Climate activists are delivering an important message - Yorkshire Post Letters

Bill Carmichael (The YP, August 4) correctly notes that there has been a lot of climate news recently. But we should have been regularly reading about climate change in the headlines long before now - those of us who are climate activists have been sounding the alarm bell for years, many for decades.

We belong to large organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; the Green Party is 50 this year, as is the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, both having climate change and the environment as the reasons for their existence.

These and many other organisations have consistently tried to get the climate change message and solutions across.

Despite several clearly incorrect statements, Bill Carmichael does appear to accept that climate change is happening; but rather than using his column as a rallying call for the urgent action needed, he criticises one of the messengers - Antonio Guetteres, Secretary General of the United Nations – who is trying to wake us all up to the existential threat of climate change.

Criticising the messenger is a classic response when you don’t like the message. And some people will not like the message, the ‘inconvenient truth’ that Al Gore described 20 years ago, with his hockey stick graph of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, as it requires that we change the way we live on this precious planet that currently sustains us all.

I wonder how many tourists who experienced the wildfires and unprecedented heat in so many parts of the world this summer realised the irony that flying to these destinations is part of the problem. Climate activists have been around for decades, using different means from letter writing and other lobbying, to protests for example at fracking sites to try to get their urgent message across, whilst themselves making lifestyle changes.

Unfortunately, we do not have the power and influence to decide what makes the news headlines each and every day and so I will not criticise the headline grabbing actions such as that of the brave Greenpeace activists.

The protesters did not threaten the safety of the Prime Minister and his family, but the decision that he made to issue 100 new oil and gas licences threatens the safety of all of us. I felt dismayed and physically sick when I read the news of his decision, as did many others.

It was then up to the press to decide how that, and then the Greenpeace protest, were reported: unfortunately most newspapers chose to criticise the messengers, not concentrate on their urgent message.

Several years ago I was told by a climate scientist of their colleagues returning from their studies in the Arctic with grey faces. Perhaps that should have been a newspaper headline, followed up by promises from the government, politicians and organisations to take the urgent action required to keep the global temperature under 1.5 degrees centigrade.

Could I suggest that the Yorkshire Post, which pleasingly does seem to understand man-made climate change, starts a regular column providing well-informed actions that we who have choices can take; this could help enable each to do our part in tackling climate change.