Spare me the sermon, Sir David

Dear Editor

David Attenborough’s nature programmes are magnificent and he does not let his commentary or his own personality intrude on the lives of the animals he portrays.

In others, human beings take centre stage, with commentators also detracting from the programmes by insisting on speaking within earshot of the animals and lowering their voices to stage whispers to compensate.

My only beef with David is his plugs for man-made climate change which are inserted all too often. He tends to preach his climate-change sermons even more frequently when dealing with life at the poles.

A lone polar bear is shown struggling to walk on melting ice and he uses this shot to prove his point that polar ice is allegedly fast disappearing.

Other scientists do not subscribe to the theory that our planet is warming at a faster pace than ever before and that it is all the fault of human beings.

One school of thought maintains that, if there is warming, then it is only part of a cycle of climate change which has been going on for millennia.

We have had a whole series of ice ages, large and small, followed by periods of warming, and most of them occurred long before human beings arrived on the scene.

In a recent documentary on Sir John Franklin’s disastrous quest for the North-West Passage in the mid-19th century, the narrator stated that the extent and thickness of the ice in the Arctic now is much the same as it was then. I therefore ask David: please give your climate-change preaching a rest. It is spoiling otherwise magnificent programmes for me. As soon as you start on your sermons, I switch off. George K McMillan, Perth