The prophets of climate change doom have been advised to rein it in. At the September Gordon Institute of Business Science Forum on Energy Security and Climate Change, Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty’s government, was celebratory in announcing the innovation emerging from the UK in the face of the climate challenge. We live, as the Chinese put it, in interesting times. While we must seek ways to mitigate the danger of climate change, we have already passed the point requiring the entire human community to adapt to its implications.

Faced with significant change, our approach tends to fall into three categories. In decreasing preference, we resist by denying the need; we handle it by installing some form of management system; or we get creative by changing ourselves.