Not a day has gone by over the past five years without another climate change prediction being highlighted in the world’s media, and reactions to the reporting of computer models and physical evidence vary depending upon where you live, and what your already established views are. The question is, have most of us in the West already taken sides in the debate?

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Those who believe climate change is real divide easily into two groups—those who say nothing can be done, and have already given up, and those who are already taking steps from large to small to limit their personal carbon emissions, waste production and overall impact on the environment. As for those who deny and dispute climate change, if they haven’t yet changed their position it seems only a massive physical change to the world will bring them on board—which many argue will mean it’s too late for all of us, that by the time the doubters have their collective epiphany we’ll have already by that point seen millions of people die in countries like Bangladesh and environments such as the Arctic ice gone forever.

Whatever side of the debate you’re on, however much or little you do, there’s no denying that with each new report our responses cover the range of human emotion from absolute denial and fear through to depression, hopelessness, despair, and even rage. It might be that for many who diss the idea of climate change, they simply don’t feel they could cope with the wash of information if they were to accept it as having any grounding in truth; it’s certainly the case that increasing numbers of people, while taking action, carry a specifically 21st-century guilt that they’re not doing enough, and not able to convince their friends, families, or elected leaders.

Only a few short years ago environmental activists were painted in the media as funky-smelling dreadlocked loons. The perception, contrived as it always was, stuck in the public mind and so the dilemma confronting everyone now is that we are being asked to sign up to the same agenda as ‘these people’. We should all know by now, after centuries of shared culpability and experience in pushing communities to the margins of society, that the way to disparage the Enemy is to belittle what they fight for and present them as ugly or unclean, dangerously hostile to comfort and luxury, and to society itself. Enemies change, of course, according to the agendas of the day, and so environmentalists, who themselves over time replaced homosexuals and communists, find themselves in turn replaced by terrorists and anyone with a Middle-Eastern appearance. It’s all guff. Ultimately the only lasting enemy of the human race is, as it has always been, the human race itself when one man turns against another and doesn’t just use words but fists and bombs as well.

The biggest bomb in human history has been under construction since before the industrial age began, and began ticking in an obvious and ominous manner back in the 1950s when CO2 emissions were first correlated directly to human activity. Hard-wired as we are to deal with the now, what is in front of us and immediately demanding of our attention and action, our species finds the long-drawn-out scream a new and difficult phenomenon to get to grips with.

Some among us talk of a paradigm shift about to take place—that is, a fundamental rewiring of how we view ourselves in the world, and interact with it. A good example of a paradigm shift is the change from feudalism to capitalism. Another took place when Martin Luther pinned his slip of paper on a door and split the Roman Catholic Church. Yet another came about in France when heads were being chopped off, and when the Berlin Wall came down a few decades back. Paradigm shifts are the stuff of evolution: messy, chaotic, dangerous and transformative. But ultimately, however painful the birthing of change is, paradigm shifts do move us forward in leaps and bounds rather than by shuffling little steps.

Those of us who are taking shuffling little steps right now are aware that our mindful little footprints in the sand are only advance markers of what is to come—ripples in the pond of Time coming back to us from a future when a mighty big bomb lands slap-bang in the middle of our manufactured world. Our own actions, and the legacies of our parents’ and grandparents’ actions, mean we are now called upon to do all we can to make history rather than sleepwalk to history’s end.

The signs are that the long-drawn-out scream is about to explode out of Time’s corridor and emerge in the next few years as something of the now, no longer future feared and possible but the real, right here. The latest news once again tells us that computer models are wrong, not in predicting the consequences of CO2 emissions, but when they will show significant impact. We have moved, in the space of just a couple of years, from talk of disaster in the next century to the loss of Arctic summer ice by 2013.

The distant future has shown itself to be a contrived perception only; it has feet, and is able to walk backwards towards us in the present, getting closer and closer instead of remaining comfortably far away beyond the span of our individual lives. It was always a strange comfort to see the end of civilisation, the possible end of all life on Earth, as somebody else’s problem—especially when you consider that loving parents have children, whose children and their children would face the consequences of what we did, and do. But now, that awful ability to put aside the future has been taken away from us. If we continue to pollute, to abuse, to greedily consume, it won’t be someone else’s problem after we have lived our lives of unparalleled convenience, luxury and comfort; it will be, and already is, ours to deal with or continue to ignore.

If you found the thought comforting and a justification for complacency that you would live your life and then die ten years, twenty, half a century, before our species created the hottest possible Hell on Earth, think again; the future is almost here, we only have to wait a few more years for it to impact upon every single one of us. Whether we can diffuse the climate change bomb, who knows? But facing up to the fact that we need to try is the first step towards hope, and change. Sure, those of us who already accept climate change as grim reality deal with depression, feelings of powerlessness, even despair at times. But these emotional responses are the price we must pay for allowing our consciences to develop, to evolve. And there are moments of elation to be enjoyed, such as when we first install a solar panel or start to recycle—that gentle sense of doing something positive, intelligent and thoughtful.

The bottom line is, do you want to try to make the most of what the gods gave you inside that skull of yours, or do you want to waste the work of our ancestors in bringing us down from the trees? Our quest as a species, in common with all other life on the planet, has always been to live better lives. We can live much better lives than we do today. On this side of the paradigm shift it’s hard to see how life can be better when all the talk is of becoming more frugal, cutting down on car and air travel, buying local food rather than strawberries from Israel to put on the table in December… The messages seem unrelentingly grim, miserly, joyless. But that’s because we’re on the wrong side of the perceptual shift right now. We’ve yet to pass through the bubble, or what Pagans increasingly reference, appropriately I think, as the Great Turning. Already people are sensing the paradigm shift draws ever closer; they are discovering there is adventure and joy to be found in growing their own vegetables, keeping chickens, giving things away that they no longer need for themselves. I know people who are looking to keep bees, learn to knit their own clothes, acquire the lost skills of their grandparents…

We don’t need to go back to the trees or caves to save the planet. We just need to start the preparatory work in our own lives for the next stage in our evolution. Nobody yet has a name for what will come after capitalism and, in China, communism; but just because it has no name doesn’t mean there isn’t a system out there, waiting to emerge—one that is, by necessity, co-operative and nurturing, respectful and all-encompassing. There is an alternative to hopelessness and depression when thinking about the current state of the world, and that’s to become excited about the fact that we are living in challenging times for everyone. Are you up to the challenge? I rather think you are. I certainly like to think and hope that I am… Or, at least, that I’m getting there…