As Paul Brown says: “There can be few people who have written more about climate in the past 20 years than me”. The former environment correspondent for the London-based Guardian, Brown has written about climate change for twenty years. Fourteen months ago he left the newspaper to write his second book on the issue, called Global Warming, The Last Chance For Change.
“Should two books appear an obsession?” asks Brown: “I can only give my assurance it is not. A study of the latest science, and the snail’s pace of diplomacy, has led me to the conclusion it is not blind sheep that are about to fall off a cliff, but us. The book is part of the duty of a journalist to communicate.
The title, he says, “gives a sense of how close to disaster we are. There are perhaps 10 years to put the policies and available technologies in place to turn the world around. It is no longer an issue for our grandchildren. In the first chapter, I say that anyone under 30 would be foolish to be saving for a pension. If business continues as usual, the financial institutions will collapse well before the under-30s come to draw their pensions …. New science soon to be published tells us that survival for most of the human race depends on us doing something about climate change – not some time in the future, but now.”
How many more warnings do we need? What are you going to do when the financial markets do collapse? Put the money under the bed…