AS far as public opinion of climate change protesters is concerned, there are roughly two camps.

There are those who dismiss the climate change campaigners as a self indulgent bunch of middle class space wasters who cause the hard working public all manner of commuting inconvenience.

And then there are those who applaud the generation most likely to suffer the effects of onrushing climate change for taking action when governments don’t.

I make no apologies for being in the latter camp. Scientists have spent 30 years warning of the likely catastrophic effects of global warming, and are even more apocalyptic in their forecasts now, having noticed the Arctic and Antarctic ice floes melting even faster than their predictions.

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And that matters – not just to the wildlife who will perish as a result of lost habitat, but to humanity, who will very quickly come to notice the effect of the resultant serious rise in sea levels. Those ever more frequent floods will become even more regular and destructive.

Meanwhile the rises in the global temperature – and the hottest years ever have all been in the last 10 – will make huge swathes of many places like the African continent, and even parts of Australia, simply uninhabitable.

According to the researchers, the resultant enforced migration will then overwhelm the countries to which they flee. The war exodus from Syria will be a fleabite by comparison.

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We have known this for many years now, yet it is has taken a 16-year-old baby faced Swedish schoolgirl to initiate the kind of activism which forces the world’s media and politicians to pay attention.

Greta Thunberg began the Friday school strikes movement which has so captured the imagination of her peers worldwide, and so cheesed off some educationalists who still fret about students missing double geography rather than trying to save the planet in which it is taught.

Meanwhile, in the most powerful nation on what’s left of earth, the President extols the virtues of coal fired power, and appoints apologists for the fossil fuel industry to head up his environment agency. President Trump once called the climate change crisis a hoax dreamed up by the Chinese. Truly his scientific ignorance is matched only by his political naivety.

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Not that there is much of a finger hold on the moral high ground back on the UK ranch, where the government which promised to be the “greenest ever” has spent the last few years sabotaging the renewable energy industry wherever possible, clawing back the subsidies which encouraged home owners to be energy efficient.

The people who rail against wind power, who doubt the efficiency of solar heating, who can count the profits to be had from oil extraction but never the possible costs, are not going to be protected from the impact of climate change denial. More pertinently, their children and grandchildren will bear the full brunt.

So more power to the elbows of feisty, bright, fearless young campaigners like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. They speak truth to power whilst so many of their elders whine about minor league irritations to their complacent lives.