Climate change occupies a strange position in our public debates: in America, it has somehow been divorced from its objective existence in the real world and has transformed into a matter of values and opinions, with one's political ideology largely determining the stance one takes. In the UK, the opposite is the case. Climate change's reality is so taken for granted that it is barely mentioned in politics. Everyone agrees that we ought to be Doing Something, yet the slow pace and inevitability of the phenomenon means that it melts into the background of our public consciousness, an ever present reality that can always be ignored at any given moment in order to focus on whatever is more immediately pressing.

Yet any reasonable, focused consideration of climate change can only lead to one conclusion: climate change is terrifying. It's truly frightening. It's got to be in the ballpark of nuclear war, yet it's treated as if it were a spot of acid rain or a small hole in the ozone layer. We are looking at the

destabilisation of every kind of global and national order that currently safeguards public security. We are looking at the collapse not just of economic systems but economics itself. If you prefer your statistics horribly unemotional, we're looking at hundreds of millions of people dead. There cannot be any doubt that this is the most scary thing the modern world is facing.\

You wouldn't have thought so if you spent Halloween in Cambridge. By far the most worrying part of what in Cambridge passes for public debate is the complete and paralysing absence of any mention of climate change.

Only three other universities in Britain have higher carbon emissions than Cambridge. UCL's are half of ours, and the majority are less than that.* Bristol have the "BUST" sustainability team that has turned their campus into a hotbed of green activity. A couple of years ago at Oxford, students ran a campaign that aimed, and succeeded, to get the university to switch their energy supply to renewable sources only. This is the kind of basic, concerned action one might expect from engaged young people who are as scared of climate change as they rationally should be. Oxford is now an environmental leader among top-ranked world universities. Did Cambridge take note? Was one word breathed about combatting the climate crisis during the run up to the Chancellorship elections last month? Has anyone sensed the irony that despite being a site for so much cutting edge environmental research, most of the university's energy still comes from fossil fuels?

We need climate change at the top of the agenda in Cambridge. We need to start working on our monstrous carbon footprint, our vampirical lack of energy efficiency and our zombie-like resistance to acknowledging reality or the need for progress. Halloween is fun because we enjoy letting ourselves get scared whilst knowing that everything is really under control. Climate change has no such comfort. It is not fun. It's time to start screaming about it; let's hope we're loud enough to wake the university - or indeed its students.