Sometimes films can affect you for reasons not entirely clear at the time. I went to see director Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of the PD James novel, Children of Men, during the week. In Cuaron's London of 2027, a totalitarian government ruling through brute force is holding together the last semblance of a state left in the world. Anarchy has prevailed everywhere else because of one simple, stunning fact.
Women can no longer have children. The world that carelessly took for granted that there would always be a next generation descends into chaos, when people realise that the human race will be extinct within a century.
Desperate refugees, known as 'fugees, try to enter Britain, and if they succeed, are rounded up and herded into camps where squalor and degradation are the norm. Bexhill, a town on the coast, has become one giant 'fugee camp, where soldiers kill and maim at random. In one technically brilliant 10-minute, single-take shot set in Bexhill, Theo Farron, the reluctant hero played superbly by Clive Owen, ducks and dives during a 'fugee uprising, amid shootings, tanks, sniper attacks, troops, and screaming victims eviscerated by bombs but not yet dead.
The most chilling aspect of it is that one could be watching news footage from Iraq, or many recent war zones. Yet, because one has become emotionally involved with the protagonist, it has a raw power that documentaries often do not. The full horror of war, the arbitrary nature of who lives and dies, and the dehumanisation that inevitably accompanies it is powerfully realised.
Although the film revolves around the despair of a world without children, I was puzzled by the fact that my reaction was not: "Thank God I have four children. Let me rush home and hug them, and remind myself to think of this moment the next time they are making so much noise that I fear my head will burst".
Instead, it took me several days to understand why I found the film so moving. Although no explanation is given for the fact that women can no longer carry babies, and no attempt is made to link it to our criminally careless treatment of this fragile blue and green planet, it was impossible to view Children of Men in the same week as the Stern report came out in Britain, and not to see parallels. Sir Nicholas Stern might be nonplussed to see his sober, academic and unemotional exposition of the economic effects of climate change spoken of in the same breath as a tense, violent cinematic realisation of a dystopian future, but bear with me.
Literature and film allow us to explore what it would be like to live in situations currently far removed from our experience of reality. Sir Nicholas's tome, all 700 pages of it, is dry and in places full of eye-glazing academic jargon, yet in spite of that, facts leap from the page that are all too simple to understand. Climate change is real. All countries will be affected, but developing countries will suffer earliest and the most, despite the fact that most of the damage has been inflicted by rich countries.
By the middle of the century, 200 million people may be permanently displaced due to rising sea levels, heavier floods and drought.
Global food production will be seriously affected. A rise of just two degrees could result in extinction of 15 per cent to 40 per cent of species. The dystopia created in Children of Men by the fact that human beings can no longer reproduce could be also created by global warming.
It is at this point that most people switch off, irritated by what they fervently hope is scaremongering. Look at Y2K, they say, when planes were meant to fall from the sky and banks collapse; or at avian flu, which was supposed to decimate populations. Let's go back to watching Coronation Street.
Some of this is due, it must be admitted, to the fact that climate change is sometimes presented in a manner that would have made Geneva's Calvinists look light-hearted.
The consequences of climate change are presented as being a direct result of the awfulness of humanity, that one stinking blot on the Gaian paradise, who wreak havoc in the harmony that would otherwise prevail.
The Malthusians, those exponents of population control ( mostly of other races, particularly in the developed world), seem to be grimly delighted that human beings may soon be forcibly culled.
Children of Men brilliantly shows what happens when hope dies, and equally brilliantly (without plot-spoiling) the joy that children, symbols of the future, bring.
If people are to begin to believe the awful reality of the damage being done daily to the only home we have, this planet, they need hope. The Stern report is careful to point out that prevention is better than cure, that the benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh the costs.
Yet giant tomes from governments will not cause people to agree to take action that hurts in the short-term for long-term gain.
We need to start to appeal to that most basic of instincts, the instinct to protect our children. How can we justify potentially leaving a world to our children where they have to scrabble for food, clean water and the basics of life? Alarmist? Sadly, no.
Even in the unlikely event that all these scientists are wrong about climate change, we are still facing unprecedented challenges in this century, because we are using up the planet's resources in a way that blithely assumes that they are infinite, instead of limited.
What the world needs now is leadership, from many directions. Take this newspaper, which since the aims of the liberal agenda have all more or less been achieved, and no one seems particularly grateful or particularly better off, has been acting a little like a dog that chases cars and does not know what to do with one when it catches it.
Care for the environment is an obvious cause for a newspaper like The Irish Times to champion. The churches, the arts, and politics, for once have a cause behind which all reasonable people can unite. Yet they will only do so, if hope, fragile as a newborn child, is kept alive, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.