DESPITE national insecurity that makes many want to hide behind their own borders, the world is now much smaller, with few places more than a day away. Ironically this means that we are now very much interconnected and the threat of pandemics, global scale threats that ignore national boundaries, are very real. It seems that viruses, political as well as medical, have now joined with trade to have an all embracing global reach.

The two most relevant current examples of these international problems, one of disease and the other political, are Ebola in West Africa, and the fundamentalist jihad strife in the Middle East. While it's possible to suggest that both have been made worse by human lifestyles, one by the cutting down of forests, and the other a changing climate leading to drought and political unrest, it's interesting to consider the nature of our response to such threats.

As a species we seem to need the dangers we face to be immediate, and challenging the moment, rather than something that's certainly going to happen but not just yet. We are somehow programmed to put off facing up to future problems until they are upon us, and then it's more than likely that any action will be too late.

We see this in our personal lives where lazy teeth cleaning leads to dentures later on, or we delay making arrangements for pensions preferring to spend on the excesses and luxuries that currently tempt us. The same can be seen with nations and this must be the only reason why we ignore the inevitability of climate change. It's going to happen, but not yet, or perhaps not too seriously here, so we can ignore it.

Maybe we can take heart from the fact that attitudes and behaviour can suddenly change, from an almost universally accepted position to a completely different one in as short a time as a generation, or even a decade. Examples range from the mundane, such as the crowds at a pre-war Wembley cup final all wearing hats while by the Fifties the supporters were overwhelmingly bare headed, to a more significant change in attitude to practices such as smoking in the work place and on public transport.

However I'm not even sure that the experience of being the victims of abnormal climate events, such as the flooding in the Somerset Levels, or the drought in Brazil necessarily leads to understanding. Too often the response is to blame the government, the water company, the sun or a divinity rather than question the contribution of personal life styles.

It'll be interesting to see what role addressing climate change plays in the General Election. Don't expect much.