What is there to learn from reading the Daily Mail? “Not much” I hear the more polite among you say. Other, more Anglo-Saxon, phrases are possible, and I’d agree, knowing from personal experience that the wretched tabloid just makes shit up to suit its ‘angle.’
But nonetheless, we are in a climate emergency (or worse) and so it is worth looking at two articles appearing in the June 26, 2026 edition for what they tell us about how its writers think (or “think”, if you’re being arch) and what they expect readers to swallow.
It’s especially useful to name a few tactics that are used, since these crop up elsewhere.
The two articles are
- Littlejohn, R. 2026. Why the net zero nut jobs want to make us Hotter and Poorer. Daily Mail, June 26, p.19
- Stevens, C. 2026. Heatwave hysteria. Daily Mail, June 26, p.17
I’ll start with a very brief history of climate change and the responses to it (“the Beforetimes”), before discussing the articles in turn. I will then point to the similarities between them, close out with some further reading and ‘what is to be done?’ I am interested in what you think,and what you think I have missed or got wrong. Let me know. If you’re a denialist though, I am not gonna respond; the Fafocene has begun and our time is shorter than you think.
The Beforetimes
In May 1953, building on the work of John Tyndall (1), Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar, the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass set a cat among the pigeons by declaring that “The large increase in industrial activity during the present century is discharging so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the average temperature is rising at the rate of 1.5 degrees per century.”
This claim went around the world (but, curiously, received scant media attention in the UK). Through the 1950s, however, other scientists (American and Swedish, primarily) joined in. By the mid-1960s carbon dioxide was one of the many potential threats being described as industrial growth surged. By the late-1970s there was a consensus among climate scientists that there was trouble ahead. In 1979 the Daily Mail was capable, at this stage, of reporting on this without losing its “mind.”
Efforts were to get Thatcher and Reagan interested in the problem. Thatcher was incredulous – “you want me to worry about the weather?”. It wasn’t until 1988 that the physical problem became a political issue. The Americans were able to force the essential idea – of targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries – off the agenda for the 1992 “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Since then, globally emissions of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide is the main one, but not the only one) have surged, and temperatures have surged too. To quote myself
“When Plass spoke out, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was at about 310 parts per million. Today, they’re [430] or so. Every year, as we burn more oil, coal and gas, the concentration climbs and more heat is trapped.”
Unfortunately, a well-funded and extremely determined campaign of denial, doubt, technosalvationism and (predatory) delay has been going on for decades. The Daily Mail has been a part of that. In 2013, for example you get this . People complain, but the toothless watchdogs usually say “nothing to see here.”
So, with that out the way, brace yourselves for…
The Articles
Article One – Littlejohn
For those lucky enough not to be familiar with him, first some context –
“Richard Littlejohn (born 18 January 1954) is an English author, broadcaster and opinion column writer, having started his career as a journalist. As of May 2023, he writes a twice-weekly column for the Daily Mail about British affairs.”
He is also a reliable source of spleen and invective – “Littlejohn has been criticised for insufficient fact-checking[4][5] and for alleged anti-gay bigotry.[6]”
The headline (nb not normally chosen by the writer) demonises and trivialises climate action advocates as “Net Zero nutjobs”.
Littlejohn goes in, as usual, studs and all
There is that knowing “skepticism” “we are informed officially” (pointy-headed venal experts’ and ‘comic hyperbole ‘since records began in 1066’ – a call back to the classic ‘1066 and all that’). Littlejohn wants you to remember the 1950s, even if you weren’t there.
There is the inevitable “council jobsworths’ and London Mayor “Genghis Khan” (a play on Sadiq Khan – geddit?)
After tiring himself out with being ‘fair’ by dissing the Conservatives, and showing he is above the fray by casting doubt on Reform, Litlejohn turns his attention to the Guardian.
Note, Littlejohn does NOT ascribe the view that these temperatures (“The sun has got his hat on”) are going to be normal and in all probability surpassed, to scientists at the Met Office or elsewhere. That would make his ‘argument’ awkward. So he has to (only) shoot the Messenger, those hated lefties at the Guardian.
After more jabs at the congestion charge (no mention of the radical reduction in hospital emissions), Littlejohn comes to the crux – those warning about heatwaves and worse are “climate hysterics”. We will come back to this.
There is, inevitably, the invocation of “plucky” Brits (tied up with the whole Keep Calm and Carry On thing).
Article Two – Stevens
Christopher Stevens
Who he? According the this website
“With an unfailing ability to pinpoint the details that define a story, combined with a readiness to write about his own deep personal experiences, Christopher Stevens is arguably the most wide-ranging feature writer in British newspapers.”
Stevens’ basic argument, if you want to call it that, is that there is nothing new under the sun, that the heatwave in 1957 (in the UK) is no different from what is going on now.
Before we dive into this one, what is fascinating (to me at least, but I am odd) is that 1957 was a very important year. The International Geophysical Year began and among the many many measurements being taken around the world by many scientists of many nations was… carbon dioxide. Stevens, like Littlejohn, is eerily silent on carbon dioxide.
Stevens is similarly dismissive of the danger to the poor, the sick, the elderly – the fall of the temperature record was “met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and hailed as proof that our planet will soon be uninhabitable because of global warming.”
Stevens claims that “on that roasting Saturday there was no hysteria, [that word again], no climate scientists predicting the end of the world.” (This is wrong, insofar as the fact that climate scientists WERE already predicting that there would be serious consequences if we kept on burning fossil fuels. See, for example, these)
- September 22, 1955 – a General Electric scientist warns about carbon dioxide build-up –
- January 23, 1957 – New Zealand scientist warns about consequences of carbon dioxide build-up
- May 19, 1957 – LA Times asks “Is your smoke helping to melt polar icecaps?”
Stevens then writes about El Nino as a factor, withOUT mentioning the build up of CO2. He mentions a “heatdome” over Europe. Anything to avoid mentioning carbon dioxide build-up. He then pivots to more nostalgia for the 1950s – “A plummy BBC reporter, shirt collar buttoned with a smart striped tie, ventured with his camera crew into the East End to discover how families in the capital’s poorest streets were coping…”
Stevens watched this clip here, surely, but, failing to mention this totally accidentally gives the impression this is all personal reminiscence.
So, the narrative, as with Littlejohn, is of “plucky” Brits, no-nonsense, ‘keep calm and carry on time’”. Inevitably, Winston Churchill gets a cameo –
“Aged 73 he joined Queen Eizabeth for the Garter ceremony in full regalia at St George’s chapel, Windsor.”
So, you see, the two situations are entirely comparable. And then, of course –
“Now amid similar temperatures we have seen a mood of doom-mongering from Left-wingers and climate campaigners.”
Inevitably, the Guardian is derided, and El Nino is invoked as a “natural phenomenon”.
The word natural here is interesting and telling.. Cobra venom is natural. Bubonic plague is natural. Stevens is, however, using natural in the sense of ‘benevolent and/or inevitable’.
Grasping at straws Stevens invokes some experts who he can quotemine to agree with his thesis. Without pointing out the decades of warnings by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) , Stevens says “In other words, El Nino is always unpredictable, often disruptive and now is as good a time to panic as any.”
To fill out space, and hammer home the 1950s point, Stevens again returns to the 1950s (when, as he well knows, many of his readers were young and carefree) “Or we could fall back on the amiable, understated attitudes of our forebears in 1957. They just rolled up their trouser-legs and had an ice-cream. But such insouciance is frowned on now.”
So what do we learn?
In both cases, there is a resolute silence on the fact of carbon dioxide build-up. Neither can bring themselves to mention the basic facts that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that levels of it in the atmosphere have risen very sharply. Stevens is a little more sophisticated (it’s a low bar), and focuses on the El Nino as a way of NOT talking about carbon dioxide.
Both invoke weak-willed people, coddled for too long by an incompetent and intrusive Nanny State – the same old playbook.
Both, to no feminist’s surprise, reach for the adjective ‘hysterical’ to nail home their point.
In both there is an invocation of “plucky” British resilience and a harkening back to a simpler, bucolic past.
In both there is a focus on the messengers – specifically the Guardian – rather than the sources of the message themselves – various scientific bodies (IPCC, Met Office, Royal Society etc), because this would complicate/undermine the ‘nothing to see here’ message.
For both, there is an insistence that we must focus on individual solutions (put aircon in your house, with or without planning permission) and don’t think about (because otherwise you might have to worry about) collective solutions and the problems of equity. (Life doesn’t HAVE to be a shit sandwich, you know.)
What is to be done?
- We need a typology of Daily Mail style tactics. These include (but are not limited to) –
- Nanny States
- Corrupt (grant-hungry) Scientists
- Control-freak lefties (and local government bureaucrats)
- Hysterical men/women who hate progress
- British pluck and resolve
- The 1950s!
- If at all possible, avoiding mentioning the basic physical facts of carbon dioxide build-up. Under no circumstances show a Keeling Curve more than, say, once a year (see this, June 6 2025 and this May 9, 2022)
Maybe a typology already exists and I am wasting my time? If so, please point me to it.
- We need not only a typology, but also bingo cards, cartoons, and little videos that show how these propaganda tactics are deployed, why and when they are effective and how they can be combatted.
- Most of all though, we need functioning social movement organisations that don’t go up like a rocket and come tumbling down like a stick.
That last one is something most advocates of climate action don’t even address. Their implicit theory of change seems to be that if we just name and shame the oil companies enough, and deride the ‘doomers’ as ignorant or unwitting dupes of said oil companies, then somehow the new Jerusalem (hopefully with lots of shade trees) will be builded here.
Further reading
Hysteria
On the way the word ‘hysterical’ gets trotted out
byarcadia.org/post/hysteria-as-a-misogynistic-construct
Two recent examples
(June 5 2026) in the climate denial junk tank the Institute for Public Affairs
How fear and hysteria fuels politics of climate science
(June 23, 2026) “Why the heatwave hysteria won’t change how I run my school” in the Spectator
I haven’t read these but they look good
Clarke, I. (2024). The discourses of climate change denialism across conspiracy and pseudoscience websites. In The Routledge handbook of discourse and disinformation. Taylor & Francis.
Forchtner, B., & Özvatan, Ö. (2022). De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises: The far-right Alternative for Germany on “climate hysteria” and “corona hysteria”. Journal of Language and Politics, 21(2), 208-232.
On the media in general
I think the Propaganda Model of Herman and Chomsky is a pretty good starting (but not necessarily ending) place
See also the way that the denialists figured out how to use journalistic norms of ‘balance’ to force journalists to keep saying there was a ‘debate’ on the science.
Maxwell T Boykoff, Jules M Boykoff, 2004. Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press, Global Environmental Change, Volume 14, Issue 2, Pages 125-136,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001.
I haven’t yet read this
McAlister et al. 2021. Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years
On the British media and climate
Carbon Brief, January 16, 2016-
Analysis: UK newspaper editorial opposition to climate action overtakes support for first time
Footnotes
- Did John Tyndall rip off the work of Eunice Foote? Possibly, but there’s no smoking gun or any other whispers besides chronology, at least as far as I have seen.
