In June, during the first of the record heat waves to scorch Europe this summer, “the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020,” Bloomberg Green reported this week. And conditions inside U.K. hospitals were “far worse” than during Covid, Fiona Brennan, an anesthetist in Cardiff, Wales, told Bloomberg. It was so hot inside surgery rooms for cancer patients that basic procedures faltered, Brennan said, adding that some patients were so sweaty that she had to constantly check that intravenous drips were not “slipping out” of their bodies.
Also, as with Covid, early mortality figures dramatically understated the death tolls to come. The U.K. Health Security Agency initially estimated that 2,877 people died from heat-related ailments in May and June. France estimated 5,700 excess deaths took place between June 17 and July 2. Other analyses, benefiting from more complete data and advanced methodology, blamed the heat for as many as 20,000 deaths across Europe. And that was before the June heat wave was followed by an additional four heat waves that surely boosted the number of sick and dying.
Europe is not the only hot spot. In India, temperatures in the capital, Delhi, soared to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit), pushing the limits of human survival, especially for the city’s poor, and again illustrating a core injustice of the climate emergency: The people who did the least to cause it are the ones who tend to suffer the most.
But despite such parallels, there are critical differences between the Covid and climate emergencies. In the opening weeks of the pandemic, scientists weren’t sure how the virus spread, or how to treat it. By contrast, science is unequivocal that today’s extreme heat waves—and the drought and fires they’ve kindled—would be “all but impossible” without human-caused global warming driven primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal. “Summer of 2026 is another step in the escalation of our world into a sort of hotter, more dangerous planet that climate scientists have been telling us about for decades,” Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, said on CBS News.
Another difference: When Covid emerged in early 2020, much of the news media rose to the challenge, providing science-based reporting that helped both the public and policymakers make informed decisions about how to respond. Journalists also held governments to account, puncturing claims of miracle cures and explaining the value of physical distancing and getting vaccinated.
But, with notable exceptions like those cited in this article, news coverage of this summer’s extreme weather has fallen well short of the Covid standard. Two-thirds of the articles that major U.K. newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and more deadly. In the U.S., the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC between July 13 and 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”
The Guardian, as usual, has kept the climate connection front and center, and on August 8, it published an opinion piece by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who urged government leaders in Britain and around the world to treat climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is—something Khan began doing as mayor in 2018. Khan’s call for leaders to “reduce our reliance on oil and gas” did not name names, but commentators interpreted it as pressing the new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, to rule out more North Sea oil drilling, a question Burnham has studiously avoided since taking office on July 20. Meanwhile, a petition demanding that the government present a televised emergency briefing on the climate crisis has attracted 100,000 signatures, the threshold for getting it debated in Parliament, whose next session begins September 1.
Khan was only half right, however, when he opined that “the climate emergency is here, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming.” Yes, the emergency is here, and “coming faster and harder” than even scientists expected, economist Matthew Agarwala of the University of Sussex said on Britain’s Channel 4. But as Khan’s own article goes on to lament, a small but noisy chorus of climate deniers still deny that climate change is happening at all.
Khan cites Donald Trump’s dismissal of climate change as “a con job” and calls out unnamed “opposition politicians and right-wing populists” in the U.K. He does not point out that these obstructionists represent only a small fraction of public opinion. More than eight out of 10 Britons (83 percent), as well as three out of four Americans (74 percent), want their governments to take stronger climate action, according to Gallup polling that informs Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. But the deniers appear to be more numerous than they actually are, both because they have access to far-reaching megaphones and because most news coverage does not point out how wildly their claims are contradicted by science.
Again, the contrast with media coverage of Covid is striking. On April 23, 2020, as Covid’s death toll was mounting, Trump suggested at a White House press briefing that injecting disinfectant into the body might kill the virus. News outlets responded with a flurry of stories quoting incredulous experts lambasting Trump’s idea as dangerous nonsense. Trump quickly retreated, claiming that he’d been speaking sarcastically (though video of his remarks showed he was serious).
Now, as the summer of 2026 brings record heat to much of the world, as thousands die and many thousands more endure various degrees of misery, White House reporters do not even ask Trump about climate change, much less challenge his scientifically disproven assertion that it’s a hoax. In the U.K., press coverage largely ignores the climate argument against more North Sea oil drilling, instead framing Burnham’s upcoming decision as the latest battle in the culture wars.
Most journalists did better than this during Covid, and the public needs us to do better now.
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
