I threw away a yogurt pot the other day. Not a particularly radical thing to do. It was very nice yogurt. I enjoyed it. And I dropped the pot in the bin without thinking twice.

But then I started writing this piece and the more I think about it, the more I realise how easy it would have been to take the cardboard off of the pot and simply drop the two into the recycling bins on my way out of college. It might have taken one extra minute of my time.

According to the first part of a study published last week, climate change - or should I say, Climate Change – really is happening. It is a phenomenon that is so much part of our 21st century consciousness that it has been raised out of the small print to the status of capitalised title: A Big Scary Thing That We Should Do Something About.

Thanks to the new research by the Berkeley Earth Project, the climate sceptics have received a trouncing. It turns out that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” really is true. Far from being the fabricated nonsense that it seemed during ‘Climategate’ in 2009, when climate change sceptics managed to hack into UEA e-mail systems and accuse their Climatic Research Unit of scare-mongering via made-up data, Berkeley have found that the world’s temperature has evidentially increased by 1°C since the 1950s.

Whilst 1°C seems piddling as we sit in our cosy Cambridge libraries, hibernating from icy winds and dreaming of warmer summers, in real terms it means, amongst other things, a reduction of half of the African crop yield by 2020 according to an IPCC Climate Change report.

We are so inured to statistics now that perhaps it would be more helpful to put it in people terms: population in Africa is estimated to be around the 1 billion mark and 70% of Africans rely on rain fed crops. This means that we’re looking at 350 million people going crop-less from 2020, the equivalent of nearly 20,000 Universities of Cambridge.

The real problem in Cambridge is a matter of displacement. Africa is, after all, not on our doorstep. As Robin Lamboll, Green Officer at Christ’s, perceptively points out, “Collectively, many seem to regard [the issue of Climate Change] as someone else’s problem.”

On speaking to Green Officers across the University, it seems that attitudes can vary widely from college to college. Fitz have just written their second environmental policy because the majority of the goals on the first one - including composting organic waste, safely disposing of ‘white goods’, reducing water consumption and minimising use of pesticides - have been achieved.

Emmanuel, by contrast, has no formal green policy at all. One Emma student commented, “The environment seems to come way down the college’s list of priorities, far below maintaining the aesthetic beauty or providing students with extra leisure facilities like a gym.”

There is also a dichotomy of opinions over whether we live in an environment that facilitates ‘green living’. Essentially, as CUSU Environment Officer Mark Robinson points out, being green in Cambridge is easy. Everything is in close proximity and cycling around town, whilst being an occasionally hazardous activity, knocks huge amounts off of potential fuel emissions. Colleges are themselves tight, self-contained communities; in theory better for the environment as it allows for sharing facilities and small ratios of buildings to people.

At the same time though, the wonderfully clichéd ‘bubble’ that colleges create makes for a pretty artificial environment. Bea Leadingham at Magdalene suggests, “Students at other universities develop green thinking much more naturally than we do – there needs to be more incentives!” She points out that living in a shared house makes students far more aware of the amount of electricity and heating that they use thanks to monthly bills dropping through the letterbox – encouraging them to use less.

Perhaps we students in Cambridge would be less happy to leave radiators permanently on, computers on standby and chargers plugged in if we had more conception of the pennies dripping away down the electricity cables.

Good practice isn’t just an issue at college level either. Fiorenza Brady, co-chair of CUSU Ethical Affairs, has become increasingly aware of problems at a faculty level: “Cambridge is a very research intensive institution, and these areas consume a lot of energy. Plant Sciences is a good example of this – it needs plants to grow and hence uses much energy for lighting.”

Whilst the University is looking into more energy efficient light bulbs, the fear is that these will not be as effective at growing the plants necessary for research.

The University does have a ‘Policy on Environmental Issues’ but, according to the latest ‘People and Planet’ League Table, Cambridge comes 68th out of around 150 UK universities. More worrying still was that 24.5 of its total 30.5 score (out of 70) was awarded for policy but only 6 points were given for performance. We can talk all we like about green issues but this is all, quite literally, hot air unless we take some solid action.

The overwhelming reprise from Green reps is that, in the end, it comes down to the individual. Perhaps we should follow in the footsteps of Girton and Darwin who have both set up student allotments in the college grounds. Darwin’s has even has been so successful that many of the students have not had to buy any vegetables since harvest began in June.

The message that emerges is simple. As Matthew Hatfield, Green Officer at Girton, puts it, “Beyond the basics, we don’t need the university or the college to help us to be green…it is the students who take the credit for making sure they live an environmentally friendly lifestyle.”

Next time, I’m going to take that minute and walk past the green bins on my way out. Are you?