Feeling the heat? How summer fires forced parts of media to change their tune on climate

Readers of the Daily Mail were in no doubt as to what the newspaper thought about Monday's hot weather: it was little more than a "sunny day" where "snowflake Britain had a meltdown". There was criticism that public services had preemptively closed down - and praise for Prince Charles continuing to wear a suit and tie in the heat.

- Jim Waterson

Inside the newspaper, the columnist Stephen Robinson bemoaned how weather maps had dispensed with jolly symbols and instead used deep red colours to show high temperatures. He claimed the Met Office - in cahoots with the BBC - had become an "allsinging, all-dancing Amen choir for the climate alarmist 'Blob"".

Complaining that other parts of the world coped with extreme heat, he continued: "In Africa, real men would wear shorts and safari jackets and hydrate by ordering another few beers."

The paper's editorial went further and suggested a sign of weakness in the national character: "Listening to apocalyptic climate change pundits and the BBC, you'd think Britain was about to spontaneously combust."

By Tuesday after temperatures in the UK hit a record 40.3C - the same newspaper gravely described the "nightmare of wildfires" that had indeed burned suburban homes of the type occupied by many of their readers.

The extremity of this week's weather has been a reckoning for parts of the UK media, showing the extent to which coverage of the climate crisis has changed.