Right’s heat danger denial puts children’s lives at risk, says George Monbiot

Right-wing newspapers have been accused of downplaying the health risks of extreme heat in Britain, with columnists and leader writers dismissing official warnings as “nannying” and “hysterical” even as scientific evidence confirms the serious dangers posed by rising temperatures, particularly for children.

An editorial in The Telegraph headlined “Hot weather alarmism treats the public like children” argued that officials should trust people to “take the appropriate precautions” and urged Britons to “learn to live” with heat. The newspaper’s columnist Ysenda Maxtone Graham, writing under the headline “Heatwave hysterics wouldn’t have lasted a day in 1976”, insisted that “common sense was applied by most without the need for nannying intervention” and claimed health messages had become “preposterous, as if a healthy adult is liable to drop dead from a little bit of sun exposure”. In The Sun, Jane Moore asked: “Why on earth do schools need to CLOSE in hot weather?” and recalled the summer of 1976 as “the best summer of my life”, praising a “gung-ho spirit” she said should serve as a “standard benchmark for common sense”. The Daily Mail ran an article whose subheading asserted that “in 1976… the schools DID stay open”.

These claims, however, contradict the historical record and ignore significant differences between the two periods. Leo Hickman of Carbon Brief has pointed out that schools did close early during the 1976 heatwave, even though June temperatures that year never reached the records set in recent weeks. Furthermore, the 1976 heatwave was dry, whereas the current hot spell has been accompanied by high humidity, a factor that compounds health risks by reducing the body’s ability to cool itself through sweating.

The dismissive tone of these columns comes despite widespread evidence that public understanding of heat-related health dangers remains dangerously low. The Red Cross discovered in 2023 that there is a strikingly poor awareness of heatwave risks in the UK, where extreme temperatures were once rare. A survey published last year in the journal Energy Research & Social Science found that 49% of participants had “little to no knowledge on how to cope with extreme heat”.

Children face heightened physiological risks

Among those most vulnerable to extreme heat are children, a group whose particular susceptibility received little attention in the newspaper columns. Children are physiologically more at risk than adults because they have higher metabolic rates and lower sweating rates, which reduces their ability to regulate body temperature. Their thermal comfort levels are, on average, between 1.9 and 2.8 degrees Celsius lower than those of adults.

There have been multiple reports of children vomiting and losing consciousness in classrooms during heatwaves. The impact on learning is measurable: temperatures above 25C impair cognitive performance. The government’s own Climate Change Committee has found that “taking an exam on a 32C day leads to around a 10% lower likelihood of passing compared to a 22C day”. This places children in state schools at a particular disadvantage, as private schools are generally better able to afford air-conditioned exam rooms and well-insulated buildings.

Despite this body of evidence, the government has confirmed that it sets no maximum temperature limit for schools. When asked, it said it would otherwise “have to do something”. Current official advice amounts to little more than opening and closing doors and windows and minimising heat from equipment — guidance that teachers in buildings with sealed windows and high internal heat loads describe as impossible to implement.

The consequences of inaction are stark. A new study of classrooms in Hampshire found that 66% already present a “cognitive impairment risk” to pupils. Without intervention, that figure is projected to rise to 92% by 2050. The same study found that “heat strain” — a physiologically dangerous level of internal temperature — already affects 6% of classrooms. Many school buildings are structurally unsuited to hot summers, particularly the “lightweight, overglazed, single-sided” designs favoured from the 1950s onwards.

Class divide in heat resilience

The disparity in heat exposure and protection is not limited to schools. Across the country, the ability to stay cool is sharply divided along class lines. One study found that 82% of households reported difficulty keeping at least one room cool during summer. The rate of overheating among the poorest half of households was twice that of the top half of higher-income earners, a pattern confirmed by multiple studies. Steady, safe indoor temperatures, the evidence shows, are increasingly the preserve of the rich.

Years of austerity have left many school buildings in a dire state, with some that should have been replaced decades ago still in daily use. The same class pattern recurs: those with the means to insulate themselves from extreme heat — in air-conditioned offices, well-built homes, and private schools with modern facilities — are also those most likely to urge others to “tough it out”. The call for resilience, critics argue, is rarely directed at those who already enjoy protection. Government warnings themselves remain, in the assessment of researchers, vague, hard to interpret, and unsupported by effective action.