Talking about the weather has long been a harmless British pastime, with forecasters relied on to ruin holidays with their predictions of drizzle or bring good news of mild summer sunshine.
But now TV meteorologists have found themselves on the front line of the climate culture war after extreme temperatures hit England last month, with record breaking highs of 40.3C (104.5F).
Laura Tobin is known as the weather forecaster on Good Morning Britain. He is popular with viewers and has 200,000 followers on Twitter. But he has found himself spending his time battling climate deniers as his job has shifted from giving updates on Britain’s mild climate to charting the terrifying progress of the climate crisis.
She said: “When I had just done my weather forecast at 6.15am on Tuesday morning I said we’re forecasting 41C and I sat down and looked at my map afterwards, I was talking to the guy who does the weather charts for me. I actually cried. I said, ‘I’ve predicted it, it’s going to happen, it’s actually real and it’s going to happen.’ We in the forecasting community couldn’t believe it. I was so moved.”
But not all of her viewers took the warm temperatures so seriously, accusing her of “fear-mongering” and complaining on social media when Tobin linked the heatwave to climate breakdown.
Some tweets accused her of sharing “weather propaganda” and said they turned off when they saw her on TV. Some called for her to be jailed for her climate warnings and others called her “Dr Doom”.
“People say you should only talk to us about the weather, you shouldn’t talk about climate change,” he said, adding: “People think it’s someone else’s problem and they don’t want to hear it. In the People don’t like being told what to do.”
Unlike many who face abuse and complaints on Twitter, Tobin goes out of his way to respond to climate deniers and even replies to his tweets live, answering their questions.
“Meteorologists are one of the main ways climate change is communicated to the public,” he said.
“We have a duty to explain the science and show why it’s important. What we know, what we’ve seen [in such a short timescale], what we are saying is not to be alarmists, what we are seeing is alarming. It’s not scary: the truth scares people, but the reality is scary.”
She sees it as part of the job of convincing people that the climate crisis is real. “I realized a long time ago that even if these people are one in a million or one in a thousand you have to talk to them and convince them that they are wrong, showing them the proof. And I’ve managed to do that before, I’ve talked to climate deniers and skeptics, shown them the science in a non-condescending way and convinced them.”
And the angry comments don’t bother her, as she believes it’s her calling to warn people about the climate emergency.
“Anything that anybody can say that might be negative or negative, my feelings about climate change blow it out of the water, I don’t get upset, I just want them to care and understand,” Tobin explained.
“For me, the most emotional thing was that these temperatures were predicted and came true, that forest fires started and that there will be hundreds if not thousands of fatalities. Because we gave mass warnings, places like homes and schools were able to prepare and more people were saved.
“We had feedback that the Met Office should stick to the provision of not telling people what to do. I actually said, wait a minute, all these things will have helped save lives, so why is it bad?we suggest people bring an umbrella if it’s going to rain, no one wants to do that to us, so why can’t we suggest people prepare for extreme weather?
Meteorologist Scott Duncan shows rapid climate change by making and sharing graphs on social media. Many of them were shared thousands of times during the heatwave, but they also attracted abuse.
“These [extreme weather] events you get, you get the masses to come out with pitchforks and torches. People think they can predict the weather by themselves, which is fine, but when people come to social media and hit the weather forecast, it’s just not on,” he said.
Celebrities and the media have also started unhelpful hoardings of forecasters trying to warn about extreme heat.
“When it was Jeremy Clarkson tweeting incorrectly about how France had not declared a heat wave, it was kind of stirring up a mob, not helpful. It makes people not take it as seriously as they should,” Duncan added.
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After all the attention Duncan’s tweets received, he has started posting less due to the emotional toll of reading the comments.
“I’ve seen horrible arguments come up in the comments and I’ve had to restrict the comments because things are going down a very dark path. You start to fall asleep, you used to be surprised to see these things and now you’re not.
“I’ve actually been posting less, I wanted to take a step back after the backlash.”
But Duncan and Tobin plan to continue telling the world about the climate emergency.
“The air we breathed was hotter than our lungs on Monday and Tuesday [18-19 July] which wasn’t really a thing in the past – seeing 40C in places like Doncaster where it had never been above 30 – the scale of these records definitely justified the higher level of heat warning. If you don’t have a red alert for it, when would you use it?” Duncan said.
Tobin added, “My job is to give people a little more science, a little more understanding. I’ll keep doing that.”