YOUR readers will have seen the figures, heard the reports of doom and disaster; the end of civilisation, floods, droughts, uninhabitable heat and social unrest with millions migrating to survive.

They will note that carbon dioxide emissions from increased fossil fuel and forest burning – is the enemy number one as it ratchets up its parts per million (ppm) in our fragile global atmosphere to 412 this month.

And since the mini-disasters, temperature records, flooding up north, power cuts down here are relatively small local events (or in other countries so they don’t really count).

They register for a day and then are gone, so we do little and assume others are working on the problem and scientists and government are on the case.

And while they talk and strategize and target 2050 (plenty of time), and all the while claiming this is the most important threat we’ve ever known, extremely powerful tipping points and feedback loops are being triggered now.

The report from a balmy 30 degrees Greenland with 50 times the ice melt is unprecedented – the staggering amount of forest under fire in the Siberian taiga, where the methane is (was) held in the permafrost now thawing, shocking.

Some people can’t handle this and switch the TV or radio off to make it ‘go away’.

There is a fear that climate change will be so frequently mentioned that people will become immune to it and, like Brexit, will ignore it, not engaging; just wanting it finished so that we can all get back to a predictable normal (whatever that was).

The greatest challenge we face then, is not whether we can save the world for future generations, although that window of opportunity is rapidly closing, but whether we will.

For that involves everyone of us putting aside our differences, and working as this is a real emergency common to all of humanity, putting the global home fire out today, not tomorrow when it’ll be too late.

The number to watch is the CO2 ppm.

Only when that number begins to come down will we know that whatever we are doing or not doing, we stand a chance.

So let’s do it, please. – Chris McFarling, St Briavels.