From threatened habitats to threatening habits

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

The BBCs Climate Chaos season got off to an unequivocal start on Wednesday with David Attenboroughs closing clarion call: We [humans] have become a force of nature. We are changing the climate and what happens next is really up to us.

Recalling his early days as a reporter stalking through the undergrowth, 80-year-old Attenborough the British equivalent of a Japanese Living National Treasure admitted that at that time I had no idea that we had unleashed forces that were altering the Earth.

He was not alone in his ignorance. In fact his career parallels our shifts in environmental thinking. The title of his first foray, half a century ago, says it all: Zoo Quest. Gradually, 1950s warnings that changing habitats were threatening big game (charismatic megafauna, as they say in the business) has given way to todays understanding that human lifestyle habits are threatening the entire planet, ourselves included.

Wednesdays introductory programme, Are We Changing Planet Earth?, gave us the pictures that TV demands - melting glaciers, disappearing polar bears. But we had seen them before. More striking were the shots of Chinese villagers vainly shovelling away encroaching desert sand and the comments of Tuvalu islanders equally vainly worrying about the encroaching seawater in their houses.

I think well have to move out, said islander Lapua Lasifo, because Im afraid. But theres no place to move.

Equally vivid was a shot of a deep open cast Chinese mine that revealed the history of the world in layers: at the bottom of the cutaway rock was the carbon - trapped in lumps of coal that was once on the surface, trapped in plants; now it is being taken back to the surface to be released as fuel.

As well as providing the usual spectacular pictures, Attenborough asked the relevant questions, and got clear answers from the scientists. They, of course, cannot tell the future, but they can calculate the likelihood of changes. Professor Peter Cox of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Exeter pointed out that the European heatwave a couple of summers ago was seen as a once-in-200-year event; by 2040 it would be a once-in-two-years event; by 2080 the same temperatures will be considered a cool year.

Its the biggest challenge we have yet faced, concluded Attenborough, a judgement all the more powerful for the programmes unsensational approach and all the more poignant because of the sense that Attenborough himself is coming to the end of his memorable career and, like Prospero, is giving his valedictory judgement.

BBC: Climate Chaos