The rain is pelting against my window as I write and I might be forgiven for thinking that global warming is not very important – it certainly isn’t too evident in West Yorkshire at the moment, despite a warm October.

It seems there are more important matters in the Press, with cricketers in court, the euro problem and struggling Greece, but all this demonstrates is our inability to think ahead and put our current lifestyles into perspective.

In a recent Bradford lecture, Melvyn Bragg used a phrase that spoke volumes about the way we are mired in our own problems and ignore the wider view. He said: “We are embalmed in the superficiality of the present”.

Perhaps it’s only natural that we are most concerned about our local neighbourhood, and this is one of the problems with understanding what’s happening to the world’s climate.

We would get really excited if record temperatures, deep swirling floods or weeks of baking drought, all topped with hurricane damage, were happening in West Yorkshire, but they aren’t, so we show little interest and make even less effort to change the way that we behave.

Our difficulty is that we are too parochial, from family, through village, town, county and then nation – there is so much in the way filtering out the global view that we find it difficult to make the future the key determinant in all the decisions we make.

It might not seem to be happening here, but elsewhere in the world records are being set that really should challenge our comfortable assumption that what we know now will always be so. It won’t, and folk in Thailand and Texas are becoming very aware that the future is uncertain.

Recently almost half of Thailand has been under water with unprecedented rainfall and flooding, while the opposite has been the case in the south- west of the USA.

Texas has set all-time weather records with more than 40 days above 40C – that is more than 100F, reaching record highs of 46C in a number of towns. This has been partly because rainfall has been only a third of the average, leading to the driest ten months ever recorded, and so a record number of wild fires – more than 19,000 – have destroyed nearly two million hectares.

A recent 8,000ft-high dust storm was reminiscent of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s – the plot of Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath novel.

Then it was due to poor farming practices, but the current one is just another response to the way we are changing the climate through our energy-intensive, CO2-liberating, careless lifestyles.