The Weekend's TV: Earth: The Climate Wars, SUN, BBC2

The iconography of climate disaster has now acquired an almost religious inflexibility. Just as the image of the Crucifixion is inseparable from Christian devotions, the contemplation of planetary ruin is invariably attended by a set of familiar visual clichés. You'll get glaciers slumping into the sea, polar bears looking glum, chimney stacks belching smoke, and a passenger jet shimmying into the sky through a quiver of exhaust fumes. All were present, at one time or another, in Earth: the Climate Wars, which you might take as a marker of its confessional orthodoxy. But it began with a dummy punch that seemed to suggest quite the opposite. Back in 1972, Dr Iain Stewart told us, a group of eminent scientists had written to the American president with a prediction of imminent climactic disaster. "They warned that war and pestilence were on their way," he said, and instinctively you thought "Why didn't the idiots listen?" Then Stewart revealed that the feared threat was another ice age, an apocalyptic cool-down that had one contributor to a Horizon of the time putting our chances of getting past the millennium at just 1 or 2 per cent. "If scientists were so wrong back then, can we be sure they've got it right today?" Stewart asked.

Climate-change sceptics would ask this question to elicit the answer "We can't". But Stewart isn't in the denial camp...