When I first entered the field of climate change policy research, a little over two decades ago, I was warned by a former deputy administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency that I was wasting my time because: ‘Climate change will never be a major public policy issue.’ He advanced three reasons for this: ‘The science is too uncertain, the impacts are too far in the future, and there is no readily identifiable villain.’ My response was that these were exactly the kinds of reasons why climate change would become a major policy issue. It was precisely the plasticity of climate change – its ability to be many things to many people – that would ensure its claim to sustained public attention.

Ten years later, hard on the heels of the Kyoto Protocol, I led the publication of a state-of-the-art report on the social science research relevant to climate change that confirmed what we have subsequently recognised as the ‘wickedness’ of climate change as an issue. Wickedness in this sense is not a moral judgement (although to some people climate change is the consequence of an unethical industrial lifestyle). Originating in the study of urban planning, it is a way of describing problems of mind-bending complexity, characterised by ‘contradictory certitudes’ and thus defying elegant, consensual solutions.