Back in the days of the MLMB I used to rant regularly about the BBC and the Radio Times putting a sunny face on impending climate doom. The pinnacle was reached when a double-page spread appeared in the Radio Times about increasing global temperatures which showed an artist's impression of Britain in 10 years time (round about now actually) with a bloke lolling in a deckchair in his garden, sipping a cold white wine, while his wife is wheeling past a wheelbarrow filled with exotic fruits -- mangoes, bananas, peaches, etc. The tree the man is reclining under is laden with fat juicy grapes. The message, of course, is to show that Britain could very soon be experiencing the same climate as Madeira -- and wouldn't things be very peachy (literally so)? The article failed to ask what kind of climate Madeira would be having 10/15/20 years ahead.
It struck me then that the editorial decision to dress up climate change as beneficial to us in Britain had come down from on high -- it can't have been the editor of the Radio Times who decided this, it had to be someone in government who had issued a stern directive of how this issue was to be handled. They were frightened of panic, of course. Nothing has changed. They're still terrified, even more so. Which is why meteorologists on the BBC are given strict instructions to caveat every warning with the bromides they do.