Well-known weatherman on Dutch TV: stop eating meatballs
Gerrit Hiemstra, a well-known retired Dutch TV weatherman, was given the opportunity to ramble on for several minutes about the hot and dry summer in Europe during a highly-rated talk show on public service television. Naturally, according to him, the summer was the result of climate change, and Hiemstra also had a solution: stop filling up your car and eating meatballs. In the article below, Marcel Crok picks apart the claims made by Hiemstra.
Hiemstra in action on the talk show Eva.
Marcel Crok/Director Clintel
Date: 7 September 2026
The producers of the highly-rated Dutch TV talk show Eva must have been inspired by Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The 2006 film is structured around a public presentation by the former Vice-President of the United States. In 2007, a British judge accused Al Gore of no fewer than nine scientific errors. All the errors were, of course, exaggerations: a six-metre rise in sea levels without mentioning that such a rise would take thousands of years; linking drowning polar bears to melting ice, whilst the bears in question actually perished in a storm; and so on.
This programme will, of course, not lead to such a court case, but there are certainly similarities. The programme invited Gerrit Hiemstra, a well-known retired TV weatherman, to address the audience in the studio (and at home in front of the telly) about climate change, just as Al Gore did. Hiemstra is also a climate entrepreneur. For instance, he is co-founder of the company Weather Impact, a consultancy specialising in weather and climate. And at the end of 2023, together with two business partners, he founded Oarshûs, a company focusing on sustainable construction.
What followed in the programme was a striking example of climate demagoguery. According to Hiemstra, the extreme summer of 2026 would not have been possible without climate change. Hiemstra: “And the cause is surprisingly simple. It’s us. Every time we fill up with petrol or diesel, every cubic metre of natural gas we burn, every flight we book, every meatball we fry, contributes to climate change.”
Naturally, this was followed at the end by ‘Reverend’ Hiemstra’s moralising message that we must “stop using oil products, stop using natural gas, stop using coal, and stop eating meat and dairy. And the sooner we do that, the better.”
In the studio, one of the Netherlands’ best-known scientists, physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, sat nodding wearily. In his initial reaction, he said: “One can only hope […] that this […] is yet another wake-up call. But of course, we’ve slept through a whole host of alarm clocks.”
The reason for Hiemstra’s minute-long speech was, of course, the scorching summer of 2026. Somewhat to my surprise, he did go on to say that this summer had been extreme and was not yet the new normal, but, Hiemstra added, “this will become the new normal”.
Omega block
Hiemstra is a meteorologist, so the first thing you might expect is a meteorological analysis of the lovely summer (because that’s what it was!) that we were fortunate enough to experience in Western Europe. He didn’t provide one. The prolonged spell of fine weather was the result of a so-called omega block: a stationary high-pressure system in the shape of an Ω that trapped hot, dry Saharan air over Western and Central Europe for days on end. The young American meteorologist Chris Martz, who is very active on social media, argued on X that this phenomenon is entirely natural and has nothing to do with climate change or greenhouse gases.
For Hiemstra, on the other hand, it is a certainty that this summer has everything to do with ‘climate change’ – by which he means CO2 emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, as well as the greenhouse gases released during the production of meat and dairy products. He no longer even provides evidence for this; it has simply become an established fact for him. That is short-sighted and unscientific. In 2022, by far the most elegant and thorough study on climate change in the Netherlands was published. The mathematicians Han and Jippe Hoogeveen, father and son, studied all Dutch weather maps (day by day) from 1836 to the present day and thereby discovered that a change in wind direction is the main explanation for the warming in the Netherlands. The title of their paper says it all: “Winds are changing: An explanation for the warming of the Netherlands.” They conclude, quite literally, that CO2 does not appear to have a direct effect on temperature trends in the Netherlands.
Not only is this a truly remarkable paper, but Jippe Hoogeveen is an exceptionally talented young mathematician. Whilst still at secondary school, he won two bronze medals and one gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Now imagine if, after his painstaking work (he studied 165 years × 365 days – that’s over 60,000 weather maps!), this brilliant young man had concluded that CO2 was the cause of climate change in the Netherlands. He would undoubtedly have been hailed as a hero by the media and by the KNMI (the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute), and he would probably have been invited to meet the King. But now? The reader has never heard of this study or of Jippe. At the time, I tipped off a journalist from the major Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, who wrote a fine article. But that was the end of it.
Much more sunshine
The paper by Han and Jippe Hoogeveen shows that, since the 1980s, the wind has been blowing from the south more frequently, bringing warmer air – exactly what happened again this summer. Although they did not investigate this themselves, there is a striking correlation with the amount of sunshine in our part of the world: it has risen spectacularly!
Source: Copernicus
So, for whatever reason, large-scale weather patterns in Western Europe have changed since the 1980s. More frequent southerly winds, much more sunshine. These changes provide a clear explanation for the warming of the Netherlands and its neighbouring countries. The KNMI also acknowledges in its annual reports (e.g. the one for 2025) that we are getting more and more sunshine, but it does not link this increase to global warming at all. It seems like a form of burying one’s head in the sand.
Wildfires
Naturally, the report touched upon the terrible wildfires that raged in Spain and France this summer. Without further explanation from Hiemstra, the clear impression was given that this summer’s wildfires were exceptionally severe. However, nothing could be further from the truth. According to figures from the Global Wildfire Information System, it was in fact an exceptionally quiet year worldwide:
Yes, but surely the situation in Europe was serious? Not even that:
Readers can select countries and continents themselves here. Only in Spain and France was the scale of the fires quite exceptional, whilst Greece and Portugal, for example, are experiencing a relatively quiet year. It is also worth bearing in mind that wildfires are very often caused by human activity. In France, no fewer than 474 people were arrested for their involvement in the wildfires. This may involve negligence (such as throwing away a cigarette butt) but also deliberate arson.
Of course, the conditions for fires this summer were favourable due to the heat and drought. But those conditions alone do not cause a fire. How large a fire becomes also depends heavily on forest management. In many countries, there are policies to leave dead wood in the forest as this is beneficial for biodiversity. However, more dead wood means more fuel in the event of a fire. It is also important how quickly a fire is detected and how much money and resources a country is prepared to commit to fighting it. It is therefore rather nonsensical to link wildfires directly to climate change in the first place. In any case, the global trend in the area going up in flames is downward. All this data can be found in no time at all by any layperson. There is no excuse for Hiemstra to speak so simplistically about wildfires.
The Rhine
This summer, the drought led to historically low water levels in the Rhine, the Danube and the Po. On 17 August, the 24-hour average flow at Lobith (where the Rhine enters the Netherlands) was a record low of 565 cubic metres per second. Hiemstra, understandably, devotes a great deal of attention to this. But here too, context and nuance are lacking. Are low water levels of this kind becoming more common, and is there a discernible trend? Rob de Vos from the website klimaatgek.nl looked into it and the answer might well surprise you.
Source: klimaatgek.nl
As mentioned, this summer was a record-breaker, but the Rhine in the Netherlands also reached very low levels in 1929, 1947, 1949, 1953 and 1954. More importantly, an analysis of the lowest annual values since 1900 reveals no trend whatsoever! De Vos also looked at the highest annual values, and these too show no trend whatsoever:
Source: klimaatgek.nl
For years, the KNMI has been putting forward the narrative that summers are becoming drier and winters wetter. We see little to no evidence of this trend in the Rhine.
Heat-related deaths
There was certainly extreme heat in Europe this summer, and that undeniably leads to more heat-related deaths. Hiemstra reports an estimated 35,000 heat-related deaths in Europe. Here, too, he fails to be nuanced and objective. Hiemstra is undoubtedly familiar with studies from The Lancet (this one and this one) which show that, worldwide, ten times as many people die from the cold as from the heat. The well-known environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg constantly emphasises this point in his articles and social media posts. This summer, he posted the figures for Europe on X:
Source: Bjorn Lomborg
Extreme heat (which does not occur very often) is the temperature-related cause of death that claims the fewest victims! Incidentally, there is an extremely practical solution to drastically reduce deaths from extreme heat (which mainly affects the over-80s). Ensure that vulnerable groups have access to air conditioning. Hiemstra doesn’t mention this at all. He wants us all to use less fuel and stop eating meatballs.
In Europe, air conditioning use stands at 19 %, lagging far behind the US (76 %) and Japan (90 %). The American climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. calculated on his Substack page that Europe could have prevented around 26,000 heat-related deaths in 2022 (out of a total of 62,000 heat-related deaths that would have occurred that year) if it had had the same rate of air conditioning penetration as the US. Hiemstra does not mention the word ‘air conditioning’ and nor does he use the more general term ‘adaptation’. A missed opportunity.
Climate damage
As well as heat-related deaths, Hiemstra also has something to say about damage. He says: “According to economists, the drought in Europe has already caused economic damage amounting to around 180 billion euros.” It’s television, so there was no time for a source citation, let alone an explanation. He can be forgiven. The source turns out to be a report by Triodos Bank published this summer. That report does indeed mention the 180 billion euros. But ‘damage’ is a misleading term here. By mentioning drought and ‘damage’ in the same breath, he suggests he is talking about climate-related damage. That refers to damage caused by extreme weather – think of damage from floods, storms and, yes, drought can also cause damage, for example to agricultural crops. But the Triodos Report does something quite different; it attempts to estimate the impact of the dry and hot summer on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), including indirect effects such as reduced productivity. It arrives at an estimate of around 1 per cent of European GDP.
But why not simply state what we know about actual climate-related damage? As Roger Pielke Jr. explains in this article, inflation-adjusted damage in Europe is on the rise. But that is because the European economy has more than doubled since 1980. If you adjust for this, the following picture emerges:
Source: Roger Pielke Jr.
Here we see climate damage as a percentage of GDP. There is considerable year-on-year variation, as you would expect given that we are talking about disasters, but no clear trend. On average, the damage is just above 0.1 per cent of GDP. Annoying, but manageable.
Complaint to the Ombudsman
Just like Al Gore in his film, Hiemstra was rather selective in what he shared with the talk show’s viewers. Everything was geared towards maximum sensationalism. Simply mention as many records and extremes as possible, link them to climate change (even if that link doesn’t exist at all) and then claim that “we must turn off the tap”. Any sense of nuance is entirely absent. Of course, Hiemstra is entitled to his personal views, but to broadcast them in such a demagogic manner – on public service broadcasting, of all places – is unprecedented. Filing a complaint with the National Ombudsman is the obvious course of action. There is much more that could be said in such a complaint, for example about the lack of trends in extremes worldwide, which has been reported by the IPCC but which Hiemstra conveniently ignores. Roger Pielke Jr. has recently launched a website on which he makes all these trends very easy to understand. There, you can see at a glance that, with the exception of heat (more) and cold (less), there are virtually no other trends to be detected in extremes:
Source: Roger Pielke Jr.
Hiemstra also threw in RCP8.5. He showed clips from the 8 o’clock news in which the current weatherman Peter Kuipers Munneke, extrapolates current summer temperatures into the future based on the KNMI scenarios. Based on the high-emissions scenario, he suggests that hot summers of this kind will soon be the norm. But that high-emissions scenario, known as RCP8.5, has recently been dismissed even by the IPCC. On the Clintel website, I warned at the time that this scenario should be regarded as “dead but not yet buried”. Even following questions from Parliament to the minister responsible, the KNMI refuses to distance itself from this doomsday scenario, and so it crops up again on this talk show, without any qualifying remarks being made.
Finally, what surprises and disappoints me most personally, is the total silence from the climate science community. As mentioned, the data and graphs presented in this article to qualify and refute Hiemstra’s argument can be found in the blink of an eye in this age of AI. Climate scientists know that Hiemstra is going far beyond the bounds of credibility here. They remain silent because A) they presumably agree with his political message (“stop using fossil fuels”) and B) because they are likely afraid of the reputational damage they might suffer if they publicly contradict him (“you’re not a climate denier, are you?”). With this attitude, however, climate science is squandering its credibility.
This article was originally published in Dutch on Indepen.eu on 7 September 2026.
Marcel Crok
Marcel Crok is a Dutch science journalist who has been writing full-time about the climate debate and climate policy since an award winning article about the notorious hockey stick graph in 2005. He published two books in Dutch (De Staat van het Klimaat (The State of the Climate) and was co-author of the book Ecomodernisme (Ecomodernism)). With the British independent researcher Nic Lewis he wrote an extensive report about climate sensitivity, titled A Sensitive Matter. He was asked by the Dutch government to become expert reviewer of the IPCC AR5 report. Together with the Dutch climate institutes KNMI and PBL, Crok set up an international discussion platform Climate Dialogue.
In 2019, Crok and emeritus professor Guus Berkhout founded the Clintel Foundation. They published the World Climate Declaration, which has now been signed by over 2000 scientists and experts. Together with Andy May and a team of scientists from the Clintel network, Crok contributed to and edited the book The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC.
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