The BBC got excited about two things last week. One was that topping the list of new words entering this year’s dictionaries is “fake news”. The other was that, thanks to “human activities” and an El Niño weather event, 2016 saw a record spike in global CO2, taking it up to levels not seen since the Pliocene period “three to five million years” ago, when the world was “two to three degrees warmer” than today, and sea levels up to “20 metres” (66ft) higher thanks to melting polar ice.

This enabled the BBC yet again to claim that Arctic ice is rapidly vanishing, supported on BBC News by a clip from David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series, intoning that, among species most “seriously affected” by global warming, are walruses, showing hundreds of them desperately squeezing on to a melting ice floe.

But there are one or two little problems with this BBC version of the facts. First, far from Arctic ice vanishing, there has been no further downward trend in the extent of its summer melting since 2006. Its lowest point this September was higher than in seven of the past 11 years.