The Day After Tomorrow was a brilliant Hollywood box office success, and perhaps dramatised something that we have all been in denial about over the past several years.
But behind the sensational drama of a disaster movie lies a bedrock of unpalatable truths, which are this month beginning to be talked about at last.
In its simplest terms, our climate is changing. On the one hand, this shouldn't be something we panic about, because the truth is that it is constantly changing.
Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this is the fact that in 1814, the River Thames in London froze, and the last recorded Frost Fair was held on the River.
In other words, it froze sufficiently for hundreds of people to be able to set up stalls actually on the River, and for citizens to skate and play on one of the busiest waterways in the country. Frozen solid.
Historically, there is apparently an approximate 300 year cycle of significant changes in the European climate, which no doubt exists in the context of larger cycles, perhaps spanning across thousands of years, trekking back to the last Ice Age.
No doubt we will all be familiar with the notion that Northern Europe was covered in an ice sheet, that was large enough, deep enough, and strong enough, to have transformed the geography of our country, with glaciers slowly eroding entire mountain ranges, and leaving after their thaw erratic rocks pushed hundreds of miles from their source.
Within living memory, it is possible to discern sometimes subtle and sometimes less subtle changes that have taken place.
When I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border in a small town, my 80-year-old neighbor could remember when the river that was just 100 metres from our house, would flood and create regular streams that would cross the street.
This was transformed when sluices were introduced to this small river in 1932, making the river, where we lived 20 miles inland, no longer navigable to the sea.
This emphasizes a simple rule, that if you make one change in a river system, perhaps to stop water from regularly interrupting the lives of local inhabitants, there will be consequences. In this case, the (benign) consequence (perhaps?) that shallow bottomed boats could no longer travel from the end of our street as far as Great Yarmouth, and from there, to Holland and the Baltic. Both of which were sources for the building materials from which our 17th-century house had been constructed.
Our neighbor could remember the installation of those sluices, and the changes that came about because of them.
For most of us, local memories take account of much shorter periods of time.
Last week, our street flooded, quite simply because the drainage system couldn't quite cope with the amount of rainfall.
It shouldn't have been as much of a surprise as it was, as the last time it happened was about five years ago. And
there is a substantial hint in that most of the houses in this part of the road, constructed in the 1920s and 30s, have a step at the front gate, over which you gain access to your front garden.
It is only a small step, just over the height of a brick, and in fact those houses which have retained this small step, and not opened their front garden for the parking of a car, were protected from floodwater which didn't fortunately get much deeper than a few inches.
Enough for my immediate neighbor to have to have to resort to using grow-bags as a defence against the ingress of water.
Since we have only recently closed the street to traffic so that children could play in the street on the Jubilee weekend, many neighbors have been introduced to each other, and with the extraordinary circumstances of a local flood, neighbors were out helping each other to cope with this local emergency.
Most notably, much forking of drains took place to encourage water to go where we have taken for granted it should go, but perhaps we have forgotten that it was only over the past several years that our local borough council have regularly banked up the shingle on the beach, just two streets away from where we live on the south coast of England, so that we are less affected by tides.
When I first arrived in Worthing, and I still walked my dog in my electric wheelchair, I remember one morning coming upon a young man surveying on the beach, and I asked him what he was doing.
To my surprise, using satellite technology, he said he was checking the alignment of the pebbles on the beach, and I suppose this would have been a precursor to further banking of pebbles as required.
It was one of my carers that recently pointed out to me that regular tidal flooding used to take place, and I suppose the way in which drains have been laid over the years, has reflected the need to accommodate this factor.
Most of this part of West Worthing was developed in the early part of this century, which perhaps means that services like drains have been laid out using modern methods of town planning. One hopes.
We haven't had much of a Summer in Britain this year yet, and for the first time this morning, in the middle of July, I have heard a weather forecaster from the BBC say that it is likely that our climate may well change over the next 20 years, so that we have more extreme weather.
The simple fact is that we don't take bad news easily, and the idea that we might have to get used to more extreme weather conditions, perhaps increasing periods of heavy rainfall, won't make anybody's day more cheerful.
And so I expect it may be some time before we see the carefully crafted analysis programmes about what we might expect from the weather.
Ever since the weather forecaster David Fish failed spectacularly to predict the enormous storm that destroyed thousands of trees and devastated woodland around the UK, as well as in France (which of course is much more forested than England).
No one will want to stick their neck out and get it wrong, and certainly politicians will not want to recognize that we may have to change how much we spend on planning for a more sustainable environment, within which we can live without having to rebuild our homes more often than we can afford.
Let's face it, the climate is changing, has always changed in any case, and we mustn't just take for granted all of those things that we think are fixed and immutable.
They simply aren't.
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