When the UN reported that we must cut carbon emissions massively every year for the next 12 years to have a chance of preventing catastrophic climate change, what did our government do?
The sane response would be to call an emergency and convene the best minds to help decarbonise our economy.
Perhaps that did not happen because the message got lost. So allow me to translate: catastrophic climate change means harvests failing to the point where you and I could be starving. In which case, most of us won’t be going to work or obeying the rules. That’s the seeds of a societal collapse.
One might assume that action to reduce this threat would be top of the agenda in the corridors of power.
Not if you are in denial, which most of our politicians are. As more people wake up to this predicament, we demand leadership from government.
Last year global carbon emissions jumped higher and faster than they have ever done in human history.
Our climate crisis is the central political challenge of our time and requires a complete redesign of our economic system.
Some people gain a sense of personal self-worth from respecting the norms of life. Thankfully, enough think more freely and can respond.
At our demonstrations I met such people, from all generations and walks of life. They know we need to break the norms, express our fears and come together to make the best of a terrifying situation.
Professor Jem Bendell 
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People don’t like to hear bad news. Most of us build our views of the world outward from our own personal experiences and through some sort of reflex tendency that helps shape our abilities to understand existential threats to our well being. Almost all of us have a tendency to wait and let others fix things rather than fix things ourselves; which by the looks of it, pretty much covers the present situation we are all in with this escalating climate change situation, and there are no signs anywhere that we’re going to collectively change things, although, we have a tendency to believe that we can fix things when we choose to, no matter how big the problem. In other words, we have evolved our ability to fool ourselves and can actually live and function in a state of denial of almost anything, even reality.
The bigger problem, if we had the time, resources and collective will to resolve the full impact of abrupt climate change, is not actually geophysics, it’s human nature.