I fear that within 20 or 30 years those who are now talking about the temperature changes we are seeing will find that they are not that out of the ordinary in the context of the past 8,000 years or 4.5 billion years. We may look back and ask, “Why did we suddenly decide to make it more expensive to generate electricity in this country? Why did we suddenly decide to decarbonise at a time when other nations, such as China and other places in south-east Asia, were doing quite the opposite?” We may look back from a point in the future when not only the GDPs of those countries, but their GDPs per head are much larger. Carbon emissions will not have stopped, temperatures will not have risen that much and those rises that do take place
will be as much to do with things such as the Pacific decade, oscillation and the natural changes that go on in the Earth, and we will wonder whether we were right to go down this path.