Climate activism must not be allowed to undermine climate science

Student activist Edred Whittingham baffled the snooker world last week by jumping onto the green baize at the Snooker World Championships in Sheffield and detonating a package of orange chalk across the table in a bid to end global warming. A few days earlier, the German government had baffled scientists by shutting down their three remaining nuclear power plants; this despite a despairing open letter from scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, explaining the plants’ potential to reduce Germany’s carbon footprint by up to 30 million tons of C02 per year.

As these stories show, there is no shortage of good intentions to save the planet, but there remains scope for improvement in how we turn these good intentions into practical results.

One attempt to address this is Unesco’s programme of ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ (ESD) which seeks to ‘reorient education to address sustainable development’, an objective enshrined in the UN’s Agenda 21.