David Attenborough is making the same mistake as Greta Thunberg

It wasn’t so long ago that Sir David Attenborough came across as a calm voice of reason. His much-admired documentaries touched on environmental issues but were not driven by them; they were not morality plays. But something seems to have got into Sir David. He has become a Greta of the third age.

The rot set in last April when he narrated a programme on climate change which used the same, tired old trick Al Gore has used: running a commentary on climate change against pictures of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and floods, as if to plant in the viewer the idea that all these events were caused by, and therefore wouldn’t have happened without, climate change.

A reasoned analysis would put it differently: that while there is plenty of evidence that global temperatures are rising, that Arctic sea ice is retreating and the global sea levels are rising to the tune of 3mm a year, the evidence linking this to extreme weather events is somewhat tenuous.