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“It's very difficult to get people to care about climate change,” a Labour staffer told me as we watched schoolkids protesting in Parliament Square.

“Thing is,” he said, “if you haven’t got a job, you worry about immigration, can’t buy a house, everything’s shutting and there’s Brexit to worry about, then you don’t really give a f*** if some polar bears aren’t getting enough to eat.”

Fair point. But somehow global warming managed to make the news this week.

It’s never been an easy subject to sell — even though it’s really, really quite important. You know? Armageddon?

Let’s run through it quickly.

On second thought, let’s not bother.

You’ve heard it all before and none of us care anyway. Well some people do. We all really should. But we don’t.

(Image: FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

As proof, here’s the most recent conversation I had about climate change and its effects on fragile Earth:

Me: Rising temperatures are going to bring extreme weather to the UK.

Them: Fine. I’ll spend summer at home and put £10 on a white Christmas.

Me: OK. How about at this rate there won’t be any insects left?

Them: Good, I hate wasps.

Me: Erm, rising sea levels will affect millions of people by 2100.

Them: So what? Face it, you and me will be dead by then. Deader than the Lib Dems.

That’s the heart of the problem — it’s impossible to get people to care about something that’s not directly affecting them right now.

Never mind the future catastrophic effects on the food chain, the forest fires, the displaced, starving people or the rising sea-levels that will wash away Bognor Regis, flood parts of London and turn Doncaster into Venice.

That’s all a long way off, and it’s hard to get too excited because it won’t be you or me queing behind dolphins to put the lottery on.

We see it in politics all the time — short-termism.

Policies are picked up and dropped almost on a whim. One party will lay out a long-terms strategy for, say, the NHS.

Then five years later they lose an election and it all gets torn up. Or a minister gets caught in scandal, resigns, and the whole thing starts again.

This is one issue we really should care about.

And it was great to see schoolchildren going on strike to try and force it on to the news agenda.

(Incidentally, the usual negative cry was: “If children want to protest against climate change, do it at the weekend.” It’s a strike, numbskull — you don’t strike when you’re not at work.)

I don’t know whether it will succeed or not. I hope it does.

But the sad fact is it probably won’t.

And then the news circus will move on and our species will march on to its predictable and disappointing demise.

So here’s a vision of the future: Hundreds of years from now, one man — the last man on Earth – clings to a single, barren rock in the middle of the furious, boiling sea.

The great cities have fallen. Animals are all gone. Vegetation has long turned to dust.

Holding on to that rock, surrounded by Earth’s choking, poisonous air, he has time for one last thought: “At last, we’ve got Brexit sorted out.”