You’ve picked out a nail that’s been waiting to be hit on the head.

The world does seem to be hotting up so do we just sit around and wait for it to happen or do we try to do something about it?

The trouble is people don’t like to change their habits and are nowadays extremely unwilling to be asked to do something they don’t like.

I’m guilty myself. I drive a car and have two (adult) children who were brought up in a western life style.

Such as all those pies the chair of the IPCC has not only his fingers but his toes in, with all his training as a railway engineer and economist.

Along with all the research grants from the tax payer, all those nice trips to sunnier climes for conferences and their fizzogs in noted scientific journals for previously unheard of lab coat wearers.

However, if the rise isn’t caused by human activity and by some natural process that we can’t understand and thus predict, then we can’t make those sort of predictions with the same accuracy. For instance, if the process is being driven by solar cycles, we don’t know when or how the cycle will reach its peak, and what rise in temperature that would cause. So, you can worry about what it might cause, but you don’t have to change your lifestyle/economy to deal with it…

Probably largely Britain & Europe in the 17th & 18th centuries and it’s us rather than others you should therefore pay to resolve it.

I think that’s the big bone of contention between the Western democracies and fast developing states like china, india and africa.

Copenhagen resembled a trade talks summit rather than a real opportunity to tackle climate change, link it to energy security and decentralisation of power production & industrial investment.

It’s a pity that Scotland couldn’t have played a bigger role (and I don’t specifically mean Salmond et al), but the targets set by parliament and the current implementation plan adopted really are quite significant models. Proper representation at the talks may well have helped accelerate a European inter-connector from our considerable renewable ‘wealth’ and progress the north sea carbon capture discussions.

Unfortunately it appears that Brown was yet again hoping to come out of as ‘world saviour’ and so avoided talking about that at all within the UK’s brief, instead focusing on paying off the developing countries.

On realising that the ‘saviour’ role wasn’t on the table he seems to have disappeared as usual like McCavity, though Salmond doesn’t seem to have faired much better with some fringe meetings and missed opportunities to get better publicity for Scotland’s lead in this area.

Of all the issues that challenge the status quo, renewable energy must be the one with the biggest potential global impact, maybe with growing tax raising & possibly borrowing powers, Scotland can really start to accelerate renewables investment.

There is massive potential here but as many have said, it’s looking like we’ll squander it like oil and wind power in the past.