THE meeting in Egypt is just finishing as I write, so you will have to look out for the finer details in the weeks to come, but the general feeling centres on two issues.

First the good news, better than expectations, there is going to be a loss and damage fund set up to help poorer countries that are suffering now from climate change.

How much and what that actually means we will have to wait and see. I hope It’s more than just helping to move people off small islands in the middle of the oceans that are going under the waves.

The second thing was the unspoken admission that we can’t hold to the 1.5 C by 2050. It now looks like a silent move to try to hold the temperature rise to 2C degrees over preindustrial times by the end of the century, or was it 2050?

Whichever, it’s bad news. These are the reasons: we have an amount of fossil fuels we can burn that once we go past that amount, we will go past 1.5 C. On current burning, we have nine years left. And as no one thinks we can stop in nine years’ time, we will go past the 1.5 C threshold.

This startling realisation seems to have been submerged in the small print and I don’t hear the media giving this the headlines it deserves. Some people still don’t think anything is happening on the climate front, but one interesting fact which I recently reread, points to a continuing changing planet.

The last major ice-age from 100,000 years ago, to around 12,000 years ago, has seen the oceans rise 400 feet, due to all the ice melting everywhere. 12,000 years ago, man and animals could walk from England to France, and even more amazing could walk on a good day, from Sicily to Malta. There was not much of a Mediterranean sea.

This was all due to astronomical changes in the tilt of the Earth and the changing elliptic of the Earth going around the Sun. The reason why the ice is melting at an incredible rate now, is humans are pushing the end of this last ice age even further than we think it would have been by changing our atmosphere and filling it with carbon dioxide.

Without the extra Co2, we would have settled down to where we were around 1900 AD. As an anecdotal comment – could it be that in this very week, that the moon shot Artemis 1 was launched, as the first of many to get bases on the moon, so that all the superrich who made most of the pollution can escape what lies ahead for planet Earth?

Who was Artemis and what did she do? Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness, Moon, and archery. She spends much of her time in the forest surrounded by animals such as hunting dogs, bears and deer.

‘I think we can see why Artemis was the chosen name for going to the Moon.’