Britain's Weather Chat Splinters Into Climate Culture War
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- George Cowling's January 1954 BBC debut — predicting a "good day to hang out the washing" — anchored 72 years of British weather culture that the column argues is now evaporating under climate crisis.
- British TV forecasters increasingly present contradictory framings within the same bulletin — sunshine as both welcome and oppressive, rain as inconvenient and desperately needed — as climate effects become "unmistakable but uneven."
- A 2025 academic paper by Thijs van Dooremalen and Philip Smith, "British Heatwave Discourse (1985–2023): from Ice Cream to Armageddon?", found an "Apocalyptic genre" of heatwave coverage became dominant only from 2015, while a celebratory "Romantic genre" persists.
- During the 2022 record heat, the BBC reported forecasters faced "unprecedented levels of trolling," with abusive messages accusing them of "scaremongering" to help the then-Conservative government impose green policies.
- BBC forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker told the Big Issue in 2023 he aimed for careful balance, but recent broadcasts have shed that neutrality — calling the current conditions "The savage summer continues across Europe" and "excruciatingly hot."
- Met Office scientist Mike Kendon, co-author of State of the UK Climate in 2025 published last month, said "The climate of the 20th century has now gone," with the year's defining feature being weather getting stuck in one state for months.
- This summer's regional split — wetter-than-usual western Scotland, desert-like southern England — means Britain can no longer be said to share a single northern European climate, the column argues.
- The political landscape has shifted: the Conservatives, Reform UK, Restore Britain and most rightwing media have turned against net zero, making opposition to alarmed forecasters more mainstream than the 2022 trolling wave.
Why it matters: Britain's weather culture was a rare unifier across political, regional and class lines; its collapse along climate-culture-war lines means a once-neutral shared reference point now carries political charge, and the Met Office's potential red "extreme heat warning" lands precisely as opposition to net-zero policy has migrated from fringe denial into mainstream conservative and right-wing media.
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