Climate fear – let them eat plastic...

CHILDREN can be so cruel. “Why do we have to be the future, when all you’ve left us with is a dying planet?” the nine-year-old asks me with an accusatory tone.

And I have to admit, when it comes to the planet, we Generation X-ers haven’t covered ourselves in glory.

In the years since we were born, we learn this week, humanity has wiped out 60pc of global wildlife populations.

The news comes just weeks after a UN report on climate change warned global temperatures are rising at a rate that will cause devastation by 2050.

And let’s not kid ourselves we’re treating the evidence the mercury is rising as a call to arms, and fighting climate change on the beaches.

No. We’re sitting in swapping energy providers, liking other people’s kids’ synthetic Halloween outfits on Facebook, and ingesting plastic.

But not the nine-year-old and me; we are zooming back to the beginning of time to experience the primeval forces of nature as they shaped our planet.

We’ve gone on a break to Edinburgh, where the city’s Dynamic Earth exhibition allows us to digest the story of the universe in less than an hour.

It allows us to consider that it’s taken man a mere 50 years to destroy what it took nature 13.8 billion years to create.

Despite this, Dynamic Earth tells us that we are all stars, the atoms that make up our bodies having travelled to our solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars.

Well, maybe not all of us. Across the road from Dynamic Earth, the eejits in the Scottish Parliament are busy legislating on truly important matters: bilingual town signage.

A dead language for a dead planet.