I HATE to be the person who breaks it to everyone, especially at this late stage, but Brexit and Scottish independence don’t really matter that much – or rather they matter, but in the way that a fiddle matters to a burning Rome. The burning imagery is fitting because what really matters is the torching of the Earth by the human race. I am taking it for granted that readers believe in climate change – know for a fact that it’s real – and so I’m not going to rehearse the science, which has been long established and proven. If anyone doubts the truth of climate change, the queue to join the Flat Earth Society is just over there. If you believe in climate change then you should fear it – and I don’t just mean worry about it when you hear the words on the news, I mean dread it, be terrified by it on an existential level, or perhaps a mass extinction level. If you don’t- if you sit and fret about Brexit or Scottish independence more than you do the planet’s rising temperature –then you may as well be worrying about your mortgage repayments while there’s a killer in your house with a gun at your child’s head. More and more people are getting this: that the only really important question facing the human race is how we ensure that the planet survives so our children and grandchildren can grow old, live well and be happy. At the weekend in London, thousands of demonstrators carried out one of the biggest acts of mass civil disobedience in the UK in decades in an attempt to hammer into the thick skulls of our political leaders that climate change matters above all else. It got little news coverage.
Herald 20th Nov 2018 read more »