Climate cultists to blame for rising scepticism
There were no 40 degree days this summer. When I realised we’d got to September without hitting those sickly heights I was relieved — which is strange because until 2022 no such thing had ever happened in the UK. There was the brutal, record-breaking July (there were about 3,000 deaths associated with heatwaves that year), and suddenly 40 degrees was part of the new normal.
The hottest day this year was a mere 35.8 degrees. This summer was still, though, the warmest on record. It followed the warmest spring on record and, up to May, the driest spring for 100 years. That laid the conditions for wildfires on the Yorkshire Moors, while Britain’s farmers are predicted to have their fifth-worst harvest ever. The only consolation is that last year’s was even more appalling. Our seas broke heat records too.
It’s not a question any more of whether climate change is happening. It is, and you don’t have to be a farmer or a fisherman or even the kind of pasty Anglo-Saxon who melts into a helpless puddle as soon as the mercury hits 30C (hello!) to notice. It’s blazed across the landscape, which turned prematurely golden this year thanks to a “false autumn” caused by the stress on trees.
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But while all this is happening the public mood on climate change has started to shift, perversely, towards scepticism. According to polling for The Times, 25 per cent of Britons now believe the threat of a warming planet has been exaggerated, up from 16 per cent four years ago; 61 per cent believe it has not been exaggerated, down from 68 per cent.
The climate consensus hasn’t collapsed but it is crumbling. In the 2000s climate scientists bemoaned the media’s tendency to set everything up as a “debate”, meaning sceptics were given prominence that exceeded their credibility. From the vantage point of 2025 that sounds like a nice problem to have. Today the world’s biggest podcaster (Joe Rogan) is pushing outright untruths about “global cooling” to his millions of followers.
But blaming Rogan is futile: appealing counterfactual narratives are the lifeblood of podcasters and you may as well be angry with a weather system as be angry with Rogan. Similarly, it’s depressing to see Reform rush towards the rhetoric of “drill, baby, drill” (and the Conservatives tag along behind them), but did anyone seriously imagine Nigel Farage as an anti-carbon warrior?
The failure of environmentalism’s popularity is down to environmentalists — or at least to the radical wing of the movement. This is not for lack of energy. Since 2018 there has been an extraordinary outburst of activism around climate change. In 2019, Greta Thunberg, then 16, gave her tearful speech to the United Nations in which she accused the assembled adults of “stealing their children’s future in front of their very eyes”.
Thunberg inspired mass “school strikes” as adolescents demanded adults do more to confront the crisis. A year before, Extinction Rebellion had been established and began mobilising supporters into large-scale acts of civil disobedience in an attempt to “compel those in power to act”. In 2019, the group occupied Marble Arch, Parliament Square, Oxford Circus and Waterloo Bridge with the aim of seizing up traffic around London.
Just Stop Oil (founded, like Extinction Rebellion, by the longstanding activist Roger Hallam) has been even more attention-grabbing: in 2022 the group halted traffic on the M25 and two of its activists threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. But none of this matches the commitment of Sacrifice for Survival, whose members ran a short-lived campaign of setting themselves on fire in protest against UK domestic flights.
From the inside, all these acts must feel profoundly righteous — and justified by the severity of the situation. From the outside, they are at best infuriating and at worst deeply disturbing acts of self-harm. The environmental movement has become something closer to a cult, with its cast of child saints (Thunberg) and martyrs. Hallam even styles himself as “prophet” and has the unsettling bearing to match.
Cults like converts but even more than that they like outsiders: the impure ones against whom they can measure their own goodness. The tests one must pass to become one of the saved are ever-growing. It’s not enough to believe in human-caused climate change and want to take action to stop it. When you sign up to Extinction Rebellion you also sign up to a suite of leftist beliefs on trans rights and Gaza.
It suits Reform UK very nicely to position itself as the voice of growth and common sense, in contrast to Ed Miliband’s uninspiring climate technocratism and the “thousands of green jobs” that have so far failed to materialise. But given that the populist right wanted a culture war, why would the environmental movement choose to deliver one on a plate?
The answer has to be that the environmental radicals never wanted to win. As far as they’re concerned the apocalypse is already here: that’s why they use slogans like “five years to save the world”. The only thing left to do is make clear that they are on the side of good. The fire might be coming for everyone but at least they can feel superior as they burn.
The acts of Extinction Rebellion et al aren’t a sign of urgency: they’re a mark of despair. And nothing is more politically repellant than despair. Climate change is here but it’s still possible to mitigate its effects. The environmental movement has work to do. Time for it to stop behaving like a religious sect and start winning back hearts and minds.