Sir David Attenborough has finally – at the age of 85 – decided to speak out on the issue of climate change. His latest TV series, Frozen Planet, currently screening on Wednesday evenings on BBC1, is being heralded as his take on climate change.
The series sees Attenborough visiting the Arctic and Antarctic. It is his first time to visit the North Pole.
“This white wilderness, this emptiness, is the North Pole,” Attenborough says. “Beneath my feet and for 500 miles in every direction there are several metres of ice. But something significant is likely to happen at the North Pole soon. Chances are that sometime within the next few decades there will be open water here for the first time in human-recorded history. The Arctic and the Antarctic are changing.’
The BBC’s new series compares the poles throughout the seasons, combining extraordinary photography and technology with an emotional story-line told through its main characters: polar bears and Arctic wolves in the north, penguins and orcas in the south.
The extreme cold is not the problem for these animals, their challenge is the changing seasons. It took three years to make Frozen Planet and all the footage is new: orcas are seen hunting in groups by creating a wave that knocks a seal off the ice; we see frozen forests, the formation of a snowflake, the calving of a glacier and the birth of an iceberg. And there’s the first footage of a ‘brinicle’, a stalactite of ice reaching to the sea floor that kills everything in its path as it freezes.
In the final programme Attenborough talks about shrinking glaciers, warming oceans, and the threat posed by man-made global warming.
In an interview with The Guardian’s Susanna Rustin, he says: “The polar bear is the easy one, it’s a very charismatic animal that people can identify with. It’s beautiful, and also savage; it’s got a lot going for it. But it’s only a white grizzly bear, really. All these big issues need a mascot and that’s what the polar bear is. But climate change is going to affect us much more profoundly than the loss of the polar bear.”
To read the full article see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/oct/21/david-attenborough-frozen-planet-climate-change.
Frozen Planet starts on Wednesday October 26 at 9pm on BBC One, with a repeat on Sundays at 4.10pm.
See also http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8841189/Frozen-Planet-the-making-of-David-Attenboroughs-new-TV-series.html.
