With Al Gore polishing his Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, the Environment Secretary David Miliband planning to send the film to secondary schools, and the Bush Administration being less recalcitrant on the matter, the debate about human-induced global warming seems to be over. Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4) offered the view that such a consensus was based on the self-serving speculation of scientists wanting to keep the funds flowing for what is now a vast global warming industry. This clearly wasn’t going to be An Inconvenient Truth but more A Convenient Lie.

It opened like the trailer for some eco-horror movie as wind-battered streets, flooded towns and factory chimneys were intercut with the declaration: “The ice is melting. The sea is rising. Hurricanes are blowing. And it’s all your fault. Scared? Don’t be. It’s not true.”

Durkin then paraded an impressive array of scientists, ranging from climatologists to astrophysicists, who saw the cause of rising temperatures as not increased carbon emissions trapping the infrared radiation of the sun, but the sun’s increased solar activity cutting down on cloud formation. Core samples from polar ice sheets suggest that CO² levels have been the consequence, not the cause, of periods of climate warming. And anyway, our planet has always been in a state of climatic flux during which the Arctic has naturally contracted and expanded.

Instead of apocalyptic CGI conjuring up a flooded London or ice-packed New York, we got graphs and jaunty graphics. But one wondered about the centuries-spanning data from which conclusions were being drawn. Temperatures in Britain and Greenland were apparently warmer in the Middle Ages than they are now, but how accurate were medieval measurements, if any? Do polar core samples give a local or worldwide picture of the past? Have recent solar increases been large enough to cause the present warming? Anyone with a composting toilet wasn’t going to cast it aside after watching this.

The programme also saw global warming as fuelling an anticapitalist environmentalism that was delaying the industrialised improvement of developing countries. You were left feeling that climate change was now less an issue and more a doom-laden religion demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil fuel-driven ways. Some of Durkin’s interviewees certainly felt that they were being victimised as “heretics”. As Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, remarked: “If you’re sceptical about the litany behind climate change, it’s suddenly as if you’re a Holocaust denier.” That’s not healthy for science, which surely needs a climate of reasoned debate rather than consensus.

A wider perspective would have been welcome in the Storyville documentary Al Franken: God Spoke (BBC Four). This followed the American satirist and political commentator as he struggled to launch the liberal radio network Air America, clashed with Republicans and conservative pundits and campaigned for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.

The film showed the polarised nature of American political discourse, but more background information was needed on the party figures orbiting Franken in what turned out to be neither a profile nor a critique. Had the film-makers collected interviews with friends, rivals and close associates, we might have got some idea of what made Franken tick. Here was a passionate, committed man who saw his country suffering in the hands of the right wing. Yet the film’s only focus seemed to be his mild self-regard – “I’m a little bit showbiz, I’m a little bit journalism,” he sang jokingly but tellingly at one point – as the camera made us feel like a tagalong member of Franken’s crew. When we learnt that he was going to run for a Senate seat next year, the film ended up seeming like a warm-up for a much bigger event.

Perhaps the film-makers should have given their camera to eight-year-olds Katie and Erin and 11-year-old Molly, who were recording their lives for a new series of My Life as a Child (BBC Two). While this could haven fallen into the “Kids say the funniest thing!” camp, it showed instead how children are sensitive to the slightest emotional ripple within a family as well as providing acute observations on unmarried parents and absent fathers. And when not wrestling with her brother or showing off her muscles, the tomboy Erin declared: “You need to be tough . . . that’s what it’s all about.” If we do end up living in a drowned world or a microwave of a climate, I think she’ll do just fine.

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