WE are living through the hottest period on our planet for over a hundred thousand years, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is, in the greatest part, man-made and will continue to accelerate.

In addition, extreme temperatures are changing even faster with the expectation that what we would have once called a heatwave will soon be the norm.

These facts are played out on our television screens by scenes of holidaymakers fleeing from massive Mediterranean wildfires, by flash flooding drowning people in their cars in a South Korean underpass and by a massive river of hailstones in an Italian village.

Global warming is real, is with us, and is already killing some of us.

In these islands, every month last year – save one – was warmer than the 1991-2020 average. Climate change is causing a rise in sea levels which will damage and isolate many of our west coast communities.

Furthermore, any disruption of the Gulf Stream (now being predicted as being likely and perhaps even imminent) would result in a severe cooling of Scotland’s winter climate.

So much for “Lord” David Frost’s idiotic claim in the House of Lords this week that global warming was a good thing because it would reduce deaths by hypothermia.

The climate sceptics, conspiracy theorists, and associated right-wing grifters who still deny these truths need to be reminded that it isn’t the meteorologists who manufacture the storms. The poet Louis MacNeice got it right nearly 90 years ago when he observed in another context that “if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather”.

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The good news, as articulated by Professor Jim Skea, the Scottish-born newly elected chair of the massively important and influential Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, is that it is not too late to avoid the worst consequences of this situation, providing we act now.

And there is the problem because Westminster politicians – and it has to be said a few in Scotland too – are now suggesting that we should in fact be weakening even our present inadequate measures and burying our heads in the ever hotter sand.

Ever since Brexit, I have been waiting for the Tories to abandon environmental and climate change commitments that were meant to be rock solid despite the UK leaving the EU.

Every other Brexit promise has disintegrated including cheaper food and power, freer trade and no impediments to travel. In addition, the very foundations of the Scottish Parliament have been and continue to be undermined no matter all the assurances to the contrary.

Now Michael Gove, that bell weather of Tory duplicity, is warning us all not to make a “crusade” of reaching net zero (previously guaranteed, though only by 2050) which is tantamount to saying that even the most essential undertaking to help save the planet can – and will – be trashed if such an action gives the Tories a chance of winning the next election.

Labour are, of course, no better. Starmer has indicated he is more than ready to abandon any pledge or promise – on climate or anything else – if it gets him a centimetre closer to Downing Street. So the next UK General Election will not be fought on key progress with environmental issues, because that pass will have been sold by the biggest players.

Tory and Labour are prepared to go on fiddling while Rhodes burns and while the global poor suffer first and worst, though in time we will all pay the price for despoiling the only home we have.

THIS new environmental race to the bottom has been sparked by the imposition of Ultra Low Emission Zones in the outer London suburbs and the possible electoral influence of that policy being pursued – but not originated – by the Labour mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

We have seen a similar battle in Scotland over the Glasgow low emission zone which was originally supported by all parties. Indeed Labour in particular were initially very critical at the apparent slowness of the SNP government to take action on the matter.

Then when it was about to be implemented Labour became a critic of the plan (from an SNP government, being implemented by an SNP council), hiding behind some supposed errors in its implementation but actually simply playing politics with the issue. This pattern is being repeated with other policies – for example, the Deposit Return Scheme – and is bound up with partisan attacks on the SNP/Green partnership in government.

This allows those who have never been sympathetic to the increasingly urgent imperatives of climate change and biodiversity loss (as well as to the harm done by pollution) to take what they hope will be an electorally beneficial stance and to hell with principles, past commitments or the good of their fellow citizens.

In these matters however, any politician who departs that far from morality and common concern for humanity is guilty not just of a selfishness but of actual harm to individual lives.

We have, in global terms, only moments left to take advantage of the opportunity that Skea and others are offering. This is no longer a matterfor debate.

Of course we need to find the best ways to make the changes and to protect and assist those who are least able to make that journey, financially as well as geographically and culturally.

But you can’t debate with a wall of fire. You can’t pretend that the flood that is rising outside your front door is a fiction of somebody else’s woke imagination. You can’t ignore the cataclysmic effects of drought and blame it on a left-wing media frenzy.

And if you try to do so, you are an idiot. Change is never easy but it is the only way to survive. Thankfully the route to survival is still open.

Let’s tell the truth about that too, because any politician who fails to follow that route is actively participating in the destruction of our collective global future.