Yet again there has been an outpouring of whittering by allegedly sensible and enlightened people about climate change and what dangers it will bring to the planet. I don’t buy it I’m afraid. Yes, the climate is changing as it has during different periods over the past millennia but climate change is not the biggest threat to the environment – people are. The world’s rivers and seas aren’t choked with floating piles of rubbish, toxic chemicals and plastic waste because of climate change or global warming. They’re that way because we have nearly eight billion people crammed onto a planet that’s dying under the pressure of our greedy abuse. Two decades from now, the earth’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish. Climate change didn’t do that. Way too many people did.

Climate change hasn’t covered the world with concrete or replaced healthy ecosystems with housing estates and shopping malls – we and our ever-increasing numbers are the culprit. Climate change is only one of many symptoms of an out-of-control disease – human overpopulation. The irreversible environmental damage stemming from having too many people on a very small planet is already painfully evident. Our bloated population is diminishing our children’s futures in ways that have very little to do with the planet’s temperature.

I read today that the BBC are about to make a series with climate activist Greta Thunberg promoting her views. That should be fun! We will again be harangued by this little girl who has somehow taken the world by storm with her ranting. Will she offer any cures for the illnesses of the planet I wonder? Somehow I doubt it. So far, she has told us all what we have done and are doing wrong but has come up with no ready alternatives.

Bunter Johnson has decreed that sales of petrol and diesel motor vehicles will cease in fifteen years time. That seems wildly optimistic and completely unsustainable I’m afraid. There is hardly any infrastructure in place to keep the currently running electric vehicles on the road and in any case, the world will still be choked in plastic.

Our current environmental woes have almost nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with how we’ve been treating the earth – not just recently but for centuries. We’ve always abused the environment and managed to get away with it because our numbers weren’t significant enough to cause lasting damage. Now our numbers are out of control, and that presents us with huge problems.

In hindsight, we should have addressed rampant overpopulation shortly after the second world war when the global population was still around two and a half billion – less than a third of what it is today. But we were in the midst of post-war optimism and still believed in the delusion of ‘nature’s endless bounty.’ Nobody thought about the environment; all they wanted was more money and larger families.

Nature’s bounty has almost run out I’m afraid and I would urge all climate-change ‘activists’ to direct their environmental anger at those who really deserve it. They can start with the economists, developers and politicians who blissfully believe that perpetual growth is still meaningful. They can then move on to the religious zealots who still spout the mantra of ‘man’s dominion over nature’ and abhor the idea of contraceptives. After that, they can apportion a hefty dose of blame to the world leaders who purposefully sidestep the overpopulation issue like the political hot potato it is. Why damnit?! Overpopulation is killing our planet and robbing future generations of the spectacular biodiversity and animal life that older generations took for granted. And finally, they can look in the mirror and ask themselves what they are personally doing (besides protesting in the streets) to make the planet a better place for all the life that dwells on it.

One of the British national dailies is running a worthy campaign to clean the country of its litter and I would suggest that Ms Thunberg – I see she is to trademark herself to prevent anyone capitalising on her name – and the Extinction Rebellion fanatics could better help the planet by picking up a few discarded plastic bags from time to time.

Are there any solutions to an overcrowded planet? Yes there are. Firstly, governments must stop getting side-tracked by the climate change industry and recognize that the problem is sheer numbers and blatant disregard for the planet’s health – not the climate. We as human beings must replace political and economic agendas with better education and more global promotion of family planning and government incentives to have fewer children – not more.

Unless this happens pretty soon, there will be no space left on the planet and then the ‘activists’ will have been proved right but for all the wrong reasons.

Promoting her new novel Grown Ups, best-selling author Marian Keyes says she only reads books by women as male writers and their lives are ‘so limited . . . it’s such a small and narrow experience.’  

Imagine if a man had said such a thing about female novelists!