Are we sleepwalking to climate change catastrophe?

Einstein said it best: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”.

This quote often comes to mind when I think about how some of the world’s governments are responding to the threats posed by climate change; continuing to burn fossil fuels and somehow expecting the planet not to heat up. Sure, we had Kyoto and Paris but there’s still a toxic love affair with coal, oil and natural gas.

A recent landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that we have 12 years to make urgent changes to limit climate change damage. Yet despite this, the UK's half-baked government has once again allowed fracking to continue, a process that extends our dependence on fossil fuels when we need to be doing everything we can to wean ourselves off them.

In support of this controversial fossil fuel technology the energy minister Claire Perry said it means we won't have to be reliant on gas from Russia. Oh, but we're still reliant on many countries for crude oil, natural gas and petroleum products.

Why not ramp up investment in renewable resources (we are a windy island so there's wave and wind power for starters) and become more energy independent?

Sun-drenched Spain is an obvious choice for solar but in the wake of the global financial crisis the government cut subsidies for this clean source of energy and introduced the much reviled ‘sun tax’ which penalised people who used electricity produced by their own solar installations.

Thankfully, here at least the signs are more promising owing to a plunge in the price of solar panels and the new government’s plan to scrap the tax.

The USA, which should be taking the lead on climate change matters, unfortunately, has numnuts in the Oval Office.

After ignoring the stark staringly obvious for years, Trump has at last admitted that climate change is not a hoax. But before you start crediting him with talking sense for once; he went onto say in an interview with 60 Minutes that although something is changing it’ll change back again.

The president provided no evidence for this conclusion which he just plucked out of nowhere. He also accused climate change scientists of being politically motivated. No, crap for brains, scientists are motived by a search for truth and go where the evidence takes them. When more than 95% of the world’s scientists who have studied climate change tell you there’s a problem, there’s a problem.

Trump’s muddled thinking, if we can call it thinking, is influenced by the powerful oil and gas industry and by the climate change denial lobby. Climate change deniers are still many in number, but they are shamefully ignorant and debating with them is pointless.

Their pseudo-scientific arguments would even make a classroom dunce blush with embarrassment.

Deniers are no different from advocates of intelligent design to explain the origin of life and people who believe the moon landings were fake and that the US government is housing alien corpses and UFOS in Area 51. They speak nothing but irrelevant nonsense.

To back their standpoint deniers often cite a ludicrous piece of work called the Petition Project.

More than 31,000 scientists signed a petition that argued that there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere. It is a real slap-your-forehead dumb project that has been widely debunked.

The overwhelming majority of signatories had no qualifications in earth, environmental or atmospheric science and misleading tactics were used to get them to sign.

One of these was to present them with a paper that was designed to look like it had appeared in a prominent peer-reviewed journal (it hadn't) and which made a number of demonstrably false claims asserted as fact.

Even if you are the maddest of mad climate change deniers surely it is common sense to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Most renewable energy sources produce little or no greenhouse gas emissions, the energy supply is cheap and inexhaustible and public health improves.

Air and water pollution from coal and natural gas plants are linked with cancer, premature death, breathing problems, neurological damage and other serious health issues.

Climate change is probably the biggest challenge the world is facing right now but it isn’t too late to fix it. If governments act quickly the problem goes away. We are not doomed just yet.