'Frozen Planet' gave us beautiful images, but an unbalanced picture

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"In each case, however, he arranged his evidence in a notably loaded way, carefully omitting much of the information a less selective picture would have included. Like so many before him, his sequence on Antarctica – with 90 per cent of the ice on the planet – focused almost entirely on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one small part of that continent where ice is significantly melting – not because of atmospheric warming, but because a shift in ocean currents has brought in a flood of warmer water. Not mentioned, of course, was that most of Antarctica has if anything got colder in the past 50 years, its growth in sea ice counterbalancing the modest shrinkage of ice in the Arctic.

This too has probably been caused not by rising global temperatures, but by changing wind patterns, and warmer water coming in from the Pacific. Great play has been made of the new ability of ships to sail through ice-free Arctic waters. But ships were sailing freely along the northern coast of Russia 70 years ago. Meanwhile, winter ice further south, in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Baltic has increased markedly in recent years."