. All that is not visible does not seem to bother them. That's the only positive aspect of the film: it reveals one invisible pollution, carbon dioxide. It also reveals that what is not immediately catchable by human senses does not seem to exist for human beings. I personally think here that it is better to mobilize the sense of cleanliness human life has always demonstrated - even if that sense has been increasing across centuries and will go on increasing - rather than the guilt we are supposed to feel when thinking of our grandchildren. This argument about our descendents is the reversal of another human principle. In all civilizations including ours till recently, the younger generation was there to take care of the older one when needed and not the reverse. The argument used by Attenborough means that we consider the younger generation is unable to assume their responsibilities. We are making them childish and dependent. We should expect them to be more reasonable than us and not the reverse, which does not excuse our own foolishness which is foolishness in itself and not as for the consequences on our descendents. This leads me to a final remark. Has the West been developing along a line that negates all human traditions and logic? I have like the impression that yes it has. We must then reverse that mistake but not with cops and regulations or guilt complexes but with economic and economical arguments. And that should not prevent us from studying other climatic models particularly the one based on water vapor, which Attenborough does not do at all. Note, as a final kick at the sandbag of blind if not biased ideology, that Attenborough does not even take into account that if we learned new cooking method based on microwave oven we could cut by half our consumption n of energy for all forms of cooking, and frying being a bad dietary habit, the light browning we can get with microwaves has to be healthier than all that carbonizing we produce in a frying pan.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

I have the greatest admiration for David Attenborough as a splendid presenter. However, I am saddened that he was persuaded to lend his talents to the bogus science of "global warming". Naturally, the BBC would not be expected to waste any opportunity to encourage global warming propaganda, branding any scepticism as "denial" (with the implication that it is akin to Holocaust denial. Try reading Christopher Booker's recent "The Real Global Warming Disaster".

Unfortunately although beautifully filmed and narrated to perfection by David Attenborough this DVD's contents have been overtaken by events and most of the assertions have been proved to be untrue, exaggerated, misinformed and misleading. Nice film to watch but the conclusions to be taken with a pinch of salt.

David Attenborough is a gentleman scientist from the days before the politicisation of science.

No scientist can be an expert in all fields. He is a biologist and assumes that other scientists all have integrity.

Similarly journalists always follow the orthodoxy. Only on the internet, if you care to follow the evidence, will you find alternative evidence which goes against the orthodoxy.

Galileo was a sceptic.

Great production values as you would expect, but this is all about an old man pushing (indirectly) a depopulation agenda through the scam of MMGW. Biased and one-sided! Avoid!