It all started so well. When the BBC decided that the good weather had gone on long enough to make it newsworthy, they invited the Met Office’s Stephen Belcher on to Newsnight, no doubt hoping that he would fan the flames with some lurid claims about how we were all going to fry in years to come. They were therefore no doubt thoroughly disappointed by his rather measured response, and his suggestion that that it was ‘probably part of natural cycles in the weather, but… superimposed on [a] background of global warming’.
However, as the warm spell has turned into a heatwave, environmental correspondents in the media have been unable to resist progressively more lurid tales. This is the silly season after all, and there’s none quite as silly as an eco-warrior in the sunshine.
For example, by the end of July we had the UK media relaying, in unison, the daft claim by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee that there will be ‘7,000 heat-related deaths every year in the UK by 2050’.
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