Jon Snow: Do you think they are?

Andrew Tyndall: I don't monitor the BBC, but I just want to say that the point about whether this issue gets covered when it's a political struggle or not is vindicated by my American data. The way I explain it is this: Environmental coverage has a low level, generally speaking, in the news hole. However, if we look at the last 20 years, the eight years of the Clinton administration - generally environmentalists were happier with that administration - the coverage went down even lower. If you look at the bookends of the two Bushes, environmental coverage is higher. When environmentalists are politically active in protesting the issues of the government, that's when environmental stories rise up in the news hole. In other words, when it is made political, that's when you get more visibility.

Jon Snow: Bjorn, what do you make of what you've heard? We've got an undertaking here from a few broadcasters that they're going to try and weave what's happening to global warming into mainstream coverage.

Bjorn Lomborg: Quite frankly, I'm a little surprised at this whole discussion about how we can we get this into mainstream coverage; what's our lobby strategy?; and we're suspicious of how the BBC does this. Presumably what broadcasters actually want is to try and present the best evidence so that we can make good judgements. And the idea that was the premise for this discussion was: To what extent are we over-focusing on something that looks good on TV but perhaps is not good at making us understand it? I was arguing, with the hurricanes, that we end up focusing on the 1 to 5 per cent about what we can do and forgetting the 95 to 99 per cent.