Skip to content
Climate Change: The Facts contains at least two facts: (a) the 2019 date of production at the end, and (b) it’s presented by David Attenborough.
David Attenborough makes a lot of capital out of how mankind is destroying the environment by doing unnecessary things like flying around the world. He points this out every time he flies around the world, including when he flew all the way to last winter’s COP conference, COP24, in Poland. If you total up the number of politicians and journalists et al who travel there, it comes to around 300,000. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to matter.
They also go there for a two week holida… I mean conference. You’d therefore think that they’d get everything done as quickly as possible, and then be out in time for when their hotel and conference room bookings expire, but no… somehow, they never get anything arranged during that time, and then they cobble together something AFTER the 11th Hour, which requires them to stay up all night.
Quite how they can still be there, when someone else would clearly have booked the rooms after them, has never been explained.
Nor why it takes so many people to fly around the world to tell us that mankind flying around the world is a BAD THING.
Are you getting this yet? Be like Line of Duty‘s Ted Hastings, and don’t get sucked in, fella.
Now, I’m not saying nothing changes. Like Take That sang – # Everything Changes # – and everything rises and falls, so after things go one way, they go back the way they came…. but one person I know who’s big in belief on ‘man-made global warming’ thinks that it can only get hotter and hotter and hotter – which also comes up in this documentary. Plus, look at those protestors in London, gluing themselves here and there, leading to over 300 arrests to date.
But I look at everything objectively, be it a TV show or film, and Climate Change: The Facts begins with doom-mongering on an epic scale, with footage of a bit of wind here, and a bit of rain there, and how the world is going to hell in a handcart, especially when it’s accompanied by Hollywood-style “End of the world” music booming out to accompany the Biblical “end of days”-style visuals, making me think this could’ve been directed by Michael Bay (Armageddon) or Roland Emmerich (2012)
In fact, there’s so much doom-mongering, that I’m only surprised that Mr Attenborough is not wearing a billboard with “The end is nigh” written on it, whilst presenting it.
“Man-made global warming” (MMGW) really is the new religion. A lot of people think there’s a God above the clouds, and that Jesus was his son, who also performed a lot of miracles. These people have been on the waccy baccy. It’s this kind of thinking which leads to cults growing in popularity, like that fronted by David Koresh. The lot of them are as mad as cheese.
Yes, there’s too much plastic in the ocean, but 90% of it comes from the Third World, and they’re not being shown this on an overly-warm Thursday evening.
This programme also contains a graph going back to 1850, and how it’s been getting mostly hotter since… Erm, what about the previous 4.6 billion years? See, this rubbish just cherry picks its own truths?
We see footage from 1972 onwards of the changing make-up of Earth, as seen via the Lansat satellite, but that’s only a 47-year period. Back in 2011, I cut my finger while making dinner. If I filmed it from cutting it, to it bleeding out a lot, and then stopped filming, you’d assumed I’d bled out until I was dead… but no, I went to A&E, had it fixed up and eventually, my body repaired itself. It’s a CYCLE. What goes up must come down, and it cycles around.
So stop panicking.
This really is a heavily-biased and propaganda-fuelled piece, designed to play on emotions of those who don’t question anything. We’re shown a dying bat, a load of dead bats, the “School strike for climate” billboards… which are just kids bunking off. They really don’t understand that they are patsies.
We see a number of wildfires, some of which are due to arson, even though they don’t say it. And referring to the religious side of things, while driving through these fires, one guy comments, “Jesus, God, help us”. Well, neither of them will.
At times, it’s like a Charlie Brooker spoof, and at one point, we’re told we have reached a ‘tipping point’, but ITV’s Professor Ben Shepherd was not invited on to give his opinion.
If you believed the experts, then Al Gore said (based on the beliefs of others) that the Arctic sea ice caps would have melted by the summer of 2014. Meanwhile, back in 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown said we had only 50 days to save the Earth. Well, it’s now 2019 and neither of these things have happened.
But then some people say never to listen to politicians… so why did anyone listen to Al Gore in the first place?
Face it, mankind accounts for about 2% of any impact on the world, hence, a negligible impact. Mother Nature has us beat. If you want to “fight global warming” (or “climate change”, such is the less threatening name it was changed to), then you may as well be raising your fist, in anger, at the clouds.
As the late, great George Carlin said, the Earth’s been around 4.6 billion years. IT is not going away…. WE ARE!
Tell a lie long enough and it becomes the ‘truth’. A bit like saying “Marmite tastes nice”, “Peter Kay is funny” or “Rosamund Pike is a good actress”.
A lot of people put stock in the belief when they hear: “Scientists are 97% convinced MMGW is a thing” – which means 97% are convinced MMGW is 100% the problem, then we hear instead, “Scientists are convinced 97% of GW is down to mankind”, which means they’re 100% convinced MMGW is the cause of 97% of it – which is an entirely different thing, and if you tried that in a court of law, it would be thrown out on the grounds of reasonable doubt.
And then there’s variations on the figure, with anything from 92% upwards. They make this guff up as they go along!
This has meant to have been a big problem for 40 years, but if anyone in power really thought mankind was the problem and was going to do something about it, they’d get cheap and subsidised Hydrogen fuel cell cars off the ground… well, on the roads, since they wouldn’t fly, but you know what I mean. These cars only emit water as a by-product. But we won’t get these any time soon because they don’t use petrol, and the governments of the world can’t take their 66% in tax revenue from it, so it’s a non-starter for them.
Something else that’s a non-starter is electric cars, since you’ll be lucky if you get to the corner shop and back… or even just to the corner shop.
We’re told we should buy less goods to reduce our carbon footprint, but you are never going to change that. We buy stuff. We use stuff. Consumption will only increase.
Oh, and stop farting. The methane also heats up the planet.
Short of Snake Plissken turning up and shutting the Earth down, What David Attenborough really needs is a magic wand. Until then, this is 60 minutes of hot air.
Following this programme, there followed just over a week of “peaceful protests” from Extinction Rebellion, which led to over 1000 people being arrested. However, it was far from peaceful. After blocking traffic, do you think they moved on when asked by the police? No, they did not. They had to be dragged out of the way. Quite frankly, if Boris Johnson hadn’t scrapped the water cannons, they would’ve made short work of these idiots.
But hang on, this lot are caring for the environment, right? No, they drank from plastic bottles, and one of their representatives, Clare Farrell, always appears on camera with dyed yellow hair… and that stuff is not good for the environment at all. Oh, and Emma Thompson turned up on the Friday (FLYING to get there, of course, the bloody hypocrite) and plonked herself in the pink monstrosity that was above everyone else so they had to look up at her, so she could say “ME! ME! LOOK AT ME!”
Not only did these idiots stop people from getting to work and causing £25m worth of damage to the economy, but they stopped hospital patients getting to their cancer treatment, and as one man said when he wrote into the Metro, he could not get to visit a young, female family member before she passed away from cancer.
Next time this happens, Sadiq Khan, just do as 10cc suggest, and Load up, load up, load up with rubber bullets…
UPDATE June 2019: Scientists are now saying that mankind will be extinct by 2050. I won’t bother paying my mortgage, then, since due to legal red tape, I’ll avoid any repayment/legal issues.
Climate Change: The Facts is shown tomorrow on BBC1 at 9.00pm. It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD.
You can watch it on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
Score: 0/10
Director: Serena Davies
Producer: Serena Davies
Presenter: David Attenborough
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.