Daily Mail readers were in no doubt what the paper thought of Monday’s hot weather: it was little more than a “sunny day” in which “Britain’s snowflake melted”. There has been criticism that public services have been closed as a precaution – and praise for Prince Charles continuing to wear a suit and tie in the heat.
Inside the paper, columnist Stephen Robinson lamented how weather maps had ditched cheery symbols and instead used deep reds to show high temperatures. He claims that the Met Office – in partnership with the BBC – has become “an all-singing, all-dancing amen choir for the climate alarmist ‘Blob'”.
He said other parts of the world have coped with extreme heat, adding: “In Africa, real men will wear shorts and safari jackets and hydrate by ordering a few more beers.”
The paper’s editorial went further and suggested the reaction was a sign of weakness in the national character: “Listening to the apocalyptic climate change specialists and the BBC, you’d think Britain was about to spontaneously combust.”
By Tuesday, after UK temperatures reached a record 41C, the same newspaper gravely described a “bushfire nightmare” that did burn down suburban homes of the type lived in by many of its readers.
The extreme nature of this week’s weather was a reckoning for parts of the UK media, showing the extent to which public coverage of the climate crisis has changed over the past decade.
“Things have changed significantly,” said Richard Black, a former BBC environment correspondent who wrote a book about the rise and fall of climate change skeptics in the UK. “I don’t think there’s any more outright climate denial, it’s just not credible anymore.”
Although some newspapers still question the links between the climate crisis and individual extreme events, Black said they found it harder to downplay extreme weather when his readers saw footage of burning British homes.
“There is a degree to which no one can ignore the evidence before your eyes,” he said. “You could argue that a dramatic picture shouldn’t make a difference, but it does. It looks like California or Australia or the areas of the world that are affected by forest fires.
It has not always been the case that British newspapers – and right-wing activists and media allied with the Conservative Party – have been instinctively skeptical of climate science. David Cameron built his Tory rebranding around the issue and there appeared to be a cross-party political consensus on the need for action.
A key shift came in the late 2000s with the rise of a small group of climate skeptics, including former chancellor Nigel Lawson and his Global Warming Policy Foundation. The group, one of a number of opaque organisations, including the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which share an office at 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, quickly found an audience in the national media for its message that the call for radical action was overblown. They took advantage of the Climategate leaks and genuine scientific mistakes made around the processing of temperature data in the Himalayas to build a narrative that the threat of a climate crisis was overstated.
During this period, the BBC often gave a platform to climate deniers in the name of impartiality and hearing both sides of the debate, something the broadcaster has since accepted was wrong.
On Monday, Extinction Rebellion protesters smashed windows at the London headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s media company in protest at environmental coverage in its publications.
In a sign of a shift in attitudes, Times journalists then rolled over to tweet how they had reported on the link between the climate crisis and extreme heat. Yet the Sun, his stalwart tabloid, initially focused on pictures of people on the beach under the words “super scorchio”.
A new, milder form of climate denial seems to be emerging in right-wing newspapers—one that portrays complaints about extreme heat as part of a larger narrative about the spread of supposed “wokeness.” The Daily Express declared: “It’s not the end of the world! Just keep your cool and carry on…’ – while the Daily Telegraph’s top columnist admitted that the ‘climate is undeniably changing’ but urged society to simply adapt to the new reality.
Black said this approach ignores the fundamental infrastructure challenges of extreme heat: “If your home isn’t built to withstand these impacts, you’re going to suffer – it’s not about being a snowflake.”
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