On 27 November 2025, an event took place in Westminster Central Hall that was barely reported by the mainstream media. This wasn’t the launch of QPR’s new away strip, the AGM of the Flat Earth Society or the launch of my latest book. This was the UK’s first ever National Emergency Briefing, where “ten leading experts delivered a critical briefing with the latest on the threats presented by the climate and nature crisis, and the science-based pathway forwards.”

You can see a good summary of the event on the Just Have a Think YouTube channel. There was a mixture of news, mostly bad: but some encouraging signs as well. Viewers are encouraged to sign a letter to the government and public service broadcasters, asking them to hold an urgent televised national emergency briefing for the public, and to run a comprehensive public engagement campaign so that everyone understands the profound risks the climate crisis poses to themselves and their families. See below for the full text of the letter.

If you’re in any doubt about the provenance of these ideas, just take a look at the list of speakers which included academics, a senior NHS professional, a former General, economist and food supply expert. These are not just anybodies and not dangerous or uninformed radicals. They’re talking with evidence about threats ranging from flood risks to public health, and from food shortages to national security.

Front-page news

If the problems are as serious as the speakers claim – as I believe they are – this should be front-page news. Our survival is at stake and the government has to step up. Regular briefings should be held and high levels of international co-operation displayed. Funds must be found. The best scientists and business leaders should be tasked with finding solutions, putting all else aside until this existentential threat is dealt with.

If all this seems fanciful, cast your mind back a few years. What I’ve just described could be applied pretty much word-for-word to how most countries reacted to the pandemic. Our response may have been patchy but at least it got our attention.

The trouble climate change faces is that it’s slow: like a gradual retinal detachment, you don’t notice the decline from day to day. With a broken leg, which is what Covid was, you do.

Media reaction

The national papers must have been told about this event. However a quick search revealed how few had written about it.

The Express’s coverage was mainly focussed on Chris Packham. Although he wasn’t one of the experts just the compere, this was understandable as he’s probably the only person on the platform anyone’s heard of. Trouble is, he’s also tainted in the eyes of some as a result of various controversies. He’s acquired the reputation of being a maverick; a loose cannon who shoots from the hip. That said, and given the temptations to rake over all this, the article provided a pretty balanced summary.

The Guardian took a different angle. Chris Packham wasn’t mentioned at all. It referred to several experts, concluding with the remark by retired General Richard Nugee that “climate change is going to be a bigger problem than Russia.” He also made the point that it’s insidious.

There have been a few more since. In gewneral, though, the mainstream media’s been pretty silent. I look at the BBC website regularly and saw nothing about it, before or afterwards. Why might this be?

Too bad?

Bad news sells: but only if it’s not too bad. It also has to be immediate, as Covid was. Climate change is both bad and slow. Media reporting demands the dramatic and immediate.

There have been plenty of this in the form of wildfires, storms and floods. Each has, however, been viewed in isolation. Climate change is sometimes mentioned as the reason, or possible reason, but the main focus is on the consequences. Again this contrasts with the pandemic when everyone capable of manipulating a mouse or a smartphone morphed into an armchair epidemiologist.

The other problem with climate change is that some serious and perhaps unwelcome changes need to be made if we’re to have any hope of dealing with it.

A look back at the industrial revolution – which, of course, started this problem, but let’s park that – is that it was driven by business, not by the government. Suddenly there were more ways to make money.

There are plenty of ways to make money from the change of our energy priorities: even Boris Johnson admitted this. The problem is that, whereas eighteenth-century Luddites and the Swing Rioters were capable of being defeated and their pre-industrial age swept away, the current old guard – the fossil-fuel companies – are rather better prepared.

Unwelcome to governments

There are various models for how an ideal world that’s weaned itself from carbon might look. One is de-centralised power supplies, a lack of reliance on traditional partners, a plant-rich diet and less need for imports. For many, this looks uncomfortably like a series of local collectives, from which government is excluded: or, as Marx suggested, where the state withers away.

This is not an attractive idea to those in power. Governments thrive on crises. Just looking at the UK, the Falklands War was just the right size: Mad Cow Disease was too small, Covid too large. None the less, each provided opportunities for political advantage or an increase of state power and regulation.

All governments, without exception, want to increase their control. Perhaps this might explain the luke-warm response from our rulers.

Manipulation

To make matters worse, a concerted and costly campaign of disinformation has been launched over many years in order to discredit climate change as a valid theory. A single well-placed headline being worth more than a hundred scientific papers, this has proved to be a profitable expenditure.

This excellent article in the New Scientist looks at several reasons why the event and its message might not have been covered.

We move on from why we ignore the problem to whether we believe in it. Here we need again to to back to Covid.

Wanting the proof

During the pandemic, someone told me that they needed to “see the proof” about the safety of the vaccines. I said the validation had been fast-tracked but felt certain this was a safe option, all things considered. They continued to say that they needed to see the proof despite mounting statistics of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital.

I could have added, but didn’t, that science doesn’t provide proof. It provides best guesses based on what’s known at the time. Disproof is possible: proof is not.

I could also asked have asked whether, before driving over a bridge, they had checked the credientials of the engineers who’d designed it or whether they subjected every mounthful of food they ate to a survey of its provenance, processes or ingredients.

Even if they did, they wouldn’t know what “proof” looked like. Nor would I. We have to take things on trust. There are processes for establishing safety. Sometimes these are defective but in general they work.

The “proof” of the problem of climate change is, in the same way, one of accepting an overwhelming burden of evidence. I’m not a scientist and so wouldn’t pretend to understand all the details, any more than I would expect to make sense of a civil engineer’s bridge report.

Many of the people who offer alternative views – that the whole thing is a fad, a scam or based on false science – have other axes to grind. Some climate deniers claim that climate change is fake news used to justify more government control and less personal freedom.

I was also constantly struck during the pandemic that those who feared that the vaccines contained chips that would enable them to be controllled by Bill Gates or whoever were the very people who would seemingly most benefit from this kind of intervention.

It’s always possible to find holes in a scientific argument, particularly if you’re prepared to be selective. You can write letters to your local paper, hire local halls or get elected at President of the USA. I’m not going to engage with these sideshows. Such people are irrelevant given they’re often not disinterested and, more importanrtly, given the weight of scientific evidence on the other side of the scales.

Why the silence?

More worrying is the fact that our national media seems to have been cajoled – I hesitate to use a stronger word – into denying that the problem exists at all. By all good opinions I’m prepared to trust, it does exist. Few can argue that there’s a serious problem facing us.

The question is therefore why the hell this is not being treated as an emergency by our government. We need to keep pressing our MPs to deal with this situation with the same level of seriousness as was applied to Covid. Given how slowly it’s advancing, and how many other more immediate problems there are, and given the myopic view of most governments, this will be hard. But we have to try.

Individually, each of us also has to do what we can do in our own lifestyles and also with the political pressure we can bring to bear.

Meanwhile, we wait for the collosal indifference at the top to change. The National Emergency Briefing provided some suggestions: but how many decision-makers were listening? Let’s make sure they all get the message.

The letter

Here is the letter which the organisers ask you to sign:

Today, hundreds of MPs, Peers, and leaders from business, faith, sport, and culture gathered in Westminster for a National Emergency Briefing.

We were presented with the latest evidence showing that the United Kingdom must urgently prepare for a cascade of serious societal impacts. The rapidly escalating climate and nature crises are set to make the UK increasingly unrecognisable and dangerous, with extreme weather events, the risk of food shortages, price shocks, economic instability and rising geopolitical risks.

We are deeply alarmed by the scale of fossil fuel–funded disinformation that has flooded Westminster and the media. The lack of public access to accurate, science-based information has created a vacuum which has been filled by polarised headlines designed to deny and delay action.

Under the Communications Act 2003, all public service broadcasters must inform the public on major national and international issues. The UK has so far failed to meet these obligations. The Climate Change Committee has also urged the Government to provide trusted public information.

We therefore ask the Government and all public service broadcasters to hold an urgent televised national emergency briefing for the public, and to run a comprehensive public engagement campaign so that everyone understands the profound risks this crisis poses to themselves and their families.

If delivered urgently and truthfully, with ambition matching the scale of the crisis, this will not only ensure that the public is properly informed but will also offer the protection that knowledge and preparedness bring. Such a campaign will resonate with the public, opening up the political space for the action needed.

We are not safe. This is an emergency. Now is the time for courage and to put trust in the public. The UK has a track record of uniting to face difficult challenges. Now is the time to do this again.

Brian Quinn
brian@pennypost.org.uk

Top photo: Deborah Phillips.