Eco-lunacy is the real menace to humanity

You know you’re living in tyrannical times when an authority figure demands you look into the fire and renounce your heresy. Heatwave season has been awash with such neo-medievalism. In full priestly mode, London mayor Sadiq Khan said our ‘burning summer is proof’ that climate-change deniers ‘aren’t just delusional, they’re deadly’. This suffocating heat is a ‘dramatic warning’ sent by ‘nature’ to disprove the deniers’ ‘bullshit based on lies’, said Teresa Ribera of the European Commission. Hellish flames reprimanding humanity for its sinful thoughts? Where have I heard that one before?

Then there’s all the drought porn. Time-rich Instagrammers are clogging up social media with photos of England’s parched yellow fields. You can’t move online for apocalypse chic – hip catastrophists posing sad-eyed in their sun-cracked local park. ‘Will grass be green again?’, asked a BBC journalist. Yes. Yes it will. What has struck me is the glee with which many have marshalled the heat to scold ‘deniers’. ‘Where are all those climate sceptics now?’, asked a writer for The Times. In the baking sun they’ve ‘shrivelled away, like our lawn’.

It is a testament to the moralism of the eco-doom movement that there has been so much focus on shaming ‘deniers’. Practical matters – like, I don’t know, making the case for the mass rollout of aircon – play second fiddle to the pillorying of heretics. The argument seems to be that these wicked doubters have landed us in the inferno of a neverending summer, just as their witchy forebears gave us crop failure and icy winters. I see it differently. To me, the punishing impact of the heatwaves is less the handiwork of ‘deniers’ than a byproduct of the moral circus of eco-alarmism itself. Maybe it’s they who need to look into the fire.

It’s hot. There’s no question about that. Britain has just had its fourth heatwave of the year, which is four too many in my view. The mercury reached 41.2C in poor old Austria. Spain and Italy are sweltering. Yet the claim that it’s all the result of humanity’s hubris doesn’t stack up. As even the very green Independent was forced to admit, ‘We cannot say global warming is definitely responsible for this particular run of hot weather’. It’s been hot before, long before the spinning jenny ever spun. There’s a ‘stubborn high pressure system over Europe’, the Indie says, and it might be that that’s making you sweat rather than the Industrial Revolution.

Eco-dogma doesn’t only reduce complex weather events to childish morality tales – it also distracts us from the task of actually dealing with heat and fire. Consider the ‘wildfires’ that have swept even the UK in recent weeks. First off, calling them ‘wildfires’ is wrong, given the vast majority of them are started by humans, not nature. In Europe, a staggering 97 per cent of fires were triggered by ‘human ignition’. A UK parliamentary briefing in 2024 declared that ‘almost all British wildfires’ are started by people. The dire vision of a savage sun setting fire to a polluted planet – it’s a fairytale.

Also, a key reason Britain seems more combustible than in the past is because of government action that massively increased flammable vegetation. As a report in the Telegraph said last week, Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has responded to climate change by ‘sharply increas[ing] vegetation’ while putting a stop to ‘preventative burns of heather’. This has left us with acres more scratchy foliage – prime kindle on a hot day.

It’s a little discussed fact that, globally, ‘wildfires’ are at a record low. In July – that most scorching month – experts noted ‘record low global emissions from burning fires’. You didn’t read that in your morning paper, did you? And it’s all because Asia and Africa have got better at controlling fire – through ‘changing agricultural practices [and] fire management’ – whereas Europe and North America are lagging behind. In the words of the Associated Press, our fires feel ‘more extreme’ even though ‘global burning is oddly decreasing’. A cynic might suggest that if our societies poured more energy into fire management – rather than dragooning every hot day into a nagging sermon about toxic humans – then we could also stem the licking flames.

The obsession with heat overlooks that coldness is a far bigger killer. No one denies that super hot days are potentially lethal for the old and vulnerable. Heat can quickly alter the electrolytic balance in weaker people, with fatal consequences. Yet the cold is a deadlier if slower menace.

As Bjorn Lomborg says, ‘deaths from cold far outnumber those from heat’. An exhaustive Lancet study found that where heat kills around half a million people a year, cold kills more than 4.5million. That’s nine times as many. Why do we not see scary headlines and Sadiq Khan columns during winter months that slowly constrict the blood vessels of the elderly? Because big freezes don’t lend themselves to moral grandstanding about ‘global boiling’. Your death in winter is not morally opportune, so I’m afraid it will be forgotten: a stat no one will cite.

Nothing better captures the smug set’s elevation of moralism over practicality than the aircon crisis. We all know what Europe needs to do to counter future sweltering. Other nations, including far hotter ones than ours, have already done it. Like modern Singapore, whose founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, famously called air-conditioning one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. You just need to install cooling machines in every home, hospital, school, public building and bus and train. Life would be more bearable. Lives would be saved.

Yet the heat handwringers hate aircon because, yep, it uses energy. ‘Aircon feels great but it’s terrible for the planet’, they say. This is anecdotal, I know, but I’ve taken part in numerous media discussions over the past 15 years in which I humbly suggested that if our planet really is ‘boiling’ then the solution is aircon. I was branded a denier, a joke, an arsehole. And yet if we’d rolled aircon out, maybe there would have been fewer deaths in this ‘Four Heatwaves’ summer. Surely there will come a time when the rich and green will care more about saving human life than shaming human wrongthink.

Here’s my thought for the summer: even if we accept everything the eco-nuts say, what are we meant to do? Go back in time and stop the Industrial Revolution? Write an angry letter to Xi Jinping and demand that China stop emitting 35million tonnes of carbon every day? Tell Africans that, sorry, you can’t have what we have because some prick in a keffiyeh isn’t happy about how hot it is as he sips his Whole Foods mojito on London Fields? It’s preposterous. Modernity can’t be undone. And it shouldn’t be: we need precisely the human ingenuity that birthed our modern world if we are going to tackle the fact that it’s really fucking hot.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.