Frozen Planet "climate change" episode not to be shown in US

The decision by "Discovery, the US broadcaster that co-produced the series, along with unnamed other foreign broadcasters, will not show this final episode will rightly dismay everyone who accepts that Earth is warming."

Frozen Planet has a duty to inspire debate as well as wonder

It was for his joyous curiosity about the natural world that British television viewers took David Attenborough to their hearts in the 1970s and kept him there. Whether sitting alongside a gorilla in the most famous sequence in the original Life on Earth series, or peering at the multicoloured chameleons that are his favourite creatures in a BBC special earlier this year, Attenborough's life's work has been to show people what is most beautiful and interesting about our planet.

Frozen Planet, the BBC natural history unit's latest production, is mostly more of the same and British audiences are lapping it up, with 7m viewers tuning in to the penguin-heavy third episode last week. But as Attenborough explained when I interviewed him last month, it isn't possible to spend four years filming in the Arctic and Antarctic without worrying about what is going on. Glaciers are retreating, Arctic ice cover has shrunk by 30% in 30 years and polar bears are finding it harder to survive. So the final programme in the series On Thin Ice (a working title of Meltdown was junked – presumably for sounding too alarmist), due to be aired on 7 December, explains in some detail how we know this and what it might mean, while studiously (some will say wrongly) avoiding any discussion of the causes.

Reports in British newspapers yesterday that Discovery, the US broadcaster that co-produced the series, along with unnamed other foreign broadcasters, will not show this final episode will rightly dismay everyone who accepts that Earth is warming. That audiences invited to sit through five hours of groundbreaking natural history – including the first footage of killer whales tipping seals off ice floes (as Captain Scott said they could 100 years ago), and a hibernating polar bear nursing her cubs while half-asleep – could be sent away none the wiser as to the existential threat facing many of these species, seems ludicrous.

Asked why it decided to sell episode seven as an optional add-on, the BBC sounded defensive, no doubt furious that a hugely expensive, landmark Attenborough series – the kind of thing even the corporation's critics usually approve of – could turn into a PR headache if newspapers convince people the BBC has censored content for commercial gain. This was the line taken by the Telegraph, which headlined its story "BBC drops Frozen Planet's climate change episode to sell show better abroad".

An annoyed BBC Worldwide director responded in a blog that the reason On Thin Ice was treated differently from the rest of the series was because it is "presenter-led" and thus requires dubbing rather than the voiceover used in episodes when Attenborough is not in shot. This explanation makes obvious sense for foreign-language markets, less obvious sense for English-language ones like the US. But the Blue Planet and Planet Earth series were both narrated by film stars for Discovery (Pierce Brosnan and Sigourney Weaver), so it seems likely they will do the same with Frozen Planet and cut Attenborough out. A spokesperson who refused to be quoted told me the channel is baffled by the story and denied that a decision to leave out episode seven when the series airs in the US had been made: since Discovery is a co-producer it doesn't have to buy a license which would set out its plans.

Watching a preview of On Thin Ice last night it seemed obvious the programme was made for a British audience. Several times Attenborough refers to previous journeys, using personal experience to force home the point that nature is adapting to climate change: there weren't so many Gentoo penguins in Antarctica last time I was here, he says at one point. This clearly wouldn't work in the same way for audiences in Brazil or Japan who don't already know him.

British people broadly believe what he tells them, he told me when I met him. This is why he doesn't do adverts. It's to his credit, I think, that Attenborough at 85 wants to spend some of the capital he has accrued through decades of giving people enjoyment by telling them some bad news about the environment. If audiences get to the end of Frozen Planet feeling worried about life on Earth as well as amazed by some of its hardiest creatures, then good.

If those in the US or anywhere else see all the action, the hunts and fights and chases, the polar bear cubs slipping and sliding on the ice, but miss out on the analysis underpinning it because the commentary, in whatever language, is not adjusted to incorporate some of these crucial facts, their broadcasters will have failed them. For what is the point of education, if not the truth?