I have been a slow convert to the cause of climate alarm. Although this may not seem obvious from the pages of our climate change supplement this week.My reluctance had nothing to do with scientific arguments about the effects of carbon dioxide. It is hard to avoid signs that the stuff is now warming our planet to a dangerous level, after all.
No, my initial failure to embrace the cause was more to do with my refusal to accept the guilt that I now realise my generation must face up to. We are inflicting a terrible, uncertain future on our children and, in turn, their children.
Of course a few years ago, it was still possible to hide behind arguments that natural variations in climate could explain the changes we are seeing - warmer and warmer summers, earlier and earlier springs, rising sea levels, and melting ice caps.
But as I have toured the universities and research centres of Britain gathering stories for the Observer over the past two or three years, I have found myself hearing only one refrain from the nation's chemists, physicists, biologists and meteorologists: we are heating our planet to a dangerous level.
The final straw was provided by Prof Alan Thorpe, a Reading University climatologist, now chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. He explained, elegantly and succinctly, how very different are the changes we are beginning to see from previous variations in our climate. At the same time that carbon dioxide has risen to unprecedent levels in the atmosphere so have global temperatures. And the met men say there is lot more to come.
The doom merchants - including latter-day converts like myself - may still be proved wrong, of course, but given the calamity that will ensue if we are right, and the world does nothing to control its industrial emissions, it would seem prudent we take some avoiding action, just to be sure. And the sooner the better.
And even if we do act, it is still likely to be a fine-run thing for our planet, as is made clear in Jared Diamond's chillingly brilliant book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. He provides a long list of societies that have wrecked their ecologies and perished: this includes the Vikings in Greenland, the Mayans and, most spectacular of all, the people of Easter Island. They cut down every tree on their once lush homeland in a competition to build more and more statues to their Gods, turning a Pacific paradise into a denuded lump of rock. Cannabilism and mayhem ensued.
What sticks in my mind is the thought of the person who chopped down the last tree. What did he feel? Did he have an inkling of the damage - both biological and symbolic - he had inflicted on his homeland and his children? The mentality seems incomprehensible given its impact on his society and family.
The Easter Islanders were isolated in the Pacific with no hope of help - just as our global society is now isolated in space with no one to turn to. It will interesting to see if we have learned any lessons.
