Few can deny that climate change is the single biggest threat that mankind faces in the 21st century. The evidence has been building for decades in the melting of glaciers and polar ice, record heat waves, droughts and rising sea levels, that threaten the lives and economies of billions of people.
A pall of acrid smoke from suburban forest fires descended on Athens at the start of August as Greece suffered its worst heat wave in decades, prompting its prime minister to declare that climate change had turned his country into a powder keg.