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Regular reports on the state of the climate which have come out every five or six years since 1990 measure with relentless consistency.

The accelerating changes produced by our burning of fossil fuels.

It's become such a familiar presence in the global institutional architecture that it's easy to overlook.

What an extraordinary idea it really was.

There's never been before such a huge and sustained effort to build this collective understanding of something so fundamental to human well being.

As the state of the climate.

Literally thousands of scientists from every country in the world have collaborated for three decades almost all of them voluntarily to give us the best possible scientific understanding of what we are doing to our climate.

They systematically review the mountains of primary research into every single aspect of the science of climate change and then they analyze with great rigor exactly what it is that we know about the way the climate is changing, carefully calibrating the confidence with which we know it.

And then they're joined by officials from every government and the scientists and the officials together carefully review the report's findings line by line to produce an agreed summary for policymakers.

Now that process is not without its controversies.

A few years ago one of the lead authors for working group three on Climate mitigation wrote to senior I.

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Chairs to complain of his frustration that the officials were weakening the text so that in his words the government approval process built political credibility by sacrificing scientific integrity and others rightly point out that the analysis also fails into factor in positive feedback loops like the one that could be caused by permafrost thaw in the arctic for example.

But nevertheless these I.

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Documents remain a critical contribution and they serve as the primary source of guidance for governments everywhere on the absolute minimum they must do to protect our climate and what's become ever clearer as uncertainties in climate science continue to be patiently removed is that humanity has never before faced such an all consuming and imminent threat to our future.

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We do know in great detail what we are doing and we will not be forgiven especially by our Children if we fail to act and to act in time.

Pete Postlethwaite captured the urgency of this task brilliantly in the film The age of stupid you might remember it.

It came out some years ago conceived by Franny Armstrong.

It's set in the future after some kind of climate catastrophe.

And in it, Postlethwaite plays the sole survivor after some kind of climate catastrophe.

He looks back from 2055.

He looks back to today and he says in words that still make the hairs go up from the back of my neck every time I say it.

Why is it knowing what we knew then we didn't act when we still had time.

Why indeed?

Because stripped of all of its often confusing detail the task of saving ourselves and our Children is strikingly simple.

We have to stop burning fossil fuels.

That's it.

From a climate perspective, we don't even have to stop using them.

We just have to stop burning them.

And of course we have to do that while still providing all eight billion of us with the access to the energy and especially the electricity that we need to live decent and fulfilling lives.

And what that means is that the transition to an energy system that doesn't burn carbon has to happen in a way that is fair that we can't simply abandon everyone whose current livelihoods depends on fossil fuels to somehow sacrifice them on the altar of a greater good to transition to a carbon free energy system must be a just transition.

That is the morally right thing to do.

But it's also important not to create a deep pool of the so called left behind to feed populist fantasies, but there are simple solutions to complex problems.

We urgently need to put the kind of collaborative effort into understanding how to build a just energy transition that we have already put into understanding how the climate works.

I think it's very clear that if the transition to a carbon free energy system is not just then it won't happen at all.

So what are some of the priorities?

Well, we haven't yet done enough to map and put in place.

The socially just pathways to a carbon free energy system by 2050 governments everywhere and of any kind will be nervous about asking citizens to support policies where the disruption may be immediate.

But the stable benefits seem a long way off and striking that balance between the pace of disruption.

The protection of incumbents requires more thought than slogans and sound bites.

Burning fossil fuels is a major source of dividends to our pension funds and taxes to our government.

These are powerful inhibitors of strong government action on climate change.

So we need to be as creative and ideas about how to replace those dividends and taxes as we are about replacing the fossil burning technologies.

And there are some bad ideas that we need to drop as well.

The idea that we can somehow replace fossil fuels with nuclear power is a fantasy that can only be made to work in a mathematical model.

Nevertheless, it is a fantasy that has a fierce grip on some political minds.

It's managed to persuade and otherwise very fiscally or steer conservative government in Britain that it should by 35 years worth of electricity in advanced at a fixed price.

That is more than twice as high as today's now, it's not easy to see how buying 35 years worth of any commodity in advance is compatible with sound management of the economy.

So there is much to do.

But in conclusion taking back control was by a long way the most powerful of the slogans deployed in the Brexit debate and in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world that is changing at an accelerating pace.

I can fully understand its appeal.

I'm only sorry that it was deployed to support a cause, leaving the EU that will actually lead to a greater loss of control, not the least over our climate.

If we really want to take back control of our future, that we must stop the burning of fossil fuels urgently in order to keep our climate manageable as we build the carbon free global energy system.

We will also be able to take back control of our energy bills and our energy security.

Losing control of our climate will be politically destabilizing as water and food security is undermined around the world.

Taking back control of our climate is the only way to make a future that's safe for our Children, one that has a chance of being prosperous and secure, and it's the only way to make a future where we save ourselves.