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. The arrival of the intense heatwave in late June – the most extreme recorded in Europe – didn’t change the tone. 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.
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. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
