Abstract
At first, I thought it was irony – but it almost certainly wasn’t. Greek islands were on fire and the whole Mediterranean was suffering an extraordinary heatwave when Allison Pearson tweeted: “Funnily enough, no climate change in the UK where we are suffering one of the coolest and wettest Julys on record. What’s the explanation?”
How to respond to someone who tries to disprove that climate change is leading to extreme weather by citing extreme weather? The Daily Telegraph columnist Pearson is just one of several contrarians whose views on the climate – clearly going against the overwhelming scientific tide – are promoted and amplified by some sections of the British media.
Once, it was mainly irascible old buffers: Bernard Ingham used to insist wind turbines couldn’t blow the skin off a rice pudding. Even in 2017, he described the wind and solar energy industries as a “scam” in the Yorkshire Post. As I write this, the useful Gridwatch website tells me that wind is providing 37 per cent of power used in the UK today (sometimes it is more than 50 per cent), and solar 26 per cent. Sadly, Bernard is no longer with us to admit his mistake. As I’m sure he would have done.
The trouble is, it’s not really funny. The week after Pearson’s tweet, July 2023 was declared the hottest month on record, including the 23 hottest days ever known. Dr Karsten Haustein, from the University of Leipzig, said: “We may have to go back thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet.” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres declared that “the era of global boiling has arrived”, while Professor Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, bleakly warned that “climate action is not a luxury but a must”.
Yet many in the British media are intent on assuring readers that the scientists have got it wrong. A friend responded to the Pearson tweet by saying she was only “playing to her audience”. Of course, but that isn’t good enough in these dangerous times. Instead of reinforcing readers’ prejudices, journalists should be better informing their readers.
Many are trying to do that. Science and environment correspondents plug away day after day, Cassandra-like, only to see their stories downplayed. But if one columnist or celebrity takes an anti-eco position, editors can’t promote their views prominently enough. Take electric cars. They might not save the world on their own, but they will give us cleaner air – and cutting pollution is a life-saver. Public Health England reckons air pollution is linked to 28,000-36,000 deaths a year in the UK.
Yet Nadine Dorries was given space in the Daily Mail to tell us that she had returned her electric car because of a long journey during which she worried about finding chargers. To be fair, she did say she supports the push to cut Britain’s carbon emissions to “net zero”. To be less fair, she admitted she swapped her £30,000 Renault Zoe, intended as a city car rather than a long-distance one, for a £47,000 Discovery Sport hybrid SUV. Which is a bit like saying she struggled to fit a family of six in a Smart car, so that was rubbish, but it’s OK now because she has bought a minibus. The Mail was gleeful. A line over its online version read: “Have you handed your electric car back? Email
The petrolhead Rowan Atkinson wrote in The Guardian that he was an EV early adopter but now felt “duped”. His article was so full of inaccuracies that the paper published several letters setting him right. Look up that article on the paper’s website and you will see it has been corrected FIVE times – including removing Atkinson’s assertion that electric HGVs are a non-starter (there are already many of them).
Inaccurate or not, the Daily Mail couldn’t wait to reprint Atkinson’s article, giving it a generous show on the front page, confirming the prejudices of those readers who probably think it is “woke” to worry about the future of the planet.
Does all this matter? It certainly does. We might be mildly amused that national newspapers are so quaintly fond of the mid-Victorian technology of the internal combustion engine, but the wider message is that we should resist doing anything – especially if it costs money – to safeguard the futures of our children and grandchildren.
Out there in the real world, Labour’s failure to win the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election was blamed on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emissions scheme (Ulez), a modest measure compared to those in many cities in Europe. It affects only car-owners with the most polluting vehicles, but the Mail labelled it “Labour mayor’s hated war on drivers”, while the Telegraph presented it as an “anti-car scheme”, allowing Rishi Sunak to declare in a front-page headline that “I am on motorists’ side”.
But the government – and our media – should be on everyone’s side. Who are they protecting by resisting measures to ensure their readers, and their families, have a future? Editors might argue that they are offering an alternative view but they don’t give a platform to an “alternative” view on, say, Holocaust denial. Quite rightly. So why offer column inches to climate change deniers?
Climate change is happening now – the evidence is hiding in plain sight on front pages – and newspapers have a duty to their readers to take it seriously. It’s time they took a lead and stopped trying to con their readers.
