DO you, like me, consider yourself a reasonable person? Guided on the things that really matter by facts, rather than prejudice or emotion or habit? Certainly we would all hope the UK is governed in such a rational way.

So why, I wonder, is our country proving so lax at addressing the climate calamity the UN has predicted must occur within a decade? A disaster none of us are guiltless in creating.

What a lovely summer it has been in Yorkshire. Plants bursting with life and birds flitting from nest to feeding ground. Blue skies, ice creams and smiles.

Easy to fool yourself in our temperate northern clime, an accident of geography, that all is well across the globe.

Meanwhile, right across the world, scientists are warning – ever more desperate scientists, frightened by politicians and the public ignoring their evidence – that the flames of the climate crisis are licking inexorably higher.

How that evidence piles up. From huge ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctica, not to mention the so-called freezer of the world, Greenland, to forest fires all over the planet, in California and even the frozen Arctic tundra.

Signs beyond ignoring. The earth is heating up at a catastrophic rate. Only greedy oil executives or hedge fund managers desperate for a new luxury yacht, or gullible people conned by corporate PR campaigns, would claim otherwise.

Britain is said to be a nation of animal lovers.

What then are we to make of the red list of potentially extinct species produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the most authoritative assessment of the status of species?

York Press:

Two wild elephants tussle on the outskirts of Gauhati, India. Loss of habitat, climate change and pollution pose an ever-increasing threat to wild creatures such as these, says the United Nations. Picture: AP / Anupam Nath

The recently published list adds almost 9,000 new species, bringing the total to 105,732, though this is a fraction of the millions of species estimated to live on Earth.

Not a single species was recorded as having improved in status. Too many are in fatal decline.

“Nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history,” said Jane Smart, director of the IUCN biodiversity conservation group. Scientists have concluded wildlife populations have fallen by 60 per cent since 1970 and plant extinctions are running at a “frightening” rate.

According to the UN, climate crisis disasters are happening at the rate of one a week: floods, cyclones, droughts.

Most barely figure in our business-biased media and therefore popular consciousness. Yet we would be irrational to believe there will be no knock-on effects for ordinary people in the UK.

Here’s a rather personal question and confession. Did you read the above and feel a deep desire to switch off, read or watch something else?

Let me confess, I felt the same thing writing it. And that’s the problem. It is too easy to turn away and pretend what we all know to be happening will not affect us or our families.

What is to be done in the face of such a calamity? First, I believe we need a government that actually takes the sheer scale of the problem seriously. The current one’s record on tackling climate change is shameful.

The number of jobs in renewable energy in the UK has plunged by nearly a third in recent years, and the amount of new green generating capacity by a similar amount. Cuts in subsidies for onshore wind and solar energy have caused a steep decline in those sectors.

As for public investments in common sense tidal projects at the expense of dangerous fracking or nuclear energy, dream on citizen.

Worse, far worse, is the lack of courage shown by our political elite to confront this existential emergency.

Let’s be clear: we cannot carry on living the way we have. Above all, we have to accept that consumerism with its ethos of acceptable waste and endlessly more production is not ‘harmless fun’ or ‘self-expression’ but sheer poison for our species’ future.

The slogan ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ needs an urgent new ‘R’: renewable energy.

This is the true question of our age.

Are we to be remembered as people so locked into heedless, consumerist habits we squandered our only world just to keep on shopping? Or as the saviours of a unique, breathing, miraculous planet?

Only common sense and reason can save us now.