Pick up a newspaper, pretty much any paper left or right — though there are honourable exceptions, notably the space the Sunday Telegraph gives to the heroic Christopher Booker — and the story peddled on climate change is virtually identical: look at all those drowning polar bears/melting ice-caps/ ‘unprecedented’ natural disasters. We’re all doomed. It’s all our fault. Something needs to be done NOW!

Our media, like our politicians, are completely out of step with public opinion. According to a survey last month by Opinium, seven out of ten of the nearly 2,000 people questioned said they were unwilling to pay higher taxes to combat environmental issues, and a similar number believed the green agenda had been ‘hijacked’ to increase taxes. An earlier survey in June showed that despite the tireless pontificating of the likes of Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, six out of ten Britons still doubted the causes of climate change.

The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing, scientists say.

Because of the current crisis, biologists at UC Santa Barbara are working day and night to determine which species must be saved. Their international study of grassland ecosystems, with flowering plants, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today," said co-author Bradley J. Cardinale, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology (EEMB) at UC Santa Barbara. "The Earth might well lose half of its species in our lifetime. We want to know which ones deserve the highest priority for conservation."

Democratic state representative, Andrea Doll, from Juneau (Alaska's capital), tried to get Palin interested in her bill [ that would have banned the flame retardant Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs), which affects brain development in young children, including memory and learning functions] early on. "I told her about the bill," she says. "But she was totally not interested in any way, shape or form. It was that look on her face - that 'don't even go there' look."

Pollutants affect all of us. But in Alaska they are taking their toll. The birth defect rate in the state is twice the US national average; and on North Slope, the area that produces most of Alaska's oil, it's nearly four times the national average.

Unsurprisingly, Sarah Palin is not popular with environmental groups. Greenpeace put it starkly: "Palin has the most anti-environment records of any governor in the US. She has supported oil and drilling in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas in Alaska, even when it meant sacrificing polar bears..."

WHEN Gemma Parkes, a communications officer for WWF, an environmental advocacy group, was attending an international meeting on fish conservation a few years ago, an unknown delegate left a bunch of white lilies and white chrysanthemums for her. They were not, she presumes, a kindness. They were a warning from an opponent of her prominent campaign against tuna fishing: in Italy these are funeral flowers.

Another person Ms Parkes knows in the fish-conservation business has received a bullet in the post. Tuna fishing is big business. Few of those involved like the suggestion that they ought to rein in their catches in order preserve it.