“We are all climate sceptics,” Professor Clive Hamilton – a leading Australian academic and pioneer in predicting the profound impact of climate change on our societies – warned years ago.

When he spoke, many politicians still dismissed climate change as a hoax. One of the first acts of US President Donald Trump when he came into office in 2017 was to pull his country out of the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty on climate change, a document Trump dismissed as written “by global activists” to “take away the great wealth” of the United States.