Climate change scepticism almost extinct from UK national press

https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/climate-change-scepticism-almost-extinct-from-uk-national-press/

by Wagamaga

33 comments

  1. Scepticism that climate change is real has “almost entirely disappeared” from the opinion pages of British national newspapers in the past ten years, according to new research.

    However articles dismissing or contesting policies designed to address the climate crisis marginally increased in the same time period.

    The research, shared exclusively with Press Gazette, was commissioned by the non-profit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and carried out by a group of academics including Dr James Painter of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

    The researchers looked at 303 opinion pieces and editorials in which “global warming” or “climate change” appeared in the headline or first paragraph, which were published in nine UK national newspapers in August 2013 to September 2014 and August 2023 to September 2024.

    They classified four of the newspapers as right-leaning (The Telegraph, The Sun, Express and the Mail), two as centre-right (The Times and the Financial Times) and three as left-leaning (The Guardian, The Independent and the Mirror).

    In 2013/14, a fifth of all opinion pieces and editorials on climate change featured “evidence scepticism” questioning the science or claiming warming is not happening. In 2023/24 this had dropped to 5%.

  2. Doesn’t the vast majority accept climate change is happening? The scepticism is around the reason and the projected effects.

  3. It’s pretty hard to remain skeptical when you are literally seeing the climate change around you. It’s becoming too obvious to ignore.

  4. It has moved from it not being real to “it is, but we can’t do anything about it”. Which is an improvement I guess.

  5. The irony that this appears at the same time as the below is hilarious. Also I’m not sure moving from “we don’t believe in it” to “OK its real but we don’t believe in doing anything about it” is exactly a change in climate skepticism, its just a case of that classic logical falacy “moving the goalposts” where you deliberately keep changing the criteria required in order to prevent anything from ever being achieved.

    [https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1i1s2v5/farage_and_truss_attend_uk_launch_of_us_climate/](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1i1s2v5/farage_and_truss_attend_uk_launch_of_us_climate/)

  7. Now we face 2 different problems:

    * Climate doomism, “why bother trying when we’re already fucked?”
    * Climate responsibility attitude, “we’re only 1% of the problem so what’s the point?”

  8. You’d have to be wilfully ignorant (which a lot of people are because climate change is scary) to be skeptical at this point. And of course it’s man made, pre industrial times were objectively cooler, no natural process could lift the entire planets temperature so much in such a short space of time.

    The next stage of denialism is to say ‘it’s all the Chinese fault / I’ll be dead anyway (you won’t be)’

  9. There should be skepticism imo. We all see it happening but there are major questions about what we should do…how we do it…when we do it…what the impact is etc. We shouldn’t just accept one politically expedient answer we need critical media to really drill into it.

    But we don’t have that either.

  10. LA is currently grappling with wildfires in the middle of January and record weather events causing untold damage to lives and livelihoods are happening year on year. By this stage being ‘sceptical’ of climate change is on par with being sceptical of gravity.

  11. I normally try and keep a bit of a lid on these type of responses, but I will allow myself one slip of the mask.

    Who is that fucking stupid in 2025 to believe climate change doesn’t exist? Like, seriously. It’s 10 degrees outside whereas a few days ago it was -5. Los Angeles is literally burning to a crisp and Donald Trump is arguing over Greenland because of all the precious metals stuck under the *massive melting ice sheet*.

    In 2024, Europe faced a serious drought that affected crop production. Florida was ravaged by a hurricane. Huge unpredicted rain led to a flood and a thousand dead in Afghanistan. The flooding in Spain was something utterly biblical and all the while the 10 hottest years on record were *the last 10 years*.

    What the actual blue hell is wrong with someone to believe our climate hasn’t changed and changed for the absolute worst?

  12. They may not be openly denying it, but they pander to those that do. Most of the right wing press attack net zero and are silent on climate change. They have gone from “it’s not real” to “it’s not a big deal”.

  14. >The research specifically cited The Telegraph, saying it “persistently gives a platform to sceptical voices on climate change”.

    Imagine my surprise.

  15. Round Earth skepticism has been pretty minimal in the press recently, too.

  16. Great, but if it’s not “it’s not real”, it’s “why should we do anything about it”, “someone else fix it”, “we can’t fix it”, “it won’t be that bad”, “i won’t be alive”, and finally “i don’t care”

  18. Just moved onto extravagant lies about EVs, renewables and Heat pumps.

  19. Better late than never I suppose.

    Now, if we could get them to advocate for action to *effectively combat* climate change, that’s be pretty good.

  20. Did the Daily Fail have a change of editor or something I remember anytime there was snow they’d run a center page spread about how it was cold out therefore global warming must be fake.

    Then every summer the same about what a wonderful British summer we’d be having as temps steadily climbed.

  21. Nigel Farage is paid by the fossil fuel industry to lie for them. He takes their money and sells the country a deception. He doesn’t give a shit that millions will die, and billions will become refugees who have to settle elsewhere due to preventable anthropogenic climate change (yes I understand that some of it is not now preventable – that’s not relevant to our current decision-making).

    We all need to see him for the sociopathic, opportunistic, amoral cunt he is, and tell him to get fucked when pretends to have opinions which are paid advertisesments for the fossil fuel industry. Same goes for the Telegraph.

    Of course they no longer try to deny the science. They pivot to an even weaker bunch of nonsense – that we just shouldn’t try to prevent a cataclysmic crisis, because it’s going to hurt wealthy people in the short term, or because other countries won’t do enough. History will one day view him and the rest of the ‘just do nothing’ brigade as utter monsters with the blood of millions on their hands. He calls himself a leader but he has no constructive proposals to address this enormous challenge.

  22. Technology will address the issues or they won’t be addressed and if climate change is as bad as reported it will continue to get worse.

    Middle classes holidaying less while being lectured by tossers like Di caprio from his super yacht won’t change anything.

    Humans aren’t capable of massive personal sacrifices for some vague bigger picture.

  23. The new tactic is to attack measures to address climate change, particularly saying they’ll make us all poorer. 

  24. Cool!
    So can we finally do something about it then?
    6 years too late, but it’d be good if we started to behave like we actually want to keep living on this planet?

  25. The UK is also doing incredibly well, moving away from coal is quickly is a huge achievement.

    I guess the positive sell is “do you want to leave behind a dry oil well, or enough renewable energy infrastructure to sustain themselves”.

    Plus climate change isn’t just about CO2 -> Greenhouse effect -> sea level rises. It’s:

    • Reducing plastic and waste in our oceans

    • Decreasing prevalence of war for fossil fuels

    • Improving air quality in towns and cities and reducing lung disease

    • Creating long term public infrastructure that doesn’t deplete

    • Reducing cost of energy (at night energy is often close to free)

    • Making town centres and cities better places to be

    Even if climate change didn’t exist and there was no correlation between CO2 and ocean temperatures, we should still be moving away from fossil fuels asap.

  26. Now that it’s too late to prevent, there is no need to pretend we don’t understand…

  27. It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts, most papers (right wing tabloids) will do it cause it draws attention.

  28. Based on studies we should sacrifice only 5% of the World’s GDP-s on battling with climate crisis.

    We all know this is a huge amount of money yet the survival of many of us if not all of us doesn’t worth “that much”, at least not in the wealthiest’s eyes.

    I think people pretty much unable to prevent anything really until it happens to them at full force, when it’s too late we gonna act…

  29. What’s also interesting is that the term “global warming” is hardly used anymore. 

  30. I hate this misuse of the word “skepticism”.

    Skeptics follow *evidence*.  Climate denialism isn’t “skepticism”.

  31. I think that this might be worse.

    Before: “Man made climate change doesn’t exist so there’s nothing to do”

    After: “Okay, maybe man made climate change does exist, but who cares eh? We’re all going to die anyway so let’s do nothing”

  32. Only sceptics are Farage and Truss, even Clarkson changed his mind

  33. It’s ok …. AI will solve it…

    By using massive amounts of energy to create meme images

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