One of these days, one world leader or another is going to say: “You know what? It’s bloody serious, this global warming business.” But as it is, the world goes rumbling on, with people getting excited about who will be the next president and when the next general election will be – and minor issues like the end of the world hardly get a look in.

There are two ways of understanding all this stuff about the impending British disappearance of the pintail and the great skua and the snow bunting. You can see it as jolly bad luck for a few odd little bits of creation. Or you can see it as like canaries down the mine, that is to say, an early warning signal. The birds respond to disaster before we do. They send out clear signals that the process of change is irreversible. Oh, there are winners and losers, according to the projection. It will be nice to see hoopoes hopping about in the back garden, with short-toed eagles overhead and bustards strutting about. But to concentrate on such exoticisms is to miss the point: to perpetrate the jocular way that climate change is understood. Yes, yes, nicer weather, a barbie at the weekend, Pimm’s, hoopoes and purple herons in the garden: such larks! (Crested larks and woodlarks for preference.)

These birds are telling us that we have embarked pellmell on a course of extreme danger: and there seems to be no political will to control it. If we lose the Scottish crossbill, it will not be the only casualty. How sustainable is human life in a changed world? We don’t know. But if we change the world from top to bottom – and that’s what climate change means – we will have to change our own lives. That’s if survival is possible in the long term. I tell you, it’s serious.

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