For the doom merchants amongst us, 2004 showed its fearsome teeth in a cracking start before it was even 10 days old. On 7 January a report in the journal Nature said climate change could speed a million land-based species towards extinction within the next 50 years. The next day the Worldwatch Institute declared modern lifestyles were bad for us and unsustainable for the planet. The UK Government's chief scientist now says climate change is a far worse danger than international terrorism. A triple onslaught like that defies anyone to head into the new year feeling even slightly positive about the human condition. Yet life goes on, and most of us worry more about paying the Christmas bills than about a world bereft of a quarter of its animals and plants.We believe the scientists: we simply do not connect their findings to our lives, our families, ourselves even. Some of us just refuse to react, blaming the messengers for their message and accusing the scientists of scaremongering. But (at the risk of tempting fate) my inbox has been blessedly much freer recently of flat-earthers and foam-flecked contrarians.

Most of us are convinced by the message - yet still we go on as if we had not a care in the world. But whether because of climate change or not, we are already losing species so fast that biologists talk of the Earth undergoing its sixth great extinction since the Big Bang. We are losing species we do not know exist, which could be vital to our survival.


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