If we continue to pollute the planet at our current rate, terrible consequences will follow. The evidence is there. But our leaders cannot find the will to do anything about it.
No wonder the scientists are frustrated. At a meeting in Copenhagen last week, leading researchers called explicitly for more government action, breaking the taboo that has traditionally held scientific inquiry above the political fray.
The purpose of the conference was to gather the latest data and present it to political leaders who will meet at the end of the year, also in Copenhagen. That summit is meant to begin negotiation on a successor treaty to Kyoto - the 1997 UN agreement that first obliged industrialised countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Even by the standards of international diplomacy this is slow progress. It makes a sorry comparison with the urgency that world leaders have summoned in response to global financial meltdown and with the vast sums of money that were quickly pledged to bail out broken banks and car industries. The threat of climate meltdown, of broken ecosystems, is by any measure greater. Who will bail out the planet?
The picture that came out of Copenhagen was bleak: oceans rising faster than expected, and turning more acidic; rain forests disappearing and ice sheets retreating faster too. The worst case scenarios envisaged even two years ago now look optimistic. And while the news was widely reported, it was also treated in much of the media as somehow mundane - just another prognostication from the green doom-mongers.
We risk being numbed by the scale of the crisis, and by the grim inevitability with which it is sometimes portrayed. If the world is falling apart, and even our simplest shopping habits are part of the problem, what hope is there of change? And what if it is already too late? Pessimism soon becomes defeatism.
But not everyone is pessimistic. The Copenhagen meeting ended on an unusually upbeat note from conference organiser Professor Katherine Richardson: "I have great faith in humans and their ability to regulate their relationship with this planet."
That is a simple message that is not heard often enough. With the departure of George Bush from the White House, a significant political obstacle to action has gone. Unlike his predecessor, Barack Obama needs no convincing that global warming is real, and that substantial, prompt action is required.
In terms of commitments to green investment, Britain now lags well behind the US. There is a commonly held view in Westminster that, while voters profess to care about the environment, those concerns are trumped by fears over the economy, crime and immigration. That is true up to a point. But as the 2006 Stern report identified, the disastrous consequences of inaction on climate change vastly outweigh the cost of action. Any long-term policy for the economy, or for that matter on crime and migration, will have to take notice of the environment too.
But policy-making for the long term has fallen out of fashion. In fact, many of us fell out of the habit of long-term thinking during the heady consumer boom. That must now change.
The financial crisis has shattered the free-market orthodoxy that drove policy for a generation. We can now develop a new political philosophy, one that has the principles of environmental sustainability at its core - that presents the threat of climate change not as inevitable apocalypse, but as an opportunity.
There is an antidote to climate defeatism: it is the knowledge that the actions we take now to lead a greener life could boost employment and develop an economy less dependent on wasteful financial services; improve national security by making us less dependent on fossil fuels; and deliver us a better, healthier, happier lifestyle. It so happens they will also preserve the planet for future generations.
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