On Monday, the Financial Times published a book review by Pilita Clark — the paper’s Associate Editor who writes on “corporate life and climate change” — that opened with the following lament:
The UK is a G7 country with a famed civil service that has been delivering world-leading climate change policies for the best part of 20 years. So how could it be so bad at dealing with the floods, heatwaves and fires wreaking so much damage on its people and economy?
Let’s set aside Lord Jon Moynihan’s withering criticism of the “famed” UK civil service and the country’s “world-leading climate change policies” which stand out as not much more than narcissistic folly pursued by an economically illiterate governing class. The four books under Ms. Clark’s approving gaze carried titles freighted with millennial dread. Reviewing them cursorily but approvingly, Clark concluded that “the state of the climate is disturbing for any parent today” and that “adults have much to learn from children, not least their moral clarity about a climate problem that will be the defining challenge of their lives”. The salmon-pink newspaper, it seems, has extended its remit from capital markets and corporate earnings to the moral instruction of British parents.
One might be forgiven for reading this as satire. It is not. It is, rather, a characteristic specimen of what has become the dominant mode of climate journalism in the mainstream Western press: a seamless fusion of advocacy, emotional appeal and selective empiricism in which no counterevidence need intrude and no sceptical voice need apply. Like the BBC, which long ago decided that ‘balance’ on climate was a form of irresponsibility, the FT operates on the settled premise that the science is closed, the catastrophe is imminent and the only honourable response is alarm. What the FT’s Pilita Clark offers her readers is not objective journalism but liturgy.
A catalogue of misattributions
Let us briefly examine what passes for evidence in Clark’s review. The first book, David Shukman’s The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes, presents a “catalogue of failures” that includes the July 2022 wildfires in east London that destroyed nearly 20 homes in record 40°C heat, an IT failure at a London hospital and an elderly man nearly drowning in a flooded basement flat after overloaded storm drains. The second, art historian Thijs Weststeijn’s The Future of the Past, catalogues damage to cultural heritage: Venice inundated in 2019, British peatlands drying and threatening 20,000 archaeological sites from the Stone Age onwards, Egyptian pyramids turning grey. These events are presented, in aggregate, as symptoms of a single, overarching “climate emergency”.
Clive Hamilton’s Negotiating the End of the World: Kant, Schmitt, and the Global Climate Struggle is the third book in Clark’s review. In this book, Hamilton describes the history of the climate talks as a struggle between the competing visions of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and Carl Schmitt, a Nazi supporter who saw a world in which great powers naturally viewed one another as foes. In this typically Manichean scheme favoured by climate ideologues, the virtue-signalling EU ruled by Brussels bureaucrats is the land of Kant, China is thoroughly Schmittian and the US has lately swung firmly into the Schmitt camp.
Ben Rawlence’s Think Like a Forest: Letters to My Children from a Changing Planet completes the quartet under review. In it, the author and father of two daughters asks, in what he calls the fundamental contradiction of parenting in the modern world, “How do we cope with the fact that we are raising kids within a system that is killing all of us?” One needs not much more detail to conclude the drift of this book.
Yet a brief survey of the accessible scientific literature ought to give pause to any responsible journalist. Take the claim that British peatlands are “drying so fast” due to climate change. The official assessments from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England and DEFRA tell a rather different story: between 80 and 87% of UK peatlands are degraded primarily from centuries of direct land management — drainage ditches, agricultural conversion, peat cutting and overgrazing. There is little space for the climate change narrative here.
Similarly, the greying of Egypt’s ancient monuments is a documented phenomenon, but field studies and Egyptian conservation authorities point overwhelmingly to Cairo’s air pollution, rising groundwater from urban expansion and the altered hydrology downstream of the Aswan Dam, and salt migration from underlying limestone — factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with global atmospheric carbon dioxide.
As for the claim that Britain is now afflicted by unprecedented weather extremes, the UK Met Office’s long-term homogenised data series shows no statistically significant increase in most extreme weather metrics beyond natural variability. Wetter winters, periodic heatwaves and flood events all have precedents in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What Clark and the authors she praises are engaged in is the rhetorical technique of aggregation: gather a wide array of distinct, locally explained events, strip them of their particular causes and bind them together under the rubric of ‘climate change’. It is a technique that is lazy, intellectually dishonest and empirically insupportable. But it is enormously effective as propaganda, which is presumably why it is so relentlessly practised.
The institutional ecology of alarmism
It’s worth asking how the media arrived at this point. The short answer is that climate alarmism has become institutionally self-reinforcing. Awards committees, editorial hierarchies, grant-funding bodies and conference circuits all select for the same worldview. Pilita Clark was named Environment Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2019 — for the third consecutive year.
Her colleagues at the FT and her counterparts at the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times occupy a professional ecosystem in which the currency of advancement is the compelling doom narrative. As Rob Bradley of MasterResource.org observed recently, it is invariably the neo-Malthusian journalists who collect the prizes, while those who apply rigorous empirical scrutiny to climate claims remain marginalised.
The parallel with the late Paul Ehrlich is instructive. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, predicted mass starvation and societal collapse within decades. He was wrong on virtually every empirical claim. He nonetheless accumulated honours, fellowships and media plaudits for the rest of his long career. His intellectual nemesis, the economist Julian Simon, who bet Ehrlich in 1980 that a basket of natural resources would be cheaper a decade later (and won decisively), died without a fraction of the institutional recognition lavished on the man he had refuted.
The climate journalism ecosystem replicates this dynamic with impressive fidelity: the catastrophists are rewarded, the empiricists are ignored and the cycle perpetuates itself.
The voices left off the page
It is doubtful that Clark has engaged diligently with the substantial body of credentialled dissent from the mainstream consensus narrative. Steve Koonin, the MIT-trained theoretical physicist and former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, argued in his 2021 book Unsettled that what the media and politicians say about climate science has “drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false” — a formulation offered not by a sceptic blogger but by Holman Jenkins writing in the Wall Street Journal. Koonin’s central charge is not that warming is not occurring but that the gap between the underlying scientific literature and its media representation is vast and systematically skewed in one direction.
Koonin is not alone among serious scientists who take issue with the consensus narrative as it is mediated to the public. William Happer, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton, Richard Lindzen, retired professor of meteorology at MIT and one of the world’s foremost atmospheric physicists, Roger Pielke Jr., formerly director of the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech — all of these are credentialled scientists who have raised theoretical and empirical objections to aspects of the official narrative.
None of them would be characterised as ‘climate deniers’ by any serious person. All of them are effectively excluded from the pages of the FT, the BBC and the broader ecosystem of institutional climate journalism. The pretence that the FT is merely ‘following the science’ is, in this light, transparently false. It is following a particular, carefully curated selection of the science, filtered through the lens of advocacy.
The children pay the price
Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of Clark’s piece: her treatment of children and the gratuitous advice to their parents. Ben Rawlence’s lament on how one copes with raising children “within a system that is killing all of us” is presented approvingly in a mainstream financial newspaper as a serious contribution to public discourse. It is, in fact, a manual for the transmission of psychological distress to minors.
The consequences of this sustained, institutionally-backed campaign of climate anxiety on the young are now well documented. Anika Sweetland, who has spoken publicly about her experience of climate indoctrination during her schooling, describes a world in which ‘settled science’ was presented as a form of moral catechism requiring no examination, no debate and no qualification.
An entire generation has been exposed to what might fairly be called manufactured helplessness: the conviction that the future is foreclosed, that adult society has failed them, and that their lives will unfold against an ever-darkening backdrop of environmental collapse. The clinical literature on eco-anxiety among adolescents is growing. The journalistic and institutional ecosystem that produced this anxiety — of which Clark and the FT are constituent parts — bears some responsibility for it.
It’s not climate change that is the primary threat to the mental health and intellectual formation of young people in Britain and the West. It is the relentless, one-sided, empirically dishonest amplification of worst-case scenarios by institutions — newspapers, broadcasters, schools, government agencies — that ought to know better and once did.
Towards honest reporting
The Financial Times was founded in 1888 and built its reputation on rigorous financial and economic analysis. Its current ‘woke’ status does not serve that tradition well when its pages carry book reviews that aggregate misattributed weather events, ignore the primary scientific literature on causation, exclude credentialled dissenting scientists and encourage parents to adopt a posture of existential despair for the benefit of their children’s “moral clarity”. The FT should do what it used to do: apply analytical rigour, present evidence honestly and trust its readers to draw their own conclusions.
The broader media ecosystem has a choice. It can continue to produce what Kevin Mooney, in his recent book Climate Porn, characterises as fabricated scare narratives dressed in the language of science. Or it can return to the first principles of empirical journalism: follow the evidence where it leads with due diligence, represent uncertainty honestly, give space to credentialled dissent and resist the institutional incentives that reward alarm over accuracy (‘if it bleeds, it leads’).
The parents of children to whom Clark and her favoured authors are directing their anxious counsel deserve nothing less than that honesty. Parents and their children are perceptive enough to recognise, in time, when they have been misled. The institutions that misled them will find that trust, once forfeited, is not easily recovered.
A version of this article was first published by the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/12/why-is-the-financial-times-encouraging-parents-to-make-their-children-anxious-about-climate-change/
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
