There is a story — which may be apocryphal — about the dean of an elite women’s college in northwest Massachusetts who once counseled her students, “When rape is inevitable, lean back and enjoy it.” Suffice to say, this was before the Women’s Lib movement clicked into high gear. The only people who would say anything so ridiculous today are all members of the current US administration. What MAGA is to America, Reform UK is to the British Isles.
So it should perhaps come as no surprise that Richard Tice, a deputy leader of the Reform UK party, blithely asserted this week that when climate change brings record setting high temperatures, Britons should just accept them and move on. Asked about the recent extreme heatwaves in the UK, Tice said with a straight face, “Of course, the climate changes, but where is the evidence that net zero is going to stop it? Where is the evidence? There is no evidence. Climate change has always happened. It always will.
Doing The Smart Thing
“Maybe the smarter thing to do is to adapt to it than think arrogantly that you can stop it. When it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it. And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic. That means we can take on the French — fantastic. Let’s celebrate some of these things rather than just be sort of doom and gloom about it.”
In other words, people in the UK should just lean back and enjoy the hotter weather. There is an echo in there of Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon chief and secretary of state in the first Tramp administration, who said that people will just need to adapt to hotter temperatures. And they will, of course, because of nature’s seemingly infinite capability to adapt. The difficulty, however, is that genetic changes take hundreds of year — or more — to happen. The warming of the planet is happening at a pace far faster than humans and other forms of life can adapt to.
Tice does get one thing correct. Earth’s climate has always experienced extreme temperatures, from the superheated era when dinosaurs roamed to the various Ice Ages that covered much of the planet with glaciers that were often several miles thick. Did humans cause those events? No, they did not. Where Tice veers off course is when he proclaims there is no evidence the human activity has had any impact on the Earth’s climate.
There is a mountain of evidence that average global temperatures are rising in lockstep with the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is also ample evidence that the increase in carbon dioxide coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans learned they could substitute the power derived from burning things for the power of human muscles.
The obstinacy of people like Tice is similar to the refusal off the Catholic Church to accept the findings of Galileo and Copernicus because they were contrary to their religious teachings. Minds are like parachutes — they only function properly when they are open. The refusal to admit there are things we don’t know is the hallmark of people whose intellect has been stunted by ideology.
It is despicable that people like Tice and Tillerson spend their lives cosseted inside climate controlled cocoons where the impact of higher average temperatures does not affect them. It is easy for a person living in a 75 degree world to tell someone struggling to breathe when it is 115 degrees outside to “toughen up.” The inability to empathize with the plight of others is the mark of a sociopath, not a leader.
The Reaction To Tice
Bridget Phillipson, the chair of the Labour party, told The Guardian, “Richard Tice’s comments are tone-deaf. With wildfires raging across the UK and drought threatening water supplies and food security, comments like these don’t just raise serious questions about his judgment — they also expose where his interests really lie.”
Tice’s comments came amid a record-breaking summer during which temperatures have risen above 35º C (95º F) several times, causing thousands of deaths, millions of hospital visits, and costing the UK an estimated £4 billion in lost economic output. The UK government has estimated that 2,877 people died as a result of high temperatures during the May and June heatwaves — twice as many as during all of the summer of 2025.
Hotter temperatures have been linked to the increasing frequency of wildfires, which are burning larger areas across many parts of the world. The so-called fire wave the UK witnessed weeks ago was the most widespread the country has ever seen, with the combination of wet winters and prolonged heatwaves exacerbating the risk, The Guardian reports.
New figures published in The Lancet show that older people are affected by the heat at lower temperatures than previously thought, while medical professionals say they are struggling to deal with the surge in patients. Tice’s answer would probably be that they should hurry up and die to “decrease the surplus population.”
The Lancet study found that heatwaves will leave huge and growing numbers of people worldwide of all ages suffering from uncompensable heat stress (UHS) in which the body loses the ability to cool itself. That in turn leads to a higher risk of serious damage to their health or possibly death.
“Our results suggest accounting for age stratified vulnerability, intolerable heat will be experienced at much larger scales and for longer durations, affecting far more people than previously thought,” according to the study, which was led by health academics from Stanford University in California.
A spokesperson for the Royal College of Nursing said, “Those calling for people to enjoy the impacts of climate change should say it to the nurses collapsing in hospitals where temperatures are hitting 36 degrees. Or to the thousands of patients lining corridors every day as extreme heat causes severe illness among the vulnerable, older people and even those without pre-existing conditions. Climate change is a public health emergency that’s getting worse in front of our eyes. The nursing profession doesn’t want out-of-touch interventions, but action to reduce emissions and make NHS and care facilities safe to work and be cared for in.”
Simon Williams, a public health researcher at Swansea University, added, “It’s concerning to see someone so high profile spreading misinformation around climate change and its impacts. Particularly for the elderly, heatwaves over time make them less capable of regulating their body temperature. Even a few degrees either way can have a major impact.” Caroline Abrahams, the charity director of Age UK, called the new findings about the impact of heat on older people alarming. “This study means there’s now no denying that extreme heat poses a very real health threat to our older population.”
The National Farmers’ Union, meanwhile, has said farmers are facing “one of the worst ever” harvests, while firefighters have battled wildfires throughout the Midlands, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Reform UK has long campaigned to scrap the government’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050 and has promised to end green subsidies if elected. Does that sound familiar? Fossil fuel madness is rampant upon the land and people like Richard Tice are dependent on ignorance and fear to advance their own political fortunes. Surely Dante Alighieri would have something to say about them. Is there perhaps an Eighth Circle in Hell waiting just for them?