Climate Change Protests

Like many Londoners I have been inconvenienced by the climate change protestors. I am sure that they do not care much and would hold that wasting a few hours of my time or causing me to walk a few extra miles is nothing compared to the threat to humanity and to all who live on the earth that climate change will bring.

I am sure that protestors are sincere but if the protests would actually do anything except  create a lot of debate and fine words of good intent then I would gladly put up with delays and trouble.

However there are two problems with the demonstrations and rallies that the young have enjoyed. The first problem is that if you cause delays and problems for people trying to go about their lives for a cause, however important that cause be, you run the risk of upsetting the very people that you hope to influence to support your cause. Targeting politicians would be far more effective but these days politicians are so isolated from the public which they serve that it is virtually impossible to inconvenience them.

And so a young lady gets to speak to politicians and even the Pope who all respond by saying just how important the cause is and then use to opportunity to claim just how their policies are fighting climate change and then having had the publicity continue to do virtually nothing to prevent climate change.

The second problem is more serious than the first. I think that the talk of ten years to prevent climate change is nonsense. That was probably true ten years ago but today it is probably too late to reverse global warming. We have had our chance and failed to take it and all we can do is try to adapt to what now seems to me to be inevitable consequences of how we are damaging our planet and thus threaten all who live on it.

When I started writing these essays about climate change in 2007, twelve years ago, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 380 ppm and today is about 412ppm.