Laura Sangha

A companion piece to: What is history for? Or: Doing history/thinking historically

The train to Totnes this weekend was full of late holiday makers heading for Cornwall. They were gratifyingly impressed by one of the greatest rail journeys in England – the swoop down the Exe estuary coast where, if you are seated on the correct side of the train, there is nothing between you and the rippling water, scattered with gulls, oyster catchers, cormorants and mudlarks.

I was rather sadder to overhear the conversation as it turned to the climate crisis. Observing the rolling Devon hills, the shallow rooted grass now returned to a lush green after a couple of weeks of regular rain showers, one traveller compared it to their London experience. ‘I suppose it wasn’t as hot down here this summer’. The other, from Kent, agreed, adding ‘I expect it will be just like 1976. After that was all over things just returned to normal again very quickly’. The companion agreed wholeheartedly and conversation then moved on to the drought resistant planting that both travellers were beginning in their parched dust bowl gardens.

At first I was taken aback to again hear repeated the line about 1976. Although it was an idea that bounced around a lot during the first and second heatwaves, I felt that the persistent, life threatening heat that followed had rather snuffed it out. No doubt my own personal media bubble was to blame. But it soon got me thinking more generally about public or popular discourse, where ideas like ‘1976’ come from, and why they persist. Why can’t people see that this take on the exceptional, extra-ordinary weather we endured in England this summer is spectacularly wrong?

Of course, there are too many reasons to examine them all here, so I wish to focus on just one: a lack of critical thinking, and a particular subset of that, a failure to consider evidence. People are spectacularly wrong because they don’t have tools which allow them to weigh up an interpretation or an argument, to examine the evidence it is based on, to see it in a broader context, or to consider other interpretations and to compare and contrast them to conclude which is most persuasive.

Yes, that’s right (surprise!) I want to talk about the methods of historical study.

My job as a historian requires that I am an expert critical thinker. It is also my chief responsibility to my students to teach them how to become critical thinkers. Because I have been steeped in this way of interacting with the world since embarking on my undergraduate degree (mumble) decades ago, it’s too easy to forget that for many people it is just not something that they have been schooled in. Or if they were, it was too long ago to remember, or they weren’t listening, or they were absent that day. Or they went on to study a subject that didn’t value or prioritise it.

But in an increasingly unstable global context, a lack of critical thinking allows misinformation and lies to proliferate, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that something is a lie, that it is untrue, that it is not right. It is not right that 2026 was just the same thing as 1976, and critical thinking can prove it.

First, to the evidence itself. Anyone can google ‘1976 compared with 2026’ and find links to a range of articles comparing the weather conditions of the two. But you need to apply some critical thinking about the context of these articles to work out which of them is likely to contain evidence you can trust.  

All this means is asking some fundamental questions. Who wrote this? What are they saying? Why did they write it – what point are they trying to make? Who are they writing for, what’s their audience, what are they trying to persuade them of and why? What is their evidence for what they have written? Where did it come from? What are the problems and gaps in it? Who has a vested interest in what they are saying?

Might this person have a reason to exaggerate, to leave out some facts, or to tell a particular story? Is it likely that this person is misrepresenting the evidence to further their own ends?

Let’s apply these critical questions to our google list of articles about 1976.

Should I trust the Reddit thread ‘2026 is the new ’76. I will not be taking questions’? Well no – I don’t know who wrote this. I know that the social news website Reddit is full of amateur and expert opinion but how can I tell the difference from the info provided there? Just because millions of people voted a thread up, it doesn’t make it right.

How about this Reuters article then. A trusted news source, so that gives me more confidence. But the article is from July, so it can’t give me a full picture of the conditions across the summer.

What about a Mirror article from mid-August then? Again, it’s not what I am looking for. Tabloid and broadsheet content is always likely to provide an interpretation that will resonate with its presumed audience or advertisers, it follows an editorial line, and it will likely lack the detailed scientific evidence I am looking for.

Ah ha, further down the results page is a Met Office article from 4 September. That’s the ticket – the Met are a professional, trusted institution with their own archive of data. Click.

And there is the evidence, all the statistics from both years, neatly summed up in the first paragraph: ‘summer 2026 has rewritten the record books, becoming the UK’s warmest summer on record for mean, maximum and minimum temperatures, while also recording more tropical nights than 1976.’

Since 1976 is just my case study I won’t go into lots of detail, but a critical thinker would immediately be able to identify the key points supporting the Met article argument ‘Summer 2026 has not only rivalled 1976 but exceeded it in several ways.’ The section that my fellow train travellers need to read is ‘Similar impacts, different climate’.

Just a little more digging might bring our reader to the open access online evidence of scientists who monitor climatic conditions, such as the Climate Lab Book on Substack. Importantly the site includes information about the author and his credentials, giving us confidence in his knowledge: it is by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, an MBE recipient who invented the ‘climate stripes’. There you can see some quite terrifying graphic evidence of the differences:

(of course the critical thinker in me also notes that using a different colour scheme would make this graphic look very different …)

Returning to our train travellers, had they dug a little deeper they would now be able to test their hypothesis against the evidence:

‘I suppose it wasn’t as hot down here this summer’ – actually the evidence shows it was very hot throughout all of the south and midlands, not just in the south east. And since the threshold for a heatwave in the southwest is 25 degrees, it too experienced heatwave conditions throughout all the summer months.

‘I expect it will be just like 1976. After that was all over things just returned to normal again very quickly’ – actually the evidence shows that ‘while extremes have happened in the past, our warmer climate is making them even more extreme’. ‘The summer of 1976 remains one of the UK’s most iconic heatwaves, but it also provides a benchmark for understanding how extreme heat may evolve in a warming climate.’

Critical thinking has revealed that anecdotal evidence (this is just like what I experienced in 1976) is weak because it may not be representative, and it won’t reveal the full picture. It can also show the illogical reasoning at the heart things. This is just an extraordinary year like in 1976 / in future I need to plant in anticipation of drought conditions becoming the norm – these are contradictory positions. The thinker’s ideas and interpretation is at odds with their behaviour, logic show that their ideas are out of step with the reality experienced around them.

This case study is an example of why the rigorous, original, critical thinking fostered by the humanities must go hand in hand with the methods of scientists and engineers. For there are many many reasons for rich and powerful people to misrepresent evidence of all kinds. The world as it is now has made them rich and powerful, so naturally they want to keep it that way. Scientific data might shows us the dangers of failing to change our world, but that data is useless unless people see it, are convinced by it, and want to act in light of it. Arts, humanities and social sciences can ensure that people have the critical ability to see it, perceive it, and be persuaded by it.

Tl;dr: Save Arts and Humanities