Janet Schlarbaum Greenhouse Effect By Dr. Mark Clayson

The world is ending anytime soon, or so the boffins would have us believe. Greenhouse effect, they say; polar ice caps will melt, drown us all, kill everything, in – um – 21xx something, give or take a few million years.

Come on, they’ve got it wrong before: the Titanic was unsinkable, the war will be over by Christmas, Thalidomide is good for us. We’ve heard it all before.

The evidence seems to be there: winters getting milder, summers longer, halcyon days of splendour and sunlight. Today, birds singing at 5am, outside my frost-laden window

Do we care though? The British Way of Strife is to demand warm weather; millions of us go abroad each year, to soak up those rays and come back as brown as toast. Ask any True Brit what he would like most of all, and he’ll say ‘Heat’

The world has evolved over millions of years, and we’ve only been recording the changes for a few hundred. We obviously made it through the Ice Age okay, and there wasn’t the same kerfuffle and sharp intake of breath as there is now. So here is my theory:

The earth is a complex planet. It’s survived over those millennia and still come out smiling. It will take care of things itself.

There’s another problem too: apathy. Most people demand the use of dirty cars, that spew out diesel and petrol fumes; cities demand heat, light, energy; we demand TV, dishwashers, fridges. All these things create undesirable effects in the atmosphere, but do we care?