Tragedy `porn and flying foxes

“Tragedy porn” is now a standard green propaganda technique. You’ve probably been on the receiving end of it, and will recognise it once I describe it. First of all you need a victim. Animals – preferably fluffy ones, and preferably with large eyes – are ideal, but people will do at a pinch. Then you have to film them in the process of dying or otherwise suffering. A presenter or scientist needs to be on hand to describe the events, preferably choking away their tears. Then you blame global warming.

It is often an effective technique, but care is required. Last week, tragedy porn proved to be the undoing of Sir David Attenborough, when on Netflix a carefully contrived story that global warming was driving walruses over cliff tops unravelled over the course of a week, as a series of flaws were discovered in the narrative and in the tales spun by the production team as they attempted to cover up what they had done. Once it emerged that the production team may well have played a role in causing the tragedy, it all started to look a bit problematic.

It’s therefore unfortunate that in Climate Change: the Facts, his latest magnum opus – which aired last week on BBC1 – producers deployed a bit of tragedy porn, and once again it appears that viewers were misled.

The animal that was chosen to front the relevant segment of the new show were bats, and in particular the spectacled flying fox, a native of Papua New Guinea and northern Australia. Flying foxes are an excellent choice for tragedy porn, being very furry and having the most extraordinary bulbous eyes, beautifully evolved to bring out the maternal instinct in everyone.

The producers gave the audience both barrels. We were treated to commentary from Rebecca Koller, the owner of a bat sanctuary near Cairns, who described how a heatwave in the area had left “dead bats as far as the eye could see”. This, we were told, was “climate change in action”. And in case you missed the point, we were also treated to a description of “the deafening sound of babies crying”, with Ms Koller apparently on the verge of tears. Now the young of bats are correctly referred to as “pups”, of course, but this is tragedy porn, and scientific and technical accuracy therefore goes out of the window. Later on, as if to make the “flying foxes look like babies” point absolutely explicit, viewers were treated to images of a pup that had been swaddled and was being bottle fed. Subtle it was not, but hearts no doubt melted across the country anyway.

Sir David informed viewers that the method bats had evolved to cool off – dipping in pools of water – was “no longer enough”. This seemed rather odd to me; I would have thought they’d just need to take a dip slightly more often. Of course, asking awkward questions is not really what is wanted – the idea of tragedy porn is that you are so overwhelmed with emotion that rational thought becomes impossible. For many viewers, no doubt it was. Nevertheless, let us persist.

For example, we were told that temperatures had reached 42°C in Cairns that day, which is certainly hot for that part of the world, but Australia is surely nothing if not a country given to occasional heatwaves. For example, in 1896, newspapers reported temperatures of over 48°C in Wilcannia in the normally cooler south of Australia. Even higher temperatures were recorded by the explorer Charles Sturt in the early 19th century.

Similarly, a perusal of the scientific literature reveals that mass deaths of bats, including as a result of heatwaves, are hardly unusual. Watkin Tench, the naval officer who described the first settlement of Australia in 1790, recorded temperatures of 43°C, and reported an “immense flight of bats…dropped dead or in a dying state, unable longer to endure the burning state of the atmosphere.” Apparently, the parrots fared no better. There are further examples of heatwaves causing mass mortality in Australian bats from the start of the 20th century.

So once again, the story served up by our national treasure turns out to have been grounded more in the hope of political action than of science. And once again, as you dig deeper, the flaws only become worse. In the 20th century, most mass mortality events among bats were the result of deliberate killing by humans or illness. Since then, however, the main cause of mass mortality has been wind farms, and overwhelmingly so. In other words, the major risk to bats is not small increases in temperatures, but attempts to prevent them through panic measures like the renewable energy systems that Sir David and his ilk are so keen to promote.

This trashing of the natural world by environmentalists is becoming a familiar theme. We strip the southern US states of trees to be burnt in power stations in the UK. We use cereals to generate biofuels and leave Africans to go hungry. We tear down rainforests to grow palm oil biofuels. We cover our wild places with wind turbines and our farmland with solar panels. We ship rubbish halfway round the world so that poor people can burn it or chuck it in the sea.

Again and again and again, radical environmentalism proves far, far worse than the problems it claims to be addressing