As extreme heat kills thousands of people in the Northern Hemisphere, and disrupts work, services and millions of peoples’ lives across many countries, experts have criticised much media reporting for failing to make clear the connections with the climate crisis and the urgency of phasing out fossil fuels.
Marie McInerney reports from a global webinar this week that brought together senior journalists, climate and communications experts, and produced some tips for how climate and health advocates, journalists and media organisations can do better at ensuring communities are properly informed.
Marie McInerney writes:
Europe has endured two deadly, record-shattering heatwaves in just a few weeks, with a third on the way next week in what the World Health Organization has warned is still just a “dress rehearsal”.
Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director, issued the warning this week, saying that Europe is warming at more than twice the global average rate and that heatwaves are becoming more frequent, intense, and prolonged.
And now, as CNN reports, the United States is experiencing “its own blast of dangerous heat”, with skyrocketing temperatures and high humidity triggered by “intense heat domes – stubborn areas of high pressure that lock hot air in place – and are clearly supercharged by global warming”.
For Europe alone, according to the World Weather Attribution organisation, it’s a deadly heat that 50 years ago would have been “virtually impossible”.
Yet, a “distressingly” large share of news coverage still does not mention the context of climate change, a global media webinar was told this week, despite the “unequivocal link” between global warming and extreme heat. And some right-leaning media outlets “have been spreading outright disinformation and mocking warnings about potential death tolls”.
Covering Climate Now executive director Mark Hertsgaard told the webinar it is “not journalistically defensible” to fail to mention climate change in heatwave reporting.
Also missing from too much climate coverage, the event heard, is the “fundamental injustice” at the heart of climate change, the disparity between “the cooled and the damned”, about who has access to cooling and who does not – a line that tends to break on racial, economic and class lines.
Another worry in media coverage is the way outlets illustrate heatwave stories, the event heard. Too often reports on extreme heat devastation are illustrated with ‘fun in the sun’ shots of people cooling off in fountains, at the beach, or eating ice-creams as if extreme heat is “something to look forward to”.
Meanwhile in Australia, a new report from climate communications charity Comms Declare reveals that major coal, oil and gas companies are marketing to Australian children in often opaque ways through trusted institutions, including schools, museums, sporting clubs, and scholarships.
“Oil and gas companies sponsoring climate education is like a tobacco company giving cancer advice,” said Comms Declare founder Belinda Noble.
“We need to ensure children receive accurate, independent education, free from corporate influence.”
The Queensland Museum has been slammed for signing a $10 million children’s education program with oil and gas giant Shell.
Services under pressure
The full toll of extreme heat events is often not known for long afterwards, but Spain and France each have reported more than 1,000 excess deaths associated with the recent heatwave, and these numbers are expected to rise.
The WHO says more than 95 million people have endured days of temperatures exceeding 35 degrees – including the hottest temperatures ever experienced in France and Germany.
Ironically, the opening session of London Climate Action Week, focused on improving extreme heat governance, was called off after Britain’s national weather service issued a “red warning.”
In a statement urging greater adaptation efforts, including heat–health action plans, early warnings, cooling spaces, and outreach to vulnerable people, WHO said demand for emergency medical services increased by as much as 50 percent in some French cities, while London recorded its highest number of life-threatening emergency calls in a single day.
Hospitals also were under enormous pressure, it said – not just from the surge in patients, but from the heat itself: cooling systems failing, medical equipment malfunctioning, staff who are sleep-deprived because night-time temperatures are not dropping, and wards described as unfit for purpose.
Extreme heat affects four key operational functions of a health system: the workforce; health information systems; infrastructure, technologies and supply chains; and service delivery, as Croakey reported last week when covering the release of the WHO’s European region’s second edition of Heat–health action plans: guidance.
Postcard from Paris
US author and climate advisor Sarah Wilson sent a grim postcard from “a burning Paris”:
All heat records have been broken. Paris became one of the hottest places on the planet. The average June temperature here in Paris is 23C. It’s been over a week now of temperatures 15C over that. And 38C is, on the treeless, stone-lined streets here, experienced as 44C. I walked past one of those iconic green cross pharmacy lights yesterday. It was recording 48C….
We know it’s got serious. Yesterday Paris banned alcohol consumption in public because the hospitals are not coping with the inundation of dehydrated patients and cardiac arrests.
This has been going on for ten days. Another heatwave is forecast for two weeks’ time.
The heat is one thing, Wilson writes, but in regions that haven’t previously experienced such extremes, “the on-the-ground reality of managing the resulting complex, interconnected, unpredictable and domino-ing fallout is another”.
That includes buckled train lines and water sanitation plants shutting down because of the heat. A nuclear power plant in France suspended production because the waters of the nearby Garonne River became too warm to provide adequate cooling.
Europe and the US are not alone. China, Japan and Korea experienced their hottest summers on record last year.
And just over a month ago, India was home to 97 of the world’s 100 hottest cities as temperatures soared in a nation where about three-quarters of the workforce, around 380 million people, labour in heat-exposed sectors, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
It said: “Census workers have died on duty. Voters collapsed at polling stations during West Bengal’s elections. A man boarding a bus to attend a wedding was dead before he arrived. Across the northern and eastern belt, temperatures between 45 degrees and 48 degrees Celsius have become, in the span of a few weeks, routine”.
Words matter
However, despite the stakes for humanity’s well-being, there has been a “broad, persistent retreat in public language about climate”, according to a study commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, titled ‘Climate Support Strong Across Leading Democracies, But Words Matter’.
Among other measures of “climate hushing”, it found that global news coverage of climate change fell 38 percent by the end of 2025 from the peak in 2021.
It called on advocates to:
- Lead with everyday consequences. Underlining real human impacts – from extreme weather to rising household costs – is the single most effective way to drive prioritisation of climate as an issue and make it feel personally relevant.
- Make the cause concrete. Reminding people the root cause of climate change is simply “pollution” that we can reduce makes the problem feel 10-20 percent more solvable while reducing polarisation.
- Frame clean energy as additive, not restrictive. The strongest energy messages emphasise what clean energy delivers – local availability, low cost, and a path to energy independence. Messages focused on bans and mandates consistently underperformed, reducing support for climate action across countries and audiences.
It is also time for media outlets to get serious about their portrayal of “brutalising” heatwaves, because there is no doubt that global temperatures will keep rising until humans stop burning fossil fuels, the Covering Climate Now webinar heard.
Hertsgaard said a slew of scientific studies, including a poll by Gallup, find that 80 to 89 percent of people globally want stronger government climate action, but there is a “wrong-headed belief” that they are in the minority, and that most people don’t care.
“That’s partly on us as journalists,” he said.
“In the short term, it’s our job to provide accurate and timely information on the dangers facing audiences and how they can stay safe, but the best reporting also explains why this is happening in the first place, that burning fossil fuels has overheated the planet, resulting in heat waves that are hotter, longer, and more frequent.”
Hertsgaard added that “climate literacy” should not just be the purview of media outlets’ science desks, but also for their business, politics and international desks.
“Civic minded journalism can literally save lives,” he said.
Attribution science
Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First and a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, acknowledged in the webinar that writing about heat is hard, despite it being a bigger killer than floods, storms, drought and other climate-fueled events.
“Heat challenges a lot of our thinking as journalists because it’s unlike a hurricane…[where] you go out and see that the wind and the water is raging and the victims are clear,” he said.
“When people die during heatwaves, there’s no gunshot wound. It’s not obvious what happened to them, so it takes some detective work on the part of officials and others to even come up with good numbers about mortality rates and things like that.”
It’s therefore incumbent on journalists to do more background work than in other disasters, and to understand why heat is dangerous, how it works, to do “due diligence” on the topic, he said.
That work is becoming easier, he said, with the development of climate attribution science, which links global climate change to specific weather events, to be able to say that “this event was virtually impossible” without climate change or “40 percent more likely” because of climate change.
According to Climate Portal, this growing field of research “lets scientists move beyond general statements – like that climate change will lead to more extreme heatwaves – to specific ones: that this heatwave, at this particular time and place, was worsened by climate change.
That work is being strengthened now, Goodell said, by a more recent and sophisticated attribution science called end to end attribution, which researchers say can trace the path from a particular fossil fuel company’s emissions to specific economic losses, “theoretically making it possible to hold emitters financially accountable for climate damages”.
It’s a “very powerful and narratively compelling” link between emissions, events and potential legal damages that Goodell encourages journalists to think about when reporting on heatwaves, saying he believes it’s “journalistic malpractice” not to reference such links.
Greenpeace activists graphically drew these connections this week in London, changing the names of well-known Tube stations – for example from Baker Street to Baking Street, Tottenham to Hottenham, and then applying a sticker saying ‘brought to you by Shell’.
In an email to Croakey, Greenpeace UK senior climate campaigner Philip Evans said the action sought to highlight how Shell, the UK’s biggest oil and gas company, was “making billions from climate-wrecking fossil fuels while we all must live on a cooking planet”.
Visual matters
The Greenpeace action helped produce some compelling visuals for media and social media, which was necessary given climate change “has something of an image problem”, Saffron J. O’Neill, Professor in Climate and Society at the University of Exeter, told the webinar.
O’Neill, who wrote The Visual Life of Climate Change, says climate imagery remains largely confined to a narrow set of visual types or traits, such as polar bears and melting ice caps, where the images that we see are often distant from people’s everyday lives and experiences, or prioritise some people’s voices and experiences over others.
That’s particularly to be seen with heatwaves where the text often portrays the seriousness of the risks of extreme hot weather, but the photographs and other types of visuals don’t – sending the message that heatwaves are “not something risky, not something [people] need to care about”, she said.
Some of her examples include: “Hell is coming” from Mail Online, in a story accompanied by a picture of a woman splashing in a fountain by the Eiffel Tower, while a live-text discussion on the Guardian website entitled “Heatwave: Paris suffers 42.6C hottest day ever” was illustrated by people enjoying the hot weather on Brighton Beach.
Having visuals that contradict the text is not unusual in climate reporting, but she said it’s particularly problematic in the context of extreme heat, where those who are most vulnerable and will suffer most in heatwaves include older people, young children, people who are pregnant, people who work outside in the gig economy, and people with pre-existing health conditions.
Currently these groups are “completely excluded from most of the visuals”, which undermines messaging about extreme heat being a serious risk and requiring protective behaviour, as well as long-term advocacy.
Psychological evidence shows that lack of visuals on what climate adaptation might look like also stops people being able to imagine “what a future might look like in order to work towards it”, O’Neill said.
“Where are the pics of older people using cool spaces, people doing innovative things to keep their homes cool, public spaces being greened to reduce the Urban Heat Island effect, kids in their school uniform changes? Totally missing. Almost as if we didn’t need to adapt (beyond glugging some water or using a brolly as a sun shelter),” she wrote during the heatwave.
Her team is now working to build a free-to-air collection of videography and photography that they hope will spark conversations in newsroom about visualising climate differently.
“What we do know from public engagement research is that audiences want to know more about climate change, they want to have more news about heatwaves, they want to have more news about what they should do about it, solutions,” she said.
“They don’t only want to be told how bad things are. So we know there’s an appetite for this kind of change in visual policy, it’s just not happening yet.”
Industry talking points
Also in the webinar, Patrick Galey, a former journalist who is now head of investigations and fossil fuels lead at Global Witness, spoke about the “fundamental injustice” at the heart of climate change, and the ongoing unwillingness of the global north to recognise its driving role in the origins of climate change and relative privilege in experiencing its effects.
Nonetheless, he said, the past week in the UK has seen a country where “we are terrifyingly unprepared to deal with what is to come”.
What scares him most is that if the world continues to allow the fossil fuel industry to “profitably poison us to death”, this European summer “will be the coolest one for the rest of our lives”.
Galey said he is dismayed that some of the coverage in response to the heatwave, including from industry and politicians, suggests the answer is just retrofit homes and businesses in Britain and throughout Europe with air conditioning.
Such adaptation is needed, he agrees, but it should not let the people who’ve been driving climate change “be our teachers in the way we adapt to the problem that they created”.
“It’s extractive, and it’s unjust, and it’s unsustainable, and it’s frankly mad when you think about it in planetary terms and civilisational survival sense, but we’re always told it’s expensive to electrify, it’s expensive to put in renewables, it’s expensive to adapt,” he said.
It is expensive, Galey acknowledged, but estimated it would cost Britain less to fully electrify, to achieve net zero, than it did to respond to the 2022 fossil fuel energy shock.
Galey said journalists should not lose sight of how the globe has got to the climate crisis, nor be intimidated by fossil fuel industry talking points, “which tell you it’s too expensive, tell you it takes too long, and tell you that, frankly, we’ve blown past 1.5 (degrees Celsius) anyway, so why keep trying”.
“That is the logic of the drug dealer,” he said. “It is the logic of someone who wants us to fail in this because they make more money.”
Further reading
Watch the webinar
Croakey Health Media is a member of the Covering Climate Now global media collaboration. See Croakey’s archive of articles on extreme heat and health
Add Comment