Has ex-Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson done a U-turn on climate change?

Jeremy Clarkson is returning to our screens with the third season of Clarkson's Farm next month.

Former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s hit show Clarkson’s Farm is returning to screens next month – and the host has hinted he may have changed his tune on climate change.

Filming Clarkson’s Farm may have brought him closer to nature, writes The Guardian‘s Charlotte Edwards in a profile published over the weekend.

“He measures rainfall like a meteorologist ... he can also tell you that we’ve already had this year’s allocation of rain,” she writes, before asking Clarkson where that leaves his previous apparent dismissal of global warming.

“That was part of the caricature, it was a joke,” Clarkson says, before adding, “Oh, come on ... I can’t believe it’s [climate change] not dominating the news agenda. Oh wait, it is.”

However, he hasn’t changed all that much, saying he “won’t drive a Tesla” because he doesn’t think “electric cars solve anything”.

“Science is going to be needed here, not politics. Science will solve it eventually. Always does.”

However, he admits global warming is “happening really fast ... 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.”

How does he feel about climate activist Greta Thunberg? Clarkson says he still “won’t be lectured by someone who’s never been to school”.

In 2021, Clarkson came under fire for saying Thunberg deserved a “smacked bottom”.

Clarkson, 61, made the comment in a column written for the Sunday Times at the time of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, describing Thunberg as an “annoying little bucket of ego”.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg flashes a V-sign after being detained and driven off in a bus after joining protestors who blocked a road during a climate protest by Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands earlier this month. Photo / AP

“I simply don’t get the Thunberg phenomenon,” he wrote. “She has no knowledge of how the world works, no manners and no letters after her name because, instead of going to school, she’s been busy sailing round the world so she can be mardy and abusive to grown-ups.

“What she needs is a smacked bottom.”

He went on to brand Thunberg a “pest” and a “Swedish doom goblin”.

He claimed that telling people what to do to lessen their impact on the environment was “pointless” and that Thunberg should instead go to countries where people were less aware of climate issues.