The truth is, we're fighting for survival

In the Guardian news paper, on the 8th of August 2008, is an article about the report of now we should handle living with a 4C increase in global temperatures. It says,

Up to 4 billion people left without water. Up to 5 billion at risk of flooding. Half a billion left hungry as agricultural yields decline by 15-35% in Africa with entire swaths of the world ceasing food production altogether. More than 80 million exposed to malaria in Africa. The Amazon collapses and 50% of species go extinct. It's basically the end of the world.

There is such a gaping chasm between the matter-of-fact reporting of this nightmarish 4C scenario that government scientists now say we should be planning for, and the total failure of apparently rational people to understand what is happening...

Reports from Kingsnorth, the site of this year's climate camp, completely fail to scrutinise the pinstriped criminals who are pushing the planet towards the brink.

With climate change, in order to be "serious" you need to acknowledge that the end of the world is an interesting detail in the broader pattern of economic "progress", but never succumb to the incredible naivety of the protesters, who fail to realise that the survival of life on earth is a bourgeois luxury which we can ill afford in these times of economic constraint.

They go on as if we are all going to die next week. As if we are sleep walking into a fire or we are like a frog in a pan of water slowly heating up and being cooked.