Falsification/Manipulation of Film Footage

Key to colour-coded commentary text

Bright red text: Actual falsification of data, and/or misrepresentation of the views of a contributor to the programme

Dark red text: Narration, or on-screen graphics, or an accumulation of consecutive interviewee statements that taken together amount to narration; which are either factually inaccurate, or apparently intentionally misleading, or are an attempt to give the impression that a contentious opinion is a fact.

Blue text: Interviewee is either factually inaccurate, apparently intentionally misleading, or expresses an opinion as if it were a fact without context being provided to make it clear that it’s an opinion.

[Prof Syun-Ichi Akasofu]	There are reports from time to time of a big chunk of ice broke, break away from the Antarctic continent. Those must have been happening all the time, but because now we have a satellite that can detect those, that’s why they become news.
[Narrator]	This data from NASA’s meteorological satellites shows the huge natural expansion and contraction of the polar sea ice taking place in the 1990s.

[Comment 104: The video played on the programme at this point, illustrating this “huge natural expansion and contraction of the polar sea ice” is deeply misleading. In fact, the variation that the film shows is simply the seasonal cycle: the ice melts and shrinks during the summer, and expands again during the winter (see http://tinyurl.com/yvkbkh [NASA] for a similar video).

The important issue regarding Arctic sea ice levels is the year-on-year changes, not seasonal changes; and although year-on-year changes do show some natural variability, there has been a strong decreasing trend in recent years (see the NASA video at: http://tinyurl.com/ysjyns, and the NSIDC graph at: http://tinyurl.com/2yyjhs).

Pretending that they were showing a film of year on year changes when they were actually showing a film of seasonal expansion and contraction amounts to deliberate deception.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)