Do people ‘get’ climate change? Regular people, I mean, not pundits and politicos: the folks next door, the family opposite, supermarket shoppers, the old boys down the working men’s club?

What about the pensioners in the Post Office, delivery drivers, the chavs by the bus stop? Do they care? The postman, the park-keeper, hospital patients and hairdressers, what do they make of it?  As for the butcher, the baker and the (now robustly hippy) candlestick-maker, do they give it a moment’s thought in their daily lives?

Do any of us, really?

Climate change isn’t a popular topic, even among the chattering classes. People become defensive, even bullish, or are artlessly guilty (‘Yes, I know I really ought to, but . . .’). To bring up climate change is to put other’s choices on trial, if only by implication. I have learned the hard way that friends do not like it.

Few of us present a totally clean (green) sheet, including me, and I’ve written a book about all the measures we’ve taken to change our lives. As a result of the work I did for Confessions of an Eco-Shopper: the True Story of One Woman's Mission to go Green (published by Hodder & Stoughton) I’ve reduced our carbon footprint to under five tonnes per year – less than half the national average – which I feel is quite an achievement, but there's still a way to go, obviously.

I’m working on reducing it further: we're gradually improving our home insulation, we use energy-rated appliances, buy green electricity, switch things off standby, shop locally. We make things, reuse things, recycle, compost. I've even become an allotment-holder and am embarking on growing our own veg. We don't fly and only use the car occasionally and are giving serious consideration to getting rid of it altogether. However, we’d struggle to live like a carbon-neutral acquaintance of mine does. And my husband has flatly refused, anyhow.

I guess you have to aim for what's realistic for you - and then up it some. We can all do something - most people recycle now - but what researching my book taught me was that we achieve a lot more than we think we can. Recycling is entry-level stuff. Good as far as it goes, but just the start of the journey. A low-carbon lifestyle ought to be achievable for most of us but that journey requires conscious decisions to be made, changes to routines and, sometimes, new ways of doing things. The question is, do people really want to make the effort?

It’s true that more families are camping in the New Forest for their holidays, but plans remain in place for a third runway at Heathrow. Actions speak louder than words and (credit-crunch restrictions not withstanding) most people still appear to think that giving up on their city breaks and foreign holidays is taking the sacrifice too far.

Not everyone, of course, but for all the well-meaning, Independent-reading greenies taking the train to Italy and talking about Slow Food, you’re as likely to get, ‘It’s a scheme dreamt up the Government to rake in more taxes’ or ‘Global warming? In this weather?’ (indicating frosty pavements) from Telegraph readers to taxi-drivers and, possibly, the park-keeper, too.

Suffice to say that if climate change is the most pressing issue of our age – and the scale of the social and economic disruption if carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere unchecked has been compared with that of the great wars (this by economist Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government-commissioned Stern Review of 2006) – then the message doesn’t seem to have percolated down universally to the electorate.

Never mind that the scientific consensus is overwhelming: more than 90 per cent of the world’s climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and that human activities are contributing to it.

Never mind that the world’s major scientific organisations, from the national science academies of the G8+5 nations to the European Science Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the National Research Council (US) and the Royal Society, the UK’s own national academy of science (to name a tiny handful), have all issued statements concurring.

And never mind that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific intergovernmental body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity, has declared in its most recent (2007) report that, ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and that ‘Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.’ 

Despite all this, people – intelligent and widely read people, as well as the ignorant and the lazy – still don’t ‘get’ it. There will always be a percentage that isn’t ‘bovvered’, but I’m not talking about them. I’m not talking about professional climate-change deniers, either, who make it their business to campaign actively against it (often with funding from the oil industry).

I’m talking about the quiet mass of ordinary people who don’t ‘get’ it because, fundamentally, they don’t want to. Because if they really did ‘get it’, as opposed to feeling vaguely uncomfortable and even a little concerned from time to time, they would be haranguing their local councillors and lobbying their MPs and voting both at the ballot box and with their feet.

Have you heard them talking about climate change in 2008? Or anybody, really? I had real hope in 2007, because the subject was so high profile and it was becoming a real political issue. However, it’s gone off the agenda since the ‘credit crunch’ began, as if caring about our planet is a luxury we can only afford to indulge in when we feel like it.

(Let me give you an example. Back in the summer of 2008, ‘organics’ were dismissed by the tabloids as purely a ‘lifestyle choice’: the fact that the fertilizers used in non-organic production make a significant contribution to greenhouse gases doesn’t even rate a mention.)

Still, many of the measures we’re being forced to take now, through necessity, are the kind of things that environmentalists want us to do anyway: use the car less, turn the heating down, grow our own vegetables, etc. But the general assumption seems to be that these requirements are a short-term expediency and that ‘normal service’ will be resumed when the economy eventually rights itself.

In fact, we’re being encouraged to take the opposite of the planet-saving measures recommended by green experts: now, instead of putting the brakes on consumerism and attempting to live more frugally, we’re supposed to be shopping to save ourselves. Stoke those Chinese power stations! Subsidise the motor industry! Flock to the supermarkets!  Keep the status quo going at all costs! Even if this over-blown pattern of global consumption literally costs the earth. Which, if we keep on doing things in the same old way, it may very well do.

When the IPCC says that global temperature rises are ‘very likely’ due to increases in human greenhouse gas concentrations, it means ‘with 90 per cent certainty’. The IPCC isn’t, as a body, given to flashy statements: it is only with the utmost caution that, after 20 years (the panel was established in 1988) that it has been confident enough to finally and (almost) categorically state that link. And that link is based on peer-reviewed and published scientific literature; in other words, it’s the summation of what other climate scientists think.

We should be listening to them.

A main activity of the IPCC, which grew out of the United Nations, is publishing special reports on topics relevant to the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty born out of the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio. This led to the Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which was signed and ratified by over 180 countries, the notable exception being the US (under Bush), which signed but refused to ratify.

That, one hopes, will change with the inauguration of the new US president, Barack Obama, who has committed to turning America into a world leader on climate change. Obama wants to cut emissions by 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050. The British Government is (unusually) leading the field on this, being the first country to make this a legally binding target ahead of the international pack. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan in December 2008, nearly 200 countries underlined their determination to agree a target for a new treaty to combat global warming, although they fell a long way short of establishing concrete targets.

The key conference to thrash out those details will be held in Copenhagen in November/December 2009, when countries will meet to decide on a successor to Kyoto, which runs out in 2012. It’s seen by many as the last-chance saloon: if the world’s nations can’t sort it out then, any subsequent attempt to rein in global CO2 emissions is going to be too little, too late.

Some think it is already. The Independent newspaper of 2 January 2009 (http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-scientists-its-time-for-plan-b-1221092.html) polled 80 leading scientists in the field, more than 50 per cent of whom are reported to think that the situation is already so serious that a ‘Plan B’ involving some kind of geo-engineering intervention might be needed. Attempts to curb emissions to date have had little impact to date. Carbon dioxide emissions are rising at the rate of one per cent a year and the past decade (1998-2007) has, according to the WMO, been the warmest on record.

Still, a Plan B is only for when Plan A fails to work out, and all the experts agree that a big push to reduce global emissions now is critical. Will our leaders have the boldness of vision – and the political will – to make that kind of commitment? Sir Nicholas Stern said at Poznan that the next two years will be critical if we are to lay down the foundations for sustainable, low-carbon growth. However, he added: ‘I don’t take any of this for granted. The human race has an incredibly well developed capacity to screw up, and we may miss this chance.’

Not, one hopes, if we all make enough noise about how important it is. But will we? Will people even notice what’s going on or will we be too focused on our own interests, both as individuals and as nations, to see the bigger picture? It is very easy – and understandable – to be distracted by the current economic circumstances; they are stressful and difficult times for us all. However, there are plenty of people with a vested interest in sowing further seeds of distraction and doubt at a time when we are all-too-willing to be diverted and the climate-change sceptics see this as their time. 

Which is kind of where I came in. Over the past few weeks, I have been corresponding with a number of climate-change sceptics on the Letters pages in our local paper, The Press, in York, UK. They’ve raised a number of arguments and I’ve spent considerable time researching the points they’ve made. I want to examine these arguments in subsequent blog posts, setting out the responses to them more fully than I was able to in a 300-word letter to the editor.

For now though, go to the Royal Society’s Climate Change Controversies: A Simple Guide (http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?tip=1&id=6231) and you’ll find the 12 most common ones explained. There is also the New Scientist’s extensively researched Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed by Michael Le Page (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html) which has extensive references and links, too. An update in August 2008 (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527) also tackles the latest myth, that warming stopped in 1998.

The main reason, though, for embarking on this essay is that my research has shown me how fantastically polarised the two ‘camps’ are – you’re either a ‘doom-monger’/’alarmist’ or a ‘sceptic’/’denier’ (depending on which side you’re coming from) – and I think this simply confuses the public. Or, worse, makes them switch off from the debate altogether. 

If we don’t all ‘get it’ now, future generations will curse us for our ignorance and laissez-faire. As veteran broadcaster Sir David Attenborough – who used to be a sceptic, too, until he found the evidence for warming was just too compelling – said: 'How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew about this and I did nothing?'

Can you answer that question comfortably? Of course no-one knows with 100 hundred per cent certainty what the future will bring. It’s easier to hedge your bets, sink another pint and dismiss it all as the weathermen getting it wrong again. Yes, it’s a bit brisk outside today. But the long-range forecast? Now that’s a different story.