Jornal de Socialômica

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Climate Change? Who cares anyway?

Patrick Grant

To do or not to do? A human question. Being told you are going to die not once but on two separate occasions, does tend to sharpen one’s mind to question what one cares about. What I really cared about was, not the ironing and other hanger’s on, but the real things in life that matter. My thoughts were only for family, my wife and my two boys. This is what really mattered. Thoughts of dying did not matter; it was how two young boys would cope and how they would remember me. I am lucky to be very close to my sons, we have our moments, but both talk to me, we love films, animals and they tell me about their lives. It was their lives that made me fight, to fight for life. I miraculously survived, by the skills of a brilliant surgeon, a Hindu by faith and a squad of other Christian doctors and nurses who came in to tell me they were praying for me. In the end they had to admit they couldn’t put my survival down to anyone but God. Why all this God nonsense; well, I can’t help it, God is my starting point. It has taken years of recovery hearing two sides argue, about the existence of climate change as some argue about God. Why not believe, be wrong but have changed the world in the process helping communities to live, good healthy lives, rather than be caught in a 21st century world crisis of untold proportions that could be prevented. I come here to listen to you, with far more questions than answers, if any, for this conference is asking those questions that are at the very centre of our world’s most important ethical questions of this Century and if we are wrong, we may find ourselves at the beginning of the end of civilisation as David Attenborough told the UN. We have a heavy burden, but it is those of us from the 20th Century, who could have changed the world after world II but instead allowed the world to slip back to more of the same with a few counting their pots of Gold We had wonderful dreams the NHS, the UN but we didn’t go far enough allowing two few to rule the many. Over the last five years I have listened and studied but the world is not nearly engaged preferring Love Island or strictly come dancing. Brexit is a flee on the back of the environmental issues that haunt
our world and like this conference we need more coming together of disciplines, who then must shout loudly, at a clueless world of fashion and cooking programs, the bread and circuses of the 21st Century. Imagine London, the low-lying parts of France Belgium, Holland, Germany Sweden all under water as the tides rise, or where heat is no longer controlled, Australia, a desert. These are ethical questions, to try to answer or at least point while some shout.