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As the first heatwave of the record-breaking summer arrived on 23 May, GB News host Cristo Foufas was not happy: “I am sick to death of the naysayers saying firstly that we’re all going to die and that we have to put out heat alerts, because, you know, just drink some water and drink a bit less rosé in the sunshine.”
“We used to call it Darwinism,” replied co-host Renée Hoenderkamp. She is a medical doctor.
The arrival of the intense heatwave in late June – the most extreme recorded in Europe – didn’t change the tone. “People die each year from vending machines falling on them, and coconuts hitting their heads. People die, unfortunately, that’s a reality of life, and things get hot,” said Will Kingston, a presenter and contributor on GB News, a free-to-air television news channel. “It doesn’t mean you have to go about changing your life in ways big and small to accommodate for it.”
Over on TalkTV, a British streaming news channel, there was also little empathy as the country sweltered in deadly heat. “I’m very sorry if someone dies because of the heat, but I don’t think that’s a reason for us never to be allowed to take a flight again, or stop being allowed to eat meat,” said the presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer on 24 June, citing policies no one is putting in place. Her guest, the conservative commentator Benedict Spence, agreed: “One way or another, something’s going to get you.”
As that heatwave reached its peak, the TalkTV host Kevin O’Sullivan was getting hot under the collar about the “asinine snowflakery” of climate concern: “Our hysterical hysteria over climate change because we’ve had a few nice days … It’s a nice day. Now we call it … a death risk.”
Then the numbers came in. The May and June heatwaves had killed about 2,700 people prematurely in England and Wales, according to an analysis based on the relationship established between heat and mortality in previous data, published on 13 July.
Cue a meltdown from O’Sullivan: “No such thing happened. They’ve sort of qualified it – and said 2,700 people might have died – and this has been apparently gamed by computer programmes and God knows what.” The report was “just disgraceful climate change scaremongering” and “absolute poppycock”, he said.
On GB News, the presenter Kingston was also deeply unimpressed: “If there is one thing that Covid taught us, it is that modelling is effectively guesswork from clever-sounding people with an ideological agenda.”
These hot takes did not age well. On 30 July, the UK Health Security Agency announced that 2,877 people had died because of the May and June heatwaves, using data on actual recorded deaths.
Many heat-related deaths are among elderly people and those who are already unwell, factors that apparently made their premature demise less important for some contributors, such as Ross Clark, who had told TalkTV on 25 June that they were “perhaps on the point of dying anyway”.
Presenters and guests on both channels frequently pointed to the higher level of deaths from cold in winter. None were asked why any reduction in winter deaths due to global heating would mean the rising number of heat deaths in summer was acceptable. And it’s not even true any more: the most recent figures from the Office of National Statistics show 2,805 heat-related deaths in England and Wales in 2025 compared with 2,244 cold-related deaths.
Instead, one TalkTV presenter, André Walker, decided that one man in particular had blood on his hands: “I believe by the end of his career, Ed Miliband will have killed 100,000 people because of his crazy green energy policies that freeze people in the winter and cook them in the summer.” He offered no evidence for this attack on every climate-denier’s bogeyman, the former energy secretary.
You might think it would be hard to deny the basic reality of climate change as the temperatures soared outside. You’d be wrong.
There was straightforward denial on GB News with, for example, the presenter Nana Akua calling the climate crisis a “scam” as the hottest May ever recorded ended; Hoenderkamp blaming the sun (an ancient climate myth); and the fashion designer and regular contributor Jeff Banks saying, wrongly, that: “The facts are that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been declining for the last 150 million years.” Over on TalkTV, Hartley-Brewer blithely told viewers in late June: “We’ve always had freak weather.” Not like this we haven’t, according to hundreds of scientific studies.
Let’s take a short break, for a fact check. The world’s climate scientists, in reports signed off by 192 national governments, have been clear for more than a decade that 100% of global heating since 1950 has been caused by human emissions and activities. Every heatwave is being made more intense and more likely as a result of fossil fuel burning, and rising global heat kills one person a minute around the world, according to a major recent report in the Lancet.
Back to the channels, where the heat the country was enduring, if not its cause, was undeniable. Cue the presenters turning their fire on the weather forecasts. “The weather maps, they used to go orange and red. They’ve now lowered the threshold so it’s bright red. It’s obviously … a psyops operation,” said the TalkTV host Ash Gould. Who was behind this conspiracy was not revealed.
Another TalkTV host, Alex Armstrong, was also frothing about maps: “They’ve literally coloured the country black – because it’s like a nuclear holocaust level. They’ve gone nuts, these climate fanatics.” He did not explain what maps he meant, and they were not shown to viewers of the programme.
One issue that got the TV stations hot under the collar was air conditioning, which, ironically enough, was barely needed in the UK until the climate crisis drove up temperatures. Foufas said on GB News: “Here in the UK, remember we’ve all been told to rip out our air conditioning because it’s not conducive to net zero.” This blanket statement appears to be based on a single planning dispute in Camden.
“It’s actually still illegal in new-build homes to fit air con,” chimed in Hartley-Brewer on TalkTV. It’s not illegal, for either new or existing homes.
And the unrelenting attacks on net zero, a policy now at the heart of the right’s culture war, carried on. “The biggest psychosis of our age is climate alarmism and net zero,” the contributor Paul Cox told TalkTV. “Net zero being a product of the monetisation of climate alarmism.” The presenter Alex Phillips did not challenge him. Instead, she insulted Miliband as “a meme and a congested ukulele player”.
A few more examples: net zero is a “deranged religion”, a “crazy ideology”, a “fallacy [that] doesn’t exist”, “lunacy” and “madness”, meaning “we all have to eat insects rather than beef and lamb”.
Just to be clear, net zero is the principle, dictated by the laws of basic physics, that until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, it will continue to get ever hotter. But even if net zero was admitted as necessary, excuses for inaction abound on the channels.
For example: the UK emits only 1% of global emissions, making action pointless. What about all the other countries that only emit a small percentage? Another favourite: the supposed cost of net zero, often backed by figures conjured up by analyses which ignore the costs of maintaining the status quo or climate damage. Net zero will have “smashed the economy to bits”, according to Cox on TalkTV.
“It’s going to be less expensive to deal with the consequences,” said the GB News presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg. Despite being a former energy and net zero secretary, he is also wrong: a multitude of serious assessments over decades have shown reaching net zero is cheaper than not doing so, including work by the government’s own official independent advisers.
For those on GB News and TalkTV, the answer to high energy bills is drill, baby, drill! TalkTV’s Jeremy Kyle quotes Donald Trump: “We have, in his words, liquid gold under the North Sea.” In fact, according to the UK Energy Research Centre, the idea that more North Sea oil and gas could cut energy bills for UK consumers or improve energy security is a “delusion”.
Perhaps the conspiratorial mindset that sometimes leaks out on the channels can explain all this cognitive dissonance in the face of record heat, thousands of deaths and all the hard evidence? Commentators on the channels call net zero “a road to communism” and “socialist-style, communist-style control”. Apparently, it is easier for some to deny reality than accept that some big problems require a collective response.
The GB News presenter Bev Turner is particularly enraged when her kids are sent home from overheated schools: “When the weather gets warm and the government says it’s too hot to go out, stay at home – we are priming them for climate lockdowns, that is all this is.”
There’s a lot of talk on these billionaire-owned, heavy-loss-making TV channels about deranged ideologues. But reviewing the summer meltdown on GB News and TalkTV, I think I found them – right there in the studios.
Note: The research was conducted for the Guardian by Stop Funding Heat, which used a combination of manual and AI-assisted research to monitor broadcasts for relevant content. Each instance was then checked by a researcher and a Guardian reporter.
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