The Times They Are a-Blobbin’

No, Hugo Rifkind, climate sceptics have not gone quiet

The problem of the climate debate (such as it is) is that climate change is a theory of everything. It’s only at its surface, rather than at its core, about the role of CO₂ in the atmosphere. When one tries to nail down some climate matter with some counterpart, the conversation explodes into countless tangents. That might mean that frustratingly little progress is possible in debate, but what is revealed by such an encompassing yet incoherent ideology, advanced by slippery chancers and zealots alike, is a great deal more information about what’s going on in society – especially at its top – than what is going on in the sky. Climate change isn’t really about the climate. And climate journalism is neither.

In the Times last week, the paper’s columnist Hugo Rifkind claims to have been writing about climate change for 20 years. He claims, furthermore, that whereas he has, for the same duration, been routinely assailed by climate sceptics (like “weird bluebottles we now get coming in from our garden whenever we cook fish”) those sceptics are now absent. Charming. “Where are all those climate sceptics now?”, he asks, suggesting that the 35-degree temperatures might have finally debunked their hypotheses and sent them packing. One of the things that climate change as a messy theory of everything forces us to confront is the quality of journalism in 21st-century Britain.

One answer to Rifkind, then, might be the changing nature of the relationship between the newspaper and its audience. I used to buy the Times. It was indeed my first digital subscription. And it was essential reading for someone who kept a watch on energy and environmental politics. But I remember very clearly the reason I cancelled it. It was in the wake of the Fukushima accident in 2011. I had read yet another article which attempted to put the disaster into the same terms as Chernobyl and “Five {sic} Mile Island”. Why was I paying for this absolute bilge, I wondered, when I could get the same low-quality nonsense from the Guardian? The only value in the newspaper was to know what people were talking about. So perhaps Rifkind is less bothered by climate sceptics because fewer of them bother to read his work.

The Times and the Guardian boast substantial digital subscriptions. So the point about the declining influence of the newspaper can’t be supported with metrics such as circulation alone – though that is significant in the case of the Independent and the New Statesman, as I’ve discussed recently. Both publications decided early on to champion climate change, whereas their real existential crises lay closer to home. The Independent was forced to give up its print edition a decade ago, and the New Statesman requires the generosity of a multimillionaire benefactor and tens of millions of pounds in bailouts to keep it afloat. This rule applies generally: the deeper an institution’s crisis, the more it clings to climate change as a story.