Trying to defend "Climate Wars"

Jonathan Renouf: The BBC documentary may have become part of the controversy, but global warming is not a con whipped up by wussy liberal scientists

If there's one thing the reaction to the series makes clear, it is that there is still a furious debate going on out there. Some contributors to the series apparently feel they haven't been fairly represented in the finished films. This is something we take seriously. We can only make these programmes because people are prepared to give up their time for us, and to trust us to use their contributions fairly. Obviously, as programme makers, we have to make selections from interviews. It's our job to make sure that in editing an individual contribution, we don't edit the argument. Have we – taking the film as a whole – done justice to each contributor's position? I'm confident that we did, but I know that contributors who feel passionately about a subject sometimes do feel that their individual arguments deserved more space.

Meanwhile, some critics have taken a much more ideological approach. For them, the BBC is the "Biased Broadcasting Corporation", incapable of "balance" on global warming (or indeed any other major issue). All I can say is that I wish the bloggers could have been there as we made the series. I think that had they been with us they would have been reassured at the level of scrutiny that all the scientific claims in the series were subjected to. And as some of the more thoughtful blogs have noticed, we were determined to give credit to the sceptical arguments where and when they were justified. In fact, to some scientists we gave them a bit too much credit. (The examples are more in emails we've received than on blogs.)