Mark Lynas: he BBC was wrong to scrap its day of special programming on climate change?

Published: 06 September 2007

The BBC's decision to axe Planet Relief reveals a great deal about the thinking – or lack of it – among senior corporation executives. Desperate not to be accused of being "soft greenies" by the right-wing press, the Beeb has decided that global warming is too hot an issue.

After a lobbying campaign by the small but powerful cabal of climate-change deniers, the BBC – supposedly a champion of education and information – has decided to cut and run.

Most ironic is that this morally bankrupt decision was taken after an attack by Martin Durkin – the producer of Channel 4's Great Global Warming Swindle, a preposterous film which must take the world record for the number of factual inaccuracies squeezed into 90 minutes. The fact that the BBC refuses to devote a single day to what the vast majority of scientists now agree is the greatest threat ever to face humanity shows how the corporation risks sidelining itself through sheer timidity. The idea that one can remain "neutral" on the question of whether or not we should protect the habitable climate of this planet strikes me as both outrageous and absurd. This is cowardice. Most worrying of all are hints by senior BBC news executives that the issue of man-made climate change is somehow still "not proven".

I am not suggesting that the BBC should transform itself into Greenpeace. But that does not mean abandoning its duty to report the truth. Like the opinions of religious maniacs, flat-earthers, tobacco lobbyists and HIV-Aids sceptics, the views of global warming deniers do not deserve significant airtime.

Mark Lynas is a New Statesman columnist and author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

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