The BBC Looks At the Climate Change Debate

The long running and much respected BBC documentary series Panorama took a look at Climate Change this week in a program entitled "What's up with the weather?". It makes for an interesting summary of the current state of play.

You can find it here on-line for a week until about the 4th/5th of July. [UPDATE: It will now be available until 28th June 2011!]

For those haven't got the time to watch the 30 minute program or didn't get to view it in time, this is a summary:

• The first half of the program goes into public opinion on the debate: That a sizeable proportion of the public ( 40% in Britain) have doubts that climate change is happening. The reasons given are various like the recent bad winter, 'climate-gate', unreliable weather forecasts, and the IPCC's mistake in saying that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

• They also touched upon how heated and personal the debate had become between the two sides of the debate.

• In the second half of the program, they went to the experts on both sides to find out where they actually differed. Surprisingly, they agree that climate change is happening, that Mankind is a part of that, the Greenhouse Effect is real, and CO2 is the reason. Where they differ is over how much we're influencing climate change (Though even the sceptics say the majority think we are having a large effect) and what we should do about it. Sceptics say we shouldn't bother spending huge amounts on cutting emissions and should be putting our efforts into R&D and adapting to the change.

So it all comes down to what we think the future will bring and what we should do about it. Do we gamble the lives of future generations on the minority scientific view or work on seeing off the threat predicted by the majority?