Royal Dutch Shell, a major world oil company, had a very bad year in 2004 when it was fined £17 million and had to pay out £500,000 to its share holders – it had falsified its oil reserves.

The company had overestimated the amount of oil in more than 100 of its operation areas, and clearly was misleading investors. It wasn’t as rich as it pretended, and £3 billion was wiped off the share price. Pension funds shivered.

This raises a real concern about how we can reduce the use of fossil fuels, the carbon dioxide producers, as the wealth and share price of all the large coal, oil and gas companies is mainly built on their future prospects.

The more proven reserves they have, the more they can borrow against future earnings, as long as the oil really is in the ground, and they can get it all out in due course.

The top 200 oil and gas companies are valued at four trillion dollars ($4,000,000,000,000) and they have borrowed another one-and-a-half trillion against the reserves they have yet to extract.

Now if you were a bank that had lent them the money, or an individual that had bought very expensive shares, or a pension fund that relied on a good return from its investment to pay an ageing population, you would be very keen that all the oil and coal in the ground saw the light of day or you would lose your money.

We’ve been there before with the subprime housing market price bubble in the USA which burst in 2008 costing investors $500 billion, leading to all the global economic problems that have followed.

That would be insignificant compared to the collapse of the carbon bubble if it became clear that we were really going to leave 60 per cent of the coal, oil and gas unused, and in the ground.

But that’s exactly what we should be doing if we’re to have any hope of stopping rampant global warming later in the century, and it doesn’t look as though we are taking the threat seriously.

Fracking of shale gas is the order of the day, Indonesia and Australia are competing to set new records for exporting coal, and there’s a wishful, but as yet unproven, hope that we might find a way to capture the CO2 and hide it away out of sight.

It would need an international agreement, from every country, to cut its fossil fuel use by a small percentage each year, from 2015, for there to be any chance of reducing the size of the bubble and the CO2 that inflates it.

Keep your fingers crossed.