Why Jeremy Clarkson's discovery of 'genuinely alarming' effects of climate change is so important
TV star and farmer Jeremy Clarkson warns this year’s harvest is expected to be ‘catastrophic’ because of bad weather, adding ‘that should be a worry for anyone who eats food’
For a long time, I quite liked the bloke-ish bonhomie of the ‘classic’ Top Gear, with Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. I didn’t particularly mind Clarkson’s near-to-the-knuckle jokes, dodgy comments about truck drivers or his dismissal of climate change. He could sometimes make me laugh – and you can’t agree about everything.
However, his horrendous “slope” remark – about an Asian man on a bridge they had built over the River Kwai – and his decision to punch a Top Gear producer because of the lack of hot food after a day’s shooting both created a sour taste that has lingered.
It wasn’t just the potential racism of the slur. It was also the fact that this was a man who had laboured alongside them; it was a sneering betrayal. And as someone who has worked with people known, in all seriousness, as “the talent” – who were sometimes anything but and comically so – I almost felt that highly entitled punch myself.
Clarkson facing ‘catastrophic’ harvest
But Clarkson is still not without redeeming features, including a willingness, for all his bombastic on-screen persona, to change his mind. In 2019, he revealed he had encountered a “graphic demonstration of global warming” after getting stuck on a boat in a dried-up river in Cambodia. He told The Sunday Times: “It’s the first time that we’ve ever admitted to there being global warming. It was alarming, genuinely alarming.”
More recently, his Prime Video show, Clarkson's Farm, appears to have done a great deal to educate people about the reality of farming and has also revealed a different side to his personality. Last year, while rather optimistically suggesting “science will solve it eventually, always does”, Clarkson told the Guardian that working on his farm, Diddly Squat (a great and very ‘Clarkson’ name), had made him realise that the effects of climate change were “happening really fast”.
“That’s what always surprises me. In the last five years, I’ve noticed a dramatic change here... It hasn’t snowed for five years. We probably get a minute of sleet. We used to get snowed in every year,” he said. While saying this, he apparently smirked and said to his interviewer “I’m like a Guardian reader’s wet dream, aren’t I?” – a remark that sounds like a jibe but is begrudgingly conciliatory to people he normally disagrees with.
On Friday last week, he wrote on social media: “It looks like this year’s harvest will be catastrophic. That should be a worry for anyone who eats food. If a disaster on this scale had befallen any other industry, there would be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth... Normal weather would help. It never stopped raining in 2024 and never started in 2025.”
Farms hit by extreme weather
It is a message that many farmers would like the rest of us, particularly those living in cities, insulated as we are from the realities of food production, to hear. A survey published last month by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found that 86 per cent of farmers had been affected by extreme rainfall, 78 per cent by drought and more than half by heatwaves.
Just 2 per cent had not experienced some kind of extreme weather. Some 84 per cent had experienced a reduction in crop yields or livestock output, and three-quarters had seen a fall in their incomes.
Tom Lancaster, the ECIU’s land, food and farming analyst, said: “Farmers are on the front line of climate change and this research reveals what impact that is having on them and their businesses. From lost crops and livestock to soil erosion, farmers are battling these impacts across more fronts than most with repeated heatwaves, droughts and periods of extreme rainfall all taking a toll on farmer confidence.”
This, he said, called the UK’s food security into question. “We need to be taking these risks more seriously, with more support for farming to adapt and build resilience, as well as more urgent action to help farmers reduce their own emissions.”
Global food prices set to rise
Similar problems are being faced by farmers all over the world. In a study published in June by the leading journal Nature, Stanford University academics estimated that, for every degree Celsius of global warming, the world’s ability to produce food would fall by 120 calories per person per day. One of the researchers, Professor Solomon Hsiang, warned that “when global production falls, consumers are hurt because prices go up and it gets harder to access food and feed our families”.
It is currently thought the world is on track for about 2.7C of warming by 2100 – well above the 1.5C and 2C limits suggested by scientists to avoid “dangerous” consequences. Unless and until we reduce carbon emissions to net zero, our climate will keep on getting hotter, less temperate and less benign.
While many viewers, including me, may have thought that Clarkson was being himself on Top Gear, he has spoken about playing a caricature of himself, “a comic creation”. However, his Clarkson’s Farm persona seems more like the real person and, fortunately, that is someone who, when confronted by the reality that our climate really is changing, is able to see it for what it is.
Ironically, his Top Gear character may help him persuade people – who, for various reasons, are still reluctant to accept that climate change is a problem – to face the increasingly obvious facts that farmers are confronted with on a regular basis.
Of course, the world should have responded to scientists’ warnings in the 1980s far more quickly, so that we didn’t reach the point at which “anyone who eats food” is being told to “worry”. However, we are where we are and, if Clarkson is able to help us wake up in his own inimitable, non-preachy way, he will have achieved a truly important feat, the very opposite of 'diddly squat'.
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