In The Guardian’s story “Most UK media reports on June heatwave failed to mention climate crisis,” the paper laments that nearly three-quarters of British media coverage of June’s heatwave failed to mention climate change, complaining that journalists missed an opportunity to educate the public about the “climate crisis.” It is a rare day when Climate Realism suggests a climate change article in The Guardian is worth reading but today is one of those days. The Guardian did misstep, however, by lamenting rather lauding the decline in news outlets taking the climate clickbait by providing straight, fact-based news coverage of the heat wave.
According to The Guardian, researchers examined nearly 2,500 newspaper stories covering the June heatwave and found that roughly 72 percent never mentioned climate change at all. Even more striking, fewer than one in 20 discussed Britain’s net zero policies in relation to the heatwave.
The Guardian clearly sees this as a failure, we see it as progress. For nearly two decades, virtually every hurricane, wildfire, flood, drought, heatwave, cold snap, heavy rainfall event, or unusual weather pattern has been reflexively linked to climate change by large portions of the media, including The Guardian. Climate Realism has posted nearly 200 rebuttals of The Guardian’s climate stories, and hundreds more calling out other media outlets for their bias, incompetence, and willful blindness with regards to climate change.
Heatwaves became one of the easiest vehicles for this “climate crisis” narrative. Every abnormally hot day or string of days was presented as evidence that climate change had arrived. Historical perspectives and data on long-term trends, when not dismissed were often ignored entirely, and natural variability became an afterthought, if not fully excluded. Lately, instant weather attribution studies grounded in climate model outputs have been reported as though they were direct observations and proof of the nonexistent “climate crisis.”
Many journalists simply stopped asking whether every weather event required a climate explanation. Perhaps that is beginning to change, as coverage of climate change has declined significantly, as discussed in a recent Climate Change Weekly post. The coverage of Britain’s recent heatwave, much to The Guardian’s dismay, is consistent with this trend.
The Guardian quotes climate scientists lamenting that the public is not being told often enough that greenhouse gas emissions made recent heatwaves hotter. The article also leans heavily on the now-familiar World Weather Attribution group claiming such events would have been impossible without human influence.
None of that is new. What is new is that editors across much of the British press apparently decided their readers did not need every heatwave story to be wrapped in climate guilt messaging.
After years of hearing that every weather event is driven by climate change, readers may simply be tuning out. Editors are in the business of understanding audiences, and if most newspapers chose to report the weather without automatically inserting a climate angle, perhaps they have concluded that readers want accurate and fair weather reporting, as opposed to not another climate change harangue.
Even The Guardian’s own data hint at this shift. The publication proudly notes that it led the field by inserting climate references into roughly half of its heatwave stories, while newspapers such as The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Express did so only occasionally.
The Guardian interprets that as a journalistic failure. It’s not, it represents a return to fact- based journalism as opposed to editorializing disguised and news reporting.
Let’s hope the recent shift represents editors rediscovering an old-fashioned reporting principle: stick with the verifiable facts, in this case that sometimes a heatwave is simply a heatwave.
Ironically, The Guardian’s complaint may be the strongest evidence yet that the media’s long-running “climate change is in everything” campaign is beginning to lose its grip. If so, that’s welcome news.
Now if only The Guardian would follow the example of the other newspapers it criticizes in this story.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
