It’s time to plant seeds of change

Farming and climate change

Another report, published yesterday, warns of the calamities that lie ahead if we do not change our ways. Despite the fact that this Royal Society report, the latest in a very long line of chilling warnings about how global warming may increase our exposure to life-threatening heatwaves by a factor of 10, it is unlikely to have anything approaching the impact such a dire warning should have.

We seem, despite scientists’ and environmentalists’ persistent and escalating efforts to get us to change our ways, to imagine that there will always be another last chance, that everything will work out in the end even if we continue to do far less that the bare minimum needed to stave off a manmade catastrophe. We seem to imagine that we need not confront the causes of climate change and that it’s really a problem for someone else.