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Not a tonne of coal or a barrel of oil will be left in the ground if money can be made from extracting and burning it Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high but sheltered ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.

It may seem obvious, but negotiating cuts in emissions while building fossil-fuel power stations just won't work

Australia is often cited as being particularly vulnerable to climate change, with projections of longer droughts punctuated by increasingly horrendous floods. In Western Australia, rainfall has already declined by 20%, and the tragic "Black Saturday" bush fires that claimed 173 lives in 2009 were amplified by an unprecedented heatwave. It is less well known that Australia is also a coal "superpower," being the world's largest exporter of this dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

Better forecasting of where the wind is blowing could allow British fossil fuel power stations to be switched off and counter critics' claims that wind power is too intermittent.

As the world's climate warms, will the Pacific Ocean make matters worse by dumping extra heat into the atmosphere? Ancient fossils and the latest modelling both suggest such fears may be unfounded. But there is a downside: extreme weather caused by the Pacific's shifting waters might become more common.

You think you're discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you're discussing belief systems. The battle among environmentalists over how or whether our future energy is supplied is a cipher for something much bigger: who we are, who we want to be, how we want society to evolve.