From ‘psyops’ to ‘hysterical hysteria’: how GB News and Talk TV lost their cool in the heatwaves

“We used to call it Darwinism,” replied co-host Renée Hoenderkamp. She is a medical doctor.

The arrival of the intense heatwave in late June – the most extreme recorded in Europe – didn’t change the tone. “People die each year from vending machines falling on them, and coconuts hitting their heads. 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. “It doesn’t mean you have to go about changing your life in ways big and small to accommodate for it.”

Over on TalkTV, a British streaming news channel, there was also little empathy as the country sweltered in deadly heat. “I’m very sorry if someone dies because of the heat, but I don’t think that’s a reason for us never to be allowed to take a flight again, or stop being allowed to eat meat,” said the presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer on 24 June, citing policies no one is putting in place. 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. You’d be wrong.

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. The world’s climate scientists, in reports signed off by 192 national governments, have been clear for more than a decade that 100% of global heating since 1950 has been caused by human emissions and activities. Every heatwave is being made more intense and more likely as a result of fossil fuel burning, and rising global heat kills one person a minute around the world, according to a major recent report in the Lancet.

Back to the channels, where the heat the country was enduring, if not its cause, was undeniable. Cue the presenters turning their fire on the weather forecasts. “The weather maps, they used to go orange and red. They’ve now lowered the threshold so it’s bright red. It’s obviously … a psyops operation,” said the TalkTV host Ash Gould. Who was behind this conspiracy was not revealed.

Another TalkTV host, Alex Armstrong, was also frothing about maps: “They’ve literally coloured the country black – because it’s like a nuclear holocaust level. They’ve gone nuts, these climate fanatics.” He did not explain what maps he meant, and they were not shown to viewers of the programme.

One issue that got the TV stations hot under the collar was air conditioning, which, ironically enough, was barely needed in the UK until the climate crisis drove up temperatures. Foufas said on GB News: “Here in the UK, remember we’ve all been told to rip out our air conditioning because it’s not conducive to net zero.” This blanket statement appears to be based on a single planning dispute in