There is no chance for a green future if we keep covering up climate change

Unesco has bowed to pressure from government spin doctors and commercial interests over its report on the Great Barrier Reef. It has allowed money to come before truth

A school of fish pass a scuba diver on the Barrier Reef (Rex)

Australia, I love you, but you need to get real.

Climate change is real. Warmer seas around Australia’s northern coast are real. The bleaching of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef is real. It doesn’t stop the reef from being one of the greatest and most precious living objects on our planet – but the truth is a wake-up call. It’s not something you can hide away.

The Australian government’s request that Unesco deletes a whole section on Australia and the Great Barrier Reef from its report on the impacts of climate change is staggering.

The problem with denial is that you don’t try to change anything. In fact, unwillingness to change is often the reason why people refuse to acknowledge what is obvious to the rest of the world. The same rule applies to individuals and to governments. People and politicians both try to style it out in the hope that the world will respond positively to the image and ignore the substance. Much of the time, this deception works – and the world becomes a worse place as a result.

When people and their governments can get away with making the same mistakes, the damage accumulates until it’s impossible to ignore. We hit crisis point.

The explanation given by the Australian Government for what amounts to blatant censorship is that the news that 95 per cent of reefs being bleached by warmer waters is hitting tourism to the country.

In the northern, most pristine, part of the Great Barrier Reef, a lot of the coral has now died. These impacts are not all due to climate change, but scientists estimate that the bleaching is a 175 times more likely because of the warmer waters, and such conditions are likely to be the norm in 20 years’ time.

Instead of Unesco sticking with its science-based approach to reporting on the growing impact of climate change, it has bowed to pressure from government spin doctors and commercial interests. It has allowed money to come before truth.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that a government has ignored a major problem and applied some arm-twisting to ensure that others stay quiet. At the heart of this silence is the desire that nothing fundamental should change because of the threat posed by climate change; that no vested interests should be challenged.

Some sections of the Australian establishment are reluctant to act because they are becoming very wealthy from fossil fuels. Australia’s coal industry has been the first or second biggest exporter in the world for many years, and is a major lobbying force that has put the brake on Australia signing up to international action on climate change, such as the Kyoto protocol.

It is important that Australia’s friends around the world point out that silence about the threats posed to the Barrier Reef, or to the Tasmanian world heritage forests which have suffered massive fires for the first time in recorded history, is no longer an option.

A government which sacks a 100 of its climate scientists and eliminates the early warning system of evidence that they were creating, will still be hit by environmental crisis – it will just hit harder and Australia will be less prepared for it.

Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away and this applies to the UK as much as it does to Australia.

The Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments in the UK remained silent and complacent about the impacts of air pollution for more than a decade, despite scientific research into the health impacts, showing that thousands of people are dying prematurely each year as a result of pollution. Our Government has barely broken into a fast stroll in its efforts to stop the invisible killer.

Our own addiction to oil and the car is holding us back from taking the action needed. As much as we should pick up on our friend’s faults on the other side of the world, we must look in the mirror at our own.

Baroness Jenny Jones represents the Green Party in the House of Lords