In this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. Collectively, we have created and maintained a national climate narrative of small disappointments and pleasures. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that “tomorrow would be rather windy”, but “a good day to hang out the washing”. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.
Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. “Met Office considers issuing red ‘extreme heat warning’ across Britain while nation enjoys ‘incredible summer’,” said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website on Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have increasingly struggled to find the right language to describe this transformation’s daily consequences. Their struggle influences and exemplifies that of many Britons to understand, and work out what we think about, the apparent end of the weather patterns we expected to shape our whole lives.
Across all the British TV broadcasters, sometimes within the same bulletin, or even the same sentence, weather forecasters now present sunshine as welcome and oppressive; high temperatures as miraculous and unbearable; rain as an inconvenience and desperately needed; cloud cover as depressing and a relief. Tanned forecasters in sundresses, emphasising the positives for domestic holidaymakers of another record-breaking summer, alternate with grim-faced forecasters suggesting we are experiencing a weather apocalypse.
Meanwhile, the wildly differing effects of the climate crisis on different areas, and from one season to another, are further fracturing Britain’s weather conversation into a babble of separate, sometimes conflicting discourses. This year, parts of the country have experienced such contrasting summers – wetter than usual in western Scotland, desert-like in southern England – that we can no longer say they share broadly the same northern European climate, as had been assumed for centuries. In an era of separatism and nationalism, another major binding element of the UK may be falling away.
Beneath the relatively placid surface of our previous weather culture, there were always some tensions and contradictions. In a 2025 academic paper, British Heatwave Discourse (1985–2023): from Ice Cream to Armageddon?, Thijs van Dooremalen and Philip Smith analysed articles about heatwaves in the national press. They found that until 2000 positive and negative coverage coexisted in roughly equal quantities, “often in the same newspaper”. From 2000 to 2014, the balance shifted slowly towards the negative, as the climate crisis became a mainstream worry. Yet only from 2015 did an “Apocalyptic genre” of heatwave articles begin to become dominant; and a “Romantic genre” of celebratory coverage remains. In a country where many people still spend much of the year feeling cold, the idea of hot weather as a liberation is likely to linger, for some, for decades to come.
For other Britons, heatwaves have become political flashpoints, their causes to be furiously contested, their existence even denied. During the record heat of 2022, “weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling”, the BBC reported, including “hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to ‘get a grip’… ‘it’s just summer’”. Some of these climate crisis deniers described advice on how to stay cool as “pandering to the ‘woke brigade’”, and accused the BBC and Met Office of “scaremongering” to help the then Conservative government impose unneeded green policies.
This summer, some of these conspiratorial arguments have re-emerged. But with the Tories having in effect turned against net zero, joined by Reform UK, Restore Britain and most of the rightwing media, disagreeing with weather forecasters who express alarm about our changing climate has become more mainstream. Discussing the weather is no longer just small talk, but also a battlefield in the culture wars.
No wonder forecasters often sound unsure or extremely cautious about what tone to adopt on air. In 2023, the BBC’s Tomasz Schafernaker gave a very careful interview to the Big Issue. “While our language remains largely the same,” he said, “we have adapted it to include references to climate change. We must be mindful that prolonged periods of sun and heat are not always good news … However, there are often areas in the UK where the weather is much more comfortable, [so] highlighting that it’s not ‘all bad’ is important. It’s a balance that we assess on a daily basis.”
Yet three years on, his broadcasts have become less neutral. “The savage summer continues across Europe,” he said on the BBC weather website last Thursday afternoon. “It’s been excruciatingly hot …” On BBC One last Sunday evening, while giving this week’s UK forecast, he kept making gestures of helplessness and disbelief. It was like a weather bulletin from a dystopian drama.
Such interventions no longer seem melodramatic. “The climate of the 20th century has now gone,” says Mike Kendon, a Met Office scientist and co-author of State of the UK Climate in 2025, published last month. So far, this year’s weather has been more extreme. Even more than the heat, summer drought and winter floods, its key feature has been the weather getting stuck in one state for months – a characteristic of harsh continental climates, rather than the changeable one around which our society has been built. So it’s possible that next summer will feature relentless rain, not drought, and that other seasons will continue to stall as well, damaging the economy, everyday life and public health.
after newsletter promotion
Britons are world famous for their weather stoicism. But this stoicism has been created by centuries of relatively minor weather discomforts and disasters. How the forecasters, and the rest of us, will react as the climate crisis intensifies – in our private behaviours and assumptions as well as our public lives – is a question we are only in the early stages of answering.
