Climate Crazy

Being naturally inclined to optimisim, I am loath to write anything today since three stories which have left me feeling gloomy.... But here is an attempt anyway.

There was a time climate change was becoming something I was feeling rather sick of hearing about frankly - in my mind there was no question that we must act now to preserve not only our future but the future of those in other parts of the world who are already suffering from things like the effects of desertification.

Then something changed; a couple of actually unconnected emails from Climate Scientists at the University of East Anglia became all the amunition climate sceptics needed to excuse the human race of acting responsibly towards the environment. Given proper context these emails were nowhere near as damning as newspapers wanted to suggest, but the media ignored this and public opinion has been set back years.

Perhaps as a result, a series of disheartening stories keeps appearing:

1) Professor Lovelock - famed for his 'Gaia theories', said on the Today programme (31st March) that we cannot do anything to save our planet and so we might as well enjoy life whilst we can. He might not consider it like this, but regardless of climate change, this is fundamentally a rally call for continued reliance on oil ignoring the environmental impacts of draining our earth dry, causing animals to become extinct.

2) Jon Holmes - This was not even a story, it was part of a throwaway speech on BBC Radio Four's Now Show. His totally unbalanced and cynical account of climate change and his declaration that we should do nothing about it riled me to the point of activism. OK, so it is perhaps a rather pathetic form of activism in that it involves boycotting the Now Show as well as Holmes's 6 Music programme (which actually until this point I had become rather fond of), and also writing into the show to point out the fundamental lack of balance in what Holmes said.

3) Barack Obama - this last story was the announcement that drilling of oil will be permitted off the U.S. coast, apart from the protected area in Alaska. This was an apparent capitulation to lobbyists in return for their cooperation on a climate deal in Congress, at the cost of many miles of coastline and probably many animal species too.

Before I bore you please take this shocking stat into account before you decide not to act too: a Select Committee report has received evidence showing that up to 50,000 people die prematurely in Britain because of the effects of air pollution, that includes 8,000 in London alone. Besides the huge increase in asthma cases, such pollution has links to chronic bronchitis, heart disease and even cancer.

So, I am not asking you to subscribe to the impending doom scenario to want to act - it remains a fact however that we are using up our resources, destroying our rainforests, causing our children to die early as they inhale fumes, making life even more difficult for poor communities, killing off animal species that can never be brought back to life.
If these are not reasons to act, then I do not know what is.