A Mail on Sunday column celebrating Britain’s long, hot summer as something like an extended French holiday has drawn a furious response from Green leader Zack Polanski.
The piece, by Ross Clark, ran under the headline: “Sorry Zack Polanski, this long hot summer is not the apocalypse, it’s like a gloriously long holiday in France… with village green cricket thrown in for good measure.” Polanski shared a photo of the page on X: “It’s time we sorted out the press. Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The Government must step up and stop being cowardly.”
That solution needs a lot more explanation, government action against newspaper coverage raises obvious press freedom questions, especially against an opinion column rather than a news report. His actual complaint about how the weather’s been covered, though, has real evidence behind it.
A summer of records, drought and fires
Calling a hot day pleasant isn’t misinformation on its own, and not every wildfire or dry field can be pinned exclusively on climate change. The problem with the Mail’s framing is what it leaves out. According to the Met Office, the heatwave running 30 June to 5 August lasted 37 days, the second-longest recorded in the UK since 1900, behind only the 39-day stretch in 1995. Britain’s warmed roughly 0.25C per decade since the 1980s, making extreme heat more frequent and more intense.
June also hit a provisional 37.7C at Lingwood, Norfolk, breaking the UK’s previous June record. More than 150 weather stations recorded new June maximum or minimum records during the heatwave. The dry weather’s been just as striking, the Environment Agency reported 71% of England’s land in drought by mid-August, with no part of the country classified as normal. Natural Resources Wales declared drought across all of Wales at the end of July.
The consequences went well beyond uncomfortable nights and dying lawns. Firefighters dealt with serious wildfires across the country, including the major fire at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk, dozens of firefighters battling a wind-driven blaze after a major incident was declared.
Climate change doesn’t light a fire. It creates hotter, drier conditions where vegetation burns more easily and fires spread faster. Droughts are shaped by rainfall patterns, water demand and land management too, but rising temperatures increase evaporation and pile more pressure onto already depleted rivers, reservoirs and soil. The scientific point isn’t that hot summers never used to happen. It’s that human-caused warming has shifted the baseline those natural swings now happen on top of.
World Weather Attribution found emissions from fossil fuels intensified the extreme heat across Europe in June. The Met Office estimates British summers are now roughly 1.4C warmer than during the famous 1976 heatwave. Considerably more consequential than an unusually long spell of good cricket weather.
The photo was from 2017
The image running with the Mail column created its own problem. It showed a cricket match at Knole Park in Kent, surrounded by lush green grass. @TMChivers traced it: “The photo the Mail has used here was taken in… 2017. How is the grass in Knole Park looking now after five heatwaves?” He posted a recent photo of the same spot, dry and brown.
Using an archive photo for a comment piece isn’t inherently deceptive, papers do it constantly, and it may well have been dated properly in the original caption. Still a strange choice for a column arguing current weather concerns are overblown. A nine-year-old photo of green parkland doesn’t say much about that same landscape’s condition after months of abnormal heat and barely any rain. It let Polanski make his point visually without much effort: one image showing an idealised English summer from nine years back, the other showing the actual effect of the weather being discussed right now.
Climate change was missing from most heatwave coverage
Polanski’s wider criticism has research behind it too. An Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit analysis of almost 2,500 articles about the June heatwave across nine national papers found 72% didn’t mention climate change at all. Some, short forecasts or travel updates, may not have needed to. The overall pattern’s harder to dismiss given the country’s hitting temperature records consistent with decades of scientific projections.
The figure varied sharply by outlet too, the Financial Times mentioned climate change in 64% of its heatwave coverage, the Sun in just 6%.
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