Progressive news website ITV News posted an article, “Reform’s Tice faces backlash for saying climate change not all ‘doom and gloom,’” claiming that Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice is “out of touch” because he says there are some benefits for the UK from the modest warming of the past century-plus, and potential future benefits if warming continues. ITV is wrong, and Tice is correct. There are in fact benefits from warming, especially as minor as modern warning has been, including improved crop production from increased rainfall, longer growing seasons, and fewer human deaths from cold temperatures.
“Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice has urged people concerned about global warming to stop focussing on the ‘doom and gloom,’” ITV writes, quoting Tice as saying “‘Of course climate change is real, but where is the evidence that net zero is going to stop it?’
“‘Climate change has always happened, it always will,’” Tice continued according to ITV. “‘Maybe the smarter thing to do is to adapt to it, (rather) than think arrogantly you can stop it.’”
These comments make Tice “out of touch,” according to ITV and the handful of climate activists they quote for this article. Tice is right though, and ITV News and climate activists are the ones who are truly out of touch with science and the effects of climate policies.
Polling shows that although Europeans express vague support for climate action, when the policies of net zero are actually laid out before them, support plummets. Even back in 2023, when climate action was more popular with the public than it is today, a YouGov poll asking Europeans about their support for certain climate policies found that most people were unwilling to make any serious changes beyond initiatives like tree planting.
Most Brits surveyed said they were unwilling to do things like switch to an electric car, personally pay to improve their home’s energy efficiency, pay extra fees for airline tickets, give up cars entirely, cut meat and dairy, or have fewer children in the name of net zero.
ITV gravely asserts that “In July, the Met Office said that 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales.”
Climate Realism previously debunked this claim. Those 2,700 deaths did not happen, it was a projected increase from modeling and not a real statistic. The data from mortality during the period of the spring heatwave hadn’t even come out yet when the Met Office reported it. ITV News is peddling blatant falsehoods here.
In reality, as reported in Climate at a Glance, cold deaths far outnumber those caused by extreme heat by as much as 20 times, but ITV neglects to mention the decline in the number of people dying from cold. That decline, according to a Lancet study, outpaces any increase in heat related mortality. Deaths from extreme weather in general have declined dramatically over the same period that the bulk of the warming occurred.
Tice is also quoted as saying that it would be a benefit to the UK for the weather to be a bit warmer, and “if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic. That means we can take on the French, fantastic.”
He’s right about crop production too, of course. Although climate campaigners say crop production is suffering, data show the opposite is true.
Yields of sugar beets, for example, are increasing, even as farmland is taken off the table and production overall falls because of the government’s commitment to rewilding and solar installations in the name of climate change. (See figure below)
Part of the reason that crop production is doing well is because there has been a modest increase in precipitation over much of the northern hemisphere as the planet has modestly warmed. Global crop production sets records every year in staple categories. In the far North, growing seasons are longer. Satellites have recorded a greening of the Earth, fueled by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Famously, during the Roman warm period, there were indeed productive vineyards in England, and it was certainly not dangerously hot to live there then, well before modern infrastructure like air conditioning.
Also, as a previous Climate Realism post explains, the pursuit of net zero makes the UK more vulnerable to bad weather when it does occur, not climate change. Most recently, the UK net zero policies have compromised medical treatments and patient health at hospitals and removed cooling devices, air conditioners and heat pumps, from private homes during the heat wave. Air conditioners save tens of thousands of lives each year, but the UK government frowns upon their use. It is the UK’s anti-air conditioning bias in pursuit of net zero, not climate change, that is compromising health and resulting in avoidable premature deaths.
ITV quotes Tice as saying “anybody who arrogantly thinks that humans can stop the power of the sun, […] frankly they are the ones who are completely out of touch.”
Again, Tice is completely correct and deserves praise for standing against climate scolds like those at ITV, who are evidently either scientifically illiterate or don’t care about what data show about climate change because they are engaged in a propaganda effort about a looming climate crisis to reach progressive policy aims.
