Wow...now here's a BBC naturalist who's a skeptic...

Alan Tichmarch is now film a series, The Nature of Britian, for the BBC...

One subject gets Titchmarsh more worked up than accusations of blandness, though. Perhaps, coming from a man who loves nature, it’s a slightly surprising one: our obsession with global warming.

‘I wish we could grow up about it,’ he says. ‘I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that, but our climate has always changed. The Romans had vineyards in Yorkshire. We’re all on this bandwagon of ‘Ban the 4x4 in Fulham’. Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys.’ He pauses for breath, then smiles. ‘Sorry, bit of a tirade there.’

Surely he worries that global warming may threaten some of the species in his series. But this doesn’t seem to bother him too much. ‘We’ll lose some, we’ll gain others,’ he says. ‘Wildlife is remarkably tenacious. Nature always copes.’

He gives the example of otters, whose numbers in Britain are on the rise. ‘When I was a lad, you had to go to the Otter Trust in Suffolk to see them. For the series, I went to the river near where I grew up, where I used to fish for tiddlers. And on the banks were otter footprints. If I’d seen those when I was a lad, I’d have died and gone to heaven.’