I have gotten to the point of being so bored by the same old platitudes about climate change. They say the devil has all the best music. So it seems that Climate Change deniers had all the best arguments. Why was this? We were told again and again that the debate was over and that all the deniers were in the pay of oil companies. Clearly neither were true and the opinion polls revealed increasing public disbelief. Maintaining either fictions had not convinced the people who matter. Something far more sophisticated was going on and the simplistic exultations were not doing the trick any more. What to do?

So we resolved to actually do what 99% of people do not do, we read something about it. And we don't mean some Press Release from Greenpeace nor a column in the Daily Mail. No, we went shopping on Amazon. We came back with David Archer's "The Long Thaw", Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth", Peter, Taylor's "Chill", James Hoggan's "Climate Cover Up", Mike Hulme's "Why we disagree about climate change", Nicholas Stern's "A blueprint for a safer planet", Anthony Giddens' "The politics of climate change", Stuart Sutherland's "Irrationality" and "Ted Nordhaus's "Breakthrough". And a lot more beside over the years. What did we learn? Well it certainly didn't change our mind about human-induced climate change but we have become aware of the high-stakes game that the IPCC is playing. Since the human signature could be between 20% and 95% to blame then there could well be times when our imprint might get over-whelmed by natural influences and cycles. The simplistic believe that the actual temperature will just go up and up in a linear fashion is not realistic. We all know about tipping points but there is also the reverse - times when the temperature will go down as well as up. Such cycles could last ten to forty years. The ever popular graph by the CGU clearly shows a trend downwards since 2006. These kinds of dips plus a few bad winters give the deniers a field-day and delays action. We could find ourselves with an enormous credibility gap unless we are careful how we phrase the argument. Mankind is fragile and we have so harmed our biosphere that it is fragile too. Hence Climate change cannot be shrugged off like it use to. This time it will hurt. It doesn't matter if we caused it. It doesn't matter if it is cooling or warming. We have to get off fossil fuels if we are to build the resilience our communities need to withstand the shock.

This generation can do very little about the climate change stored up. Nothing we do now matters in our lifetime. It has to be done for our grandchildren's lifetime. And it has to happen anyway if we are to build a better life. So we find ourselves in no-man's land with the likes of Peter Taylor and Lawrence Solomon. Probably not in the same shell-crater. These two are ideologically opposed to Climate Change being used as an excuse for wind farms and nuclear power. I enjoy no such baggage as long as solutions are cost effective and safe. Nuclear power is not, wind turbines are. Solomon is a journalist and former anti-nuclear campaigner. Taylor is a scientist and former science adviser to Greenpeace. Hence when the latter speaks we probably should listen. His views are reasonable. He knows that the decarbonisation of our economies is inevitable. He would prefer no IPCC driven stampedes. Judging by Copenhagen 2009 no such stampede is likely to happen.

The archetype script for the passionate Climate Change believer is to start screaming about tipping points and "time running out". However true it might be it isn't going to work. We learn this from Nordhaus, Giddens and Hulme. To continue to use this same tired old methodology is the group-think described in Sutherland's book. We must breakthrough to an inspiring vision of a post-oil future. It may well be expensive but we have to think of it as ensuring our long term economic competitiveness. The driver is, and remains, Peak Oil. It is the clincher. No matter how you look at it. We know what has to be done. Stern and Tickell can only get us a small part of the journey. We have to break out of these knee-jerk reactions. A million WWF "Earth Hours" won't make any difference. Having us sit in the dark is only thought provoking to the minority of aware people for whom this appeals to.

So, here we are in no-man's land. There are very few of us here. The Climate Change deniers claim that we have been duped. The true believers label US "deniers". We are the enemy of both sides just for pointing out the bleeding obvious. Climate change is a pragmatic problem. Dogma is not a solution. Appealing to people to cut their carbon is a turn-off message. We need a vision of the post-carbon world as a place far better than the here-and-now. In the transition from the stone age to the bronze age there were no people preaching to the citizens their moral duty to "cut their stone use". We simply found something better. Let's face it, stone has numerous advantages over bronze. It wasn't an easy transition and no doubt a few flint nappers lost their livelihoods along the way. Maybe even a few people in "big stone" cast a few doubts about how effective bronze would be. Indeed we had to wait until the iron age for the deficiencies of bronze to be made good. Now here we are in the Petroleum Age and things are a little different. Population is completely unsustainable without oil or some massive change in diet. We were not addicted to stones or bronze for humanity's survival. But we are addicted to oil. No amount of wind turbines will make the soil nutrient rich. There is more at stake this time than a simple change in technology. This will be a rocky road but the rewards will be rich for those who take the road early.

Our future will not be found in Hoggan's "Climate Cover Up". There isn't a crusade or a cover-up. There is public apathy and it grows with every can recycled. Every energy saving lightbulb contributes less and less. Being told to "do your bit" gets more and more ineffective every year. I have heard the old story about turning down my thermostat so often that I could vomit. If I had turned it down that often I would have hit absolute zero years ago. Until we conjure up a future we can all believe in..... then it is a waste of breath.