Inside the paper, columnist Steven Robinson lamented how weather maps had gotten rid of the cheerful symbols and instead used deep red colors to show high temperatures. He claimed that the Met Office – in conjunction with the BBC – has become “a chorus of amen singing and dancing to the ‘Blob’ climate alarm”. He said other parts of the world coped with the extreme heat, adding: “In Africa, real men wore shorts and safari jackets and rehydrated by ordering a few more beers.” The newspaper article went further and suggested that the reaction was a sign of weakness in the national character: “Listening to apocalyptic climate change experts and the BBC, you’d think Britain was about to spontaneously combust.” On Tuesday, after temperatures in the UK reached 41C, the same paper gravely described the “bushfire nightmare” that had indeed burnt down suburban homes of the type many of its readers lived in. This week’s extreme weather has been 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 massively,” 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 outright climate denial anymore, it’s just not credible anymore.” Although some newspapers still question the link between the climate crisis and individual extreme events, Black said it was harder for them to downplay extreme weather when his readers watched footage of British homes burning. “There is a degree to which no one can ignore evidence in front of your eyes,” he said. “You can argue that a dramatic image shouldn’t make a difference, but it does. It’s like California or Australia or the areas of the world that have been hit by devastating fires.” It was not always the case that British newspapers – and right-wing activists and media allied with the Conservative party – were instinctively skeptical of climate science. David Cameron built his new Tory name around the issue and there appeared to be cross-party political consensus on the need for action. A key shift took place in the late 2000s with the rise of a small group of climate skeptics, including former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the Foundation for Global Warming Policy. The group, one of a number of opaque organizations including the Taxpayers’ Alliance that shares 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 leveraged the Climategate leak and genuine scientific errors made in the handling of Himalayan temperature data to create a narrative that the threat of climate crisis was overstated. During this time, the BBC often provided a platform to climate deniers in the name of impartiality and listening to both sides of a debate, which the broadcaster has since accepted was a mistake. On Monday, Extinction Rebellion protesters smashed windows at the London headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s media company in protest at the environmental coverage of its outlets. In a sign of changing attitudes, Times reporters then fell to tweeting about how they had reported the link between the climate crisis and extreme heat. However, the Sun, its tabloid stalwart, 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 excessive heat as part of a larger narrative about the spread of supposed “vigilance”. The Daily Express said: “It’s not the end of the world! Just keep cool and carry on…” – while the Daily Telegraph’s leading column acknowledged that “the climate is undeniably changing” but urged society to simply adapt to the new reality. Black said this approach ignored the fundamental infrastructure challenges of extreme heat: “If your home is not built to withstand these impacts, you will suffer – it’s not like being a snowflake.”
