Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently “dangerous climate lies” like claims there is no climate emergency should not be allowed to go unchallenged in TV programmes.
Ofcom to investigate complaints of climate change denial for first time since 2017
Exclusive: UK regulator makes U-turn over TalkTV and TalkRadio complaints after claims it let some broadcasters ‘spout dangerous climate lies’
Damian Carrington
Environment editor Wed 25 Mar 2026 00.46 AEDT
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Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and TalkRadio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints.
One complaint was about comments from a Talk guest who said in November that climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false”. In the second case, also in November, another guest said the Labour government’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”.
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“Rightwing channels have been allowed to spout dangerous climate lies, unchecked, for too long,” said a GLP spokesperson. “We’re glad Ofcom is finally listening and await the conclusion of the investigations. Should it fail to take action against Talk’s misinformation, we will not hesitate to hold them to account.”
An Ofcom spokesperson said: “In re-examining the programmes, we concluded that they raise potentially substantive issues under the broadcasting code which warrant investigation. We have, therefore, opened investigations [on] whether they breached our rules on due impartiality and material misleadingness.” Ofcom said it had also opened another climate-related investigation after a viewer complaint about another TalkTV programme.
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Climate skeptic websites for now do not appear to be part of the investigation. OFCOM has the power to investigate websites, and extensions to this power are being considered which might be applied to websites like WUWT.
In an age where British people can be arrested for an unkind Facebook post, the threat of regulatory investigation of statements like climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false” appears to represent a dangerous step towards shutting down freedom to criticise climate claims.
Climate change is not fake, in the sense the world has warmed since the mid 1800s. What is fake is this represents any kind of emergency.
This is a sad day for Britain. Britain can reasonably claim to be the birthplace of modern parliamentary democracy. The history of British parliaments stretches back to AD 1236, when King Henry III summoned the parliamentum generalissimum. Most of that history represents an advance of people’s right to speak, a gradual replacement of absolute tyranny with representative democracy. Threatening or curtailing people’s right to make a claim in public about a scientific point of view, whether you agree with those expressed views or not, is a major step backwards in this tradition of freedom.
Even in Shakespeare’s time, in the late 1500s to early 1600s, the British enjoyed a level of freedom unknown throughout most of the world. Shakespeare wrote plays which were widely seen as criticisms of royal policy or conduct, without being punished for his impudence – though he faced investigation on at least one occasion, for allegedly encouraging insurrection. But even Shakespeare didn’t face harassment for his scientific views.
For hundreds of years the appropriate way to respond to a scientific claim you disagreed with was to publish a counter claim. There is no tradition of having government censors on programmes to immediately dispute or red label everything the government disagrees with.
But now we face a massive retrograde step, an attempted shutdown of free speech, the right to express views about science, which is on a par with the speech regulation of the religious tyrannies of the Middle Ages, when speaking out against religious interpretations of nature and divinity was severely punished.
Is this really the kind of future Britain wants, where disputing claims we are in a climate emergency is treated as blasphemy? Where broadcasters are required to include a representative of government approved views whenever science is discussed? Because this is where Britain is currently headed.
