RTÉ gems bag prestigious Europa award

Richard Collins shares his inside view as a juror in the competition.

CONGRATULATIONS to Veronica Coburn and Kevin Reynolds of RTÉ on winning the prestigious radio drama award at the Prix Europa in Berlin last week.The festival is held in the historic Haus des Rundfunks. With awards for television radio and internet programmes in eight categories, this event showcases the finest productions of the previous 12 months. RTÉ’s Mayday, set against the background of the general election earlier this year, took the prize in a field of 40.

The environment figured prominently in the internet exploration category, which focuses on ways to use the web. RTÉ’s Mooney Webcam Bluetits was one of 38 entries shortlisted. This reality TV show, featuring a pair of bluetits nesting in Derek Mooney’s back garden, was streamed live on the web last spring. The antics of the birds went down well with competition jurors.

However, I must declare an interest here, lest I be accused of blowing my own trumpet; Derek couldn’t attend and I gave the presentation on his behalf. I also served on the jury, a demanding, but stimulating experience. Subjects ranged from children’s education to features on drug addiction, history and world politics.

The winning entry was an environmental one. In the Climate Change Experiment, the BBC invited viewers to help scientists in solving an intractable problem.

A host of factors influence the ecosystem, the most notorious of which is the greenhouse effect; gasses such as carbon dioxide, when released into the atmosphere, form a thermal blanket letting in the sun’s rays but preventing heat from being radiated back to space. The trapped heat tends to raise temperatures everywhere. Other factors, however, have the opposite effect. The energy radiated by the sun, for example, fluctuates in long-term cycles which give rise to periodic ice ages. If humans had not so dramatically increased the quantities of greenhouse gases and had not cut down so many forests, the world would be heading into an ice age now.

Global dimming, the screening of the sun’s radiation by dust and vapour particles in the upper atmosphere, also reduces the warming effect. This dramatically came to light after the September 11 attacks in the US, when aircraft were grounded nationwide for several days. Levels of exhaust vapour in the upper atmosphere fell and temperatures rose. In all, some 60 factors have been identified as having significant effects on the world’s weather.

Trying to bring all the elements together in an overall climate model is horrendously difficult. Even the largest computers are not up to the job; they haven’t the processing power needed to handle the huge amounts of data involved. The problem seemed insurmountable until researchers at Oxford University came up with an ingenious idea — it might be possible, they thought, to get people’s home computers to help out. Only a small fraction of a home computer’s power is ever used and the machines are lying idle most of the time. Each PC has limited power but if enough of them worked together, the capacity would be enormous. But to harness this untapped resource, the scientists needed the help of the BBC.

In 2006, the Climate Change Experiment was initiated. In a programme presented by David Attenborough, the public were asked to download software from the internet. The software became active whenever the computer was switched on but not actively engaged in a task. During slack periods, the home computers processed climate data and the results were sent back to the BBC. More than 250,000 people took part, creating combined processing power greater than that of the world’s biggest supercomputers.

The model of the world’s climate which emerged from the experiment is brilliantly presented on the BBC website. Predicting the future is difficult but the overall trends in climate change are clear. If we continue as we are and make no adjustments to our lifestyles, temperatures in our part of the world will rise by about 4C by 2080. More optimistic and pessimistic outcomes have also been modelled; the future of the planet depends on the choices we make now.

Global issues featured in another excellent website. Entitled Christmas Box, this German production told the story of a pair of socks destined to be sold as a Christmas present. The raw material for the socks, cotton, was grown in Benin, Africa, so the programme makers travelled there to interview the farmer who grew it. He gets just a pittance for his cotton and lives with his family at subsistence level. The raw cotton is sold by middlemen to a dealer in India, where it is cleaned. Once again the local workers earn very little. The next stop is Morocco, where the socks are knitted. Then they are shipped to Germany, where Russian immigrants pack them into coloured boxes which have been made in Italy. In each case, the middlemen cream off the profits, while those who do the work receive very little. The focus of the website is the exploitation which underlies the production of consumer goods, but the carbon footprint implications of such industrial madness are also evident.