Discovery Channel reversed course on Tuesday when it announced that it would air all seven parts of a BBC series about Earth’s polar regions, including a final episode about climate change, which it originally said it would forgo.

In mid-November, the BBC drew criticism for giving foreign television networks the option not to buy the final episode, “On Thin Ice,” when purchasing rights to air its latest nature and wildlife series, Frozen Planet. At the time, the Corporation said that over thirty networks had licensed the series, but a third of them, including Discovery Channel, which co-produced Frozen Planet, had opted out.

The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, two British newspapers, suggested that Discovery Channel’s abstention reflected a desire to avoid provoking skeptics of manmade climate change in the US. When the station announced that Frozen Plant would premiere on March 18, 2012, it added that:

The series’ seventh episode, hosted on camera by British naturalist David Attenborough, will investigate what rising temperatures will mean for the people and wildlife that live there - and for the rest of the planet.

At press time, nearly 84,000 people had signed a Change.org petition to air the episode. Discovery Channel hasn’t elaborated on its decision, although a Los Angeles Times blog reported Tuesday that:

The ruckus surprised Discovery executives, who had not screened all of the episodes until last week.

“Up until today we had not made any programming or scheduling decisions, and today we made our announcement,” said Katherine Nelson, Discovery Channel spokeswoman.

The Telegraph predicted that “The airing of the final episode of Frozen Planet will have a huge impact on the ongoing debate about global warming,” although it’s unclear how much of “On Thin Ice” will focus on the impacts of climate change versus mankind’s contribution to climate change.

Media Matters, a liberal watchdog of the conservative press, highlighted a comment that Attenborough, the episode’s narrator, made in a hearing of the UK’s House of Lords regarding governance and regulation of the BBC last May. Asked if it was true that he would make “a big statement … regarded as controversial” at the end of Frozen Planet, Attenborough replied:

I don’t believe it’s controversial, the only controversial element in climate change is to what degree it’s anthropocentric, what degree humans have been responsible, but the facts of climate change are scientifically established facts and I don’t think we go beyond that.

The comment does make the eighty-five-year-old documentarian sound a bit wishy-washy on the subject, but Media Matters is undoubtedly making too much of it. Attenborough penned an op-ed for The Independent back in May 2006, in which he acknowledged that he’d been “skeptical about climate change” before going on to say:

Now I do not have any doubt at all. I think climate change is the major challenge facing the world. I have waited until the proof was conclusive that it was humanity changing the climate.

Media Matters also highlighted a comment made during a radio interview by Dr. Mark Brandon, a polar oceanographer at The Open University who served as an academic consultant on the series, in which he said:

If you were to imagine an episode where people just talked about, you know, humans are doing this, humans are doing that, that wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the story. What would make perfect sense if you’re telling the story of the polar regions is to talk about how they’re changing in the context of the animals and the environments that you’ve shown through the previous six hours of episodes.
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