Different groups of people have widely varying views about climate change and its cause, from the vast majority of Earth scientists who understand the underlying physics and know it’s mainly the result of human activity, to the few who deny that it is happening at all or, if it is, blame the sun, cosmic rays or divine intervention.

One of the problems is the rate at which change is taking place and because it’s relatively slow, it seems to pass unnoticed, obscured as it is by the normal changes in temperature between night and day, and summer and winter. There is also a mismatch between the normal life span of a human being and the time it takes for change to be noticed.

The start of the First World War was only a century ago, but that is ancient history for many, and the Romans and Egyptians seem to be the beginning of time. But they are but as yesterday compared with the 500,000,000 years since the first fossils lived, and the melting of the Aire Valley glacier in Bingley, 12,000 years ago, is a mere twitch of the eye.

It’s difficult enough to remember what it was like a few years ago, and memory often fades and can be selective. Some can recall extremes such as the blizzards and bedroom-high snow of 1946, or the cracking summer of 1948 with almost uninterrupted cricket, but apart from the 1962 winter, a good summer in 1976 and the 1995 drought, that’s about it.

These singular events stick in the memory along with pictures of the recent floods in the UK, or the damage caused by super storm Sandy, and Australia being on fire. Such one-in-a-hundred-year extremes have always happened, though it seems that nowadays they crop up every decade and are a sign of the problems to come.

We find it very difficult to accept that dangerous change is taking place if it’s not immediately obvious and rapid, and happening to us in our small corner. It’s often suggested there is nothing to worry about as the global climate has changed markedly in the past, from much warmer than now to ice ages.

But that misses the important difference about the speed of change. It took many thousands of years to warm up at the end of the last ice age, when the average global temperature increased by just five degrees.

So the one degree rise in the last hundred years is a quite unprecedented rate in the life of the planet, and it just so happens to coincide with the most selfish and greedy species that has ever lived – industrial us.