A mother polar bear featured on Frozen Planet was filmed in a zoo. Therefore climate change isn't happening. That, at any rate, is what commenters on websites devoted to attacking climate science purport to believe. Here is a small selection from the Watts Up With That? site:

"You have to give it to the BBC … they are Masters at their game of deception."

"And there it is. – The methodology of the Man Made Global Warming Movement in one."

"When it comes to tugging the heartstrings and purse strings in the name of agw [anthropogenic global warming], there is no trickery too debased to resort to."



It's an issue of mindnumbing triviality, though I do think that the BBC should do more to warn viewers when scenes have been shot in captivity. The director-general, quizzed by the culture, media and sport select committee yesterday, said that when people were polled on the question, their overwhelming response was that they did not want to see captions or hear disclaimers in wildlife programmes.

There is something both revealing and quite touching about this. It suggests that people watch such programmes much as they might listen to poetry: they want to be transported to a world whose veracity is less important than its beauty. Even so, it doesn't feel quite right, and I think it would be wise for the BBC at least to list the scenes that were not shot on location in the credits at the end of the film.

I'm less bothered by this than I was by another construction: what used to be the complete separation by wildlife programmes of the natural and the human worlds. When I last wrote about this subject, in 2002, the problem was worse than it is today.

There were, I suggested, two issues. The first is that the films created a false impression of security and abundance, even when portraying species and ecosystems which are rapidly disappearing. The second is that they construct a wilderness which bears both a resemblance and a relationship to the fantasy wildernesses created by centuries of enclosure and clearances here on the real planet earth.

Investigating the politics of conservation in east Africa, I had discovered that local people were being excluded by the wildlife authorities from places where they had lived – partly because tourists don't expect to see them there. Interviewing tourists visiting the Maasai Mara, I found that many of them believed the reserve – one of the Maasai's key dry-season grazing lands – had always been uninhabited. One of the reasons they gave for this belief was that they had never seen people in such places on the television: only undisturbed herds of game in an untouched wilderness.

David Attenborough got quite huffy about it, writing a letter to the Guardian that appeared to me to misinterpret my complaint. Even so, his programmes have changed a fair bit since then, engaging with local people and drawing aside the curtain to show how the sequences were filmed. They have also begun to cover environmental issues more compellingly, as Attenborough did in the last episode of Frozen Planet.

What the filming of the polar bear in a zoo has to do with climate change, however, is anyone's guess. The programme in which she featured didn't mention it. It was not trying to make a point, simply to produce something engaging and moving. But the BBC is now becoming an obsession among climate-change deniers.

Last week Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation published a 70-page report by that well-known climate scientist Christopher Booker, called The BBC and climate change: a triple betrayal. Lawson attacked Attenborough in the Radio Times, Booker did so in the Daily Mail (apparently before he had watched the programme) and the Sunday Telegraph.

Climate-change deniers have been bashing the BBC for a long time, but especially since July, when the BBC Trust published a report by Professor Steve Jones on the corporation's coverage of science. It noted, and not before time, that: "for at least three years, the climate-change deniers have been marginal to the scientific debate, but somehow they continued to find a place on the airwaves. Their ability so to do suggests that an over-diligent search for due impartiality – or for a controversy – continue to hinder the objective reporting of a scientific story."

In other words, the BBC had been stoking up a false controversy about whether or not manmade climate change is taking place, even though serious debate on this issue was over long ago among climate scientists.

Since Jones shook it up, the BBC has become part of the grand conspiracy, in which scientists are dropped from black helicopters into smoke-filled rooms full of illuminati to plot a new world order controlled by totalitarian fascist communist green anarchists writing for the Guardian. Now we discover that the corporation has advanced its devious plans by brainwashing us about the location of a polar bear and her cubs. It's all deeply sinister.