In today's Times there is an extract of Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living by Nick Spencer and Robert White.

Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.

Every age has its 'apocalypse'. In the twentieth century there was world war, quickly followed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today it is climate change.

'I believe [climate change] to be the world's greatest environmental challenge,' Tony Blair said in a speech in 2004, 'a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.' '[Climate change] is a huge problem,' Bill Clinton had said in a speech to the Russian Duma four years earlier. 'If we don’t deal with this within just a few years, you will have island nations flooded; you will have the agricultural balance of most countries completely changed; you will have a dramatic increase in thenumber of severe, unmanageable weather events.'

The general public, at least in Britain, is not given to trusting its elected officials, accusing them of rhetoric, hyperbole and spin. In this instance, however, it seems that our politicians are, if anything, under-exaggerating the issue’s importance. Sir David King, the UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, has called climate change 'the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism'.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the UK Meteorological Office and co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), wrote in the Guardian in 2003, 'the impacts of global warming are such that I have no hesitation in describing it as a "weapon of mass destruction."'

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