While the media has been focused on the climate change conference that has been taking place in Glasgow, they are, unfortunately, more than 80 years behind this paper.

I have recently co-written a book with local historian Noel Ponting about George Hobbs, who was an Advertiser columnist between the two World Wars, and had such modern and enlightened ideas that we have called the book (published by Hobnob Press) A Swindon Radical.

George was so far ahead of the game that he was writing science fiction stories in the 1920s.

But even more striking was an article he wrote for the Advertiser about climate change in - wait for it - 1938!

Ironically, he began by pointing out how much milder winters were by then, compared with what he could remember at the turn of the century.

And yet we have seen them get even milder since the turn of another century.

Severe winters have now become the exception, rather than the rule.

And I am looking forward to having grandchildren so I can bore them with stories of how the windows of our house used to freeze on the inside.

Here’s what George had to say: ‘Time was when every ironmonger in Swindon had a brave display of skates in front of his shop – “Skeletons”, “Acmes”, “Wooden-bottoms”. If I remember rightly, the skeleton skate required straps, even as did the wooden-bottom. The “Acme” required no strap; a clip arrangement gripped the heel and the tread of the foot.

‘The old canal usually froze over, just before Christmas, and the ice sometimes held to the end of February. Hundreds of folk gathered, the learners keeping to one of the “pounds” – the stretch of water between locks – and the experts taking journeys to Purton, Shrivenham or Wootton Bassett…

‘A skating Christmas is rare to-day, but it was not so rare, 40 years ago. I imagine that climatic changes occupy many thousands of years, probably millions... It is therefore probable that early man of our temperate zone experienced a climate very much different from what we experience today. But I imagine that every change came gradually – so gradually that it was imperceptible to any one age.’

George clearly suspected that something was afoot - because he could see they had been ‘experiencing some sort of change in weather conditions during the past 40 years’, and it was probably only an absence of scientific data at the time that led him to the conclusion that ‘no great change is imminent’.

It would be decades before scientific evidence proved to rational people (if not politicians) that there was a crisis in the making and action is required, not empty words.

But even as long ago as 1938, smart people like George Hobbs understood that ‘a too-sudden change would probably mean the extermination of life in the affected regions’.

The crisis that he feared is clearly now coming home to roost.

Or should that be roast?