“Last year I was approached by a young man who had taken the decision to immolate himself in order to awaken us to the destruction of our planetary life-support system.

I told him it would not work. The media would ignore his message and say he was depressed or deranged.”

This was the advice Brother Phap Linh, a senior Buddhist monk, gave to a Buddhist practitioner who came to him because he was contemplating setting himself on fire to draw attention to the climate crisis.

The real emergency is precisely that collectively we don’t treat this situation as remotely anything like an emergency

‘The public gets what the public wants’ sang a young Paul Weller on the 1979 hit Going Underground. It’s a lyric that doubles as our one-line summary of this week’s major report by the world’s leading climate scientists.

The mental and physical benefits of spending leisure time outdoors are well documented but, writes Rupert Read,we need more of it during school and ‘work’ hours too.

Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels could see the power of despots such as Putin considerably weakened, writes Rupert Read.

If we were to face the awful reality that 1.5C is gone, more people might well be jolted into truly stepping up, writes Rupert Read