The climate crisis threatens societal collapse – how many more hurricanes will it take for us to wake up?

As a new scientific report warns that the world is on the ‘brink of an irreversible climate disaster’, Alan Rusbridger asks why politicians and the media seem so uninterested

It took a dangerous category 3 hurricane in Florida to force climate change onto some, but not all, newspaper front pages. Normally this is a subject for gentle condescension.

You’ll have read a dozen such pieces. Climate change is genuine – there’s no denying that – but let’s be real about so-called “net zero”. We need to be “financially prudent as well as environmentally responsible”, as The Times intoned this week in endorsing BP’s retreat from agreed targets. We must stand against the politicisation of the weather, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis is fond of saying. Blah, blah, blah, as Greta Thunberg would say.

A mega storm lashing into Florida is difficult to ignore: well-off Americans as victims, lots of vivid film footage etc. And so Hurricane Milton will receive many more eyeballs and clicks than, say, the 1,700 people killed in 2022 when torrential flooding hit Pakistan, submerging a third of the country and affecting 33 million people. For some reason, this was not considered as newsworthy.

News judgements over such things can be fickle. The day before Milton made landfall a group of respected scientists issued a report which warned that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance” and that we could be facing “partial societal collapse”.

Now, it’s been some time since I worked in daily news, but this feels like what we call “a story”. Not just a story, but what is known in the trade as a “marmalade-dropper” – a story so gripping that it could lead to a distracted breakfast accident. The internal machinations of the Conservative Party are important, sure, but how do they compare with the future of humanity?

The report was barely covered. Did any news editor deign to glance at this academic paper, in the journal BioScience? If they had, they might have been struck by the very startling language of the scientists who wrote it.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” it began. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.” 

Let’s imagine a range of news desk reactions to this alarming news. The first might be a stifled yawn – as in “We’ve heard all this before, tell us something new.” The second might be to question: “Who are these so-called experts?”

There’s something in the first reaction: we have, indeed, heard dire warnings before – albeit not always in such stark terms. As to the second, the 14 authors are easily Googled: they come from top-notch universities around the world. The journal, published by Oxford University Press, comes from the American Institute of Biological Sciences. I think we can call this kosher.

But there are two deeper problems with the way the media thinks about climate change. The first is that it has become the subject of ideology more than science. Our imaginary news editor will have to factor in any prejudices his/her editor, or proprietor, may have in regard to the climate crisis. If the general newsroom feeling – arrived at by a process of mysterious osmosis – is that it’s all a load of overblown woke nonsense, then our news editor will ignore the story. The science doesn’t stand a chance.

The second problem is that journalism is most comfortable when looking in the rearview mirror. Something that happened yesterday is news: something that may – or may not – happen in 30 years is a prediction.

How can journalism adapt so that it can – with the assistance of experts – look forward as well as back? “I think journalism has to help us imagine and comprehend the true scale of what will happen if we don’t change course,” is how Wolfgang Blau, who created an Oxford University programme in climate journalism, puts it. It is sometimes referred to as “anticipatory journalism”.

But there are plenty of things in the here and now to be covered. One question might be, “Who is funding Kemi Badenoch?” The information is hiding in plain sight. Her register of interests shows that she’s accepted £10,000 for her leadership campaign from the chair of a climate science denial group.

Let’s make this really easy. Google the excellent research outfit DeSmog and you’ll find that climate campaigners have done the heavy lifting already, investigating the donation from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and founder of the investment firm Record Financial Group. He is chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

“Based in 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, the GWPF is the UK’s leading climate science denial group,” reports DeSmog. The GWPF’s director Benny Peiser has suggested it would be “extraordinary anyone should think there is a climate crisis”, while the group has also expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mischaracterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. 

What’s more, it turns out – and thanks to Bloomberg for this nugget of information – that Badenoch has been running her leadership campaign from Record’s home. While she has declared the £10,000 donation from Record, the use of the house has not been declared. A spokesperson for the candidate suggested she had done nothing wrong.

Badenoch has previously criticised the UK’s climate targets, calling them “arbitrary” in a 2022 interview. Badenoch has previously suggested that she would be in favour of delaying  the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. She argued that new fossil fuel licences were compatible with the UK’s climate targets.

Badenoch’s rival for the Tory leadership, Robert Jenrick, has also been examined by DeSmog, who found a growing record of attacks on climate action. He denounces “net zero zealotry” and has labelled the UK’s net zero target as “dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality”. He has supported the opening of new coal mines.

Worth covering? Perhaps by the same newshounds who have so enthusiastically gone in search of the generous donors who have kept Labour’s top team in smart suits, Taylor Swift tickets and football freebies?

Hurricane Milton will soon be off the front pages. Normal service will resume. But it’s hard, once you’ve read it, to dislodge the spectre of “partial societal collapse” if we continue to pretend climate change isn’t an urgent threat to our way of life. We will all have to adapt – including politicians and journalists.