Climate change is not fake - world leaders need to confront Trump's denial

Donald Trump's climate change denial is a threat to the planet, and world leaders including Boris Johnson need to step up to the plate.

As even more of the Amazon rainforest was lost forever to fires this week, leaders of some of the most powerful nations on Earth gathered in Biarritz, the world demanding action. Their limp response at the G7 was not good enough.

Sure they met to discuss those infernos and the environment but the leader of the free world was missing. Donald Trump's officials lamely said he had other leaders to meet, even as we watched those same leaders attending the session without him.

World leaders at the G7 summit

And members of Trump's team unashamedly described climate change as a "niche" issue in the press. Niche.

But of course instead of disappearing under a steaming heap of opprobrium the US president was smothered in a frenzy of gladhanding.

The leaders did come up with money to help fight the rainforest fires but it was rather like that moment when Dr Evil demands "One millions dollars!" ransom money in the Austin Powers movie.

Twenty million dollars was all some of the richest nations on Earth could come up with, in total, to the astonished derision no doubt of people back home. I mean really? You serious? 20 million? COME ON!

The free world has lost its leadership at a crucial moment for the planet. But there are six other nations in the group and this was the best they could do, despite the global outrage at the Amazonian inferno.

The debate is over. The science behind climate change is now so copper-bottomed you just look doltishly stupid denying it, or venally corrupt or both.

The debate is over. The science behind climate change is now so copper-bottomed you just look doltishly stupid denying it, or venally corrupt or both.

Leaders who continue to do so must be called out and ridiculed. The opposite is happening. Mr Trump is feted and fawned over, as if his climate change denial is not a threat to every one of us and our children.

A quick reminder of the facts: The best way to measure changes on our planet is from space so I put in a call to the scientist in charge of Europe's climate satellites to confirm the latest.

Carbon dioxide levels are over 400 ppm. The highest they have ever been. The increase is down to human activities and as every schoolchild knows, the ensuing greenhouse effect means our planet is heating up.

Levels of other greenhouse gases like methane are also continuing to soar. Glaciers are melting at increasingly alarming rates.

Most worrying perhaps sea levels are rising now at 5mm per year, up from 3mm pa in the 90s.

Boris Johnson needs to step up

"This is an undisputed fact" Josef Aschbacher told me. As director of the European Space Agency's Earth Observation Programme he oversees all those satellites and the data they are returning.

"It may not sound a lot," he conceded, but by the end of the century that would be 50cm if it was a linear increase. Only it won't be.

"Sea level rises will increase exponentially so we are talking about 1.5 metres (4.9ft). That is a lot. Many settled areas will be under water. Floods or storms will magnify the sea levels."

As he says he constantly reminds friends in Florida, they are going to go under, and millions like them if predictions are correct.

Many of us now choose to avoid the depressing headlines, stick our head in the sand and clutch at straws scattered by contrarian columnists and experts funded by special interests groups to peddle their reassuring lies.

Mr Aschbacher speaks with a clipped Austrian accent, dry and dispassionate. He cannot avoid the truth, confronted with it every day. "I have done the job for a long time. So I have seen the changes to our planet over many years. I have never seen it as fast and drastic as today.

Members of the German Greens Party protest outside the US Embassy

"Climate change is not fake. I can assure you we measure this every day and we have very clear data and this is getting faster."

When will we have done so much damage to the planet we can't turn the clock back, I asked. That is not Mr Aschbacher's purview. But climate modelling scientists give it 10 years perhaps, some more some less.

At some point fairly soon, in the grand scheme of things, the change accelerates to a point when it reaches an unstoppable momentum. In our lifetimes for most of us, certainly our children's.

Given all that, the G7 doesn't need a one-morning climate change session in a sunny french resort, optional for the world's most powerful man. We need those leaders and Russia's and China's and Brazil's and the rest of them dragged back, and locked in a room until they start making progress.

Mr Trump has described climate change as a "Chinese hoax". Last year he said he did not believe in his government scientists' own predictions about the threat it poses. In Biarritz, this was his answer to the question: What do you think the world should be doing about climate change?

"I feel the US has tremendous wealth... I'm not going to lose that wealth on dreams, on windmills - which, frankly, aren't working too well... I think I know more about the environment than most."

Many of us now choose to avoid the depressing headlines, stick our head in the sand and clutch at straws scattered by contrarian columnists and experts funded by special interests groups to peddle their reassuring lies.

He has pulled America out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and cut funding from environmental and climate change research.

His administration has suppressed climate science amongst its own scientists going to the extreme in some instances even of banning the term climate change replacing it with "weather extreme".

He has just made it a lot easier for US companies to pump unlimited amounts of methane, the worst greenhouse gas of all, into the atmosphere. His presence in the White House is an unmitigated menace to the planet.

The American fossil fuel industry has lavishly funded an ecosystem of climate sceptic think-tanks, foundations and pressure groups and funnelled a fortune into the president's campaigns.

They have spent billions in a cynical manipulation of political and public opinion that may end up costing us the Earth.

And fellow world leaders it seems are giving President Trump a free pass.

Climate activists protest near the UN headquarters on 30 August in New York

Can we expect better from Boris Johnson? He says he cares, but perhaps not given the number of climate change sceptics in his team and his campaign finance links with more of the same.

But every day those satellites return data that increasingly bodes ill for all of us and our families.

The US president should be shamed and ridiculed by his allies for his ignorance and persuaded to change. If not they must step up to the plate and fill the moral vacuum, if there is to be any chance of saving the planet.