WHAT have been the big talkers at your workplace, dinner table or pub over recent days, the issues that got folk exercised?

Did the fate of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi arise, or maybe Brexit? It might even have been the Strictly kiss between Seann and Katya.

What I have found particularly interesting is what didn’t come up: climate change.

We found out last week, after all, that humanity has just 12 years to save the world. A major report from the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded that by 2030 temperatures are on course to rise 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the maximum increase before catastrophic consequences – extreme floods and heat, mass displacement and poverty – are unleashed upon the planet.

Wow. Twelve years. Let’s face it, unless you’re a teenager that’s not long; the sort of time frame two old friends could catch up on in an afternoon, a marriage that would be considered relatively short.

And yet I didn’t honestly hear folk discussing, let alone panicking about, this perilous situation. The media carried the story prominently but not even the horrifically blunt nature of the message seemed to capture the imagination.

Why? It’s probably down to the next headline in the report, the bit explaining what we have to do to avoid calamity, which sends most people – me included – running for the hills (or to cat videos and episodes of Father Ted for comfort, at any rate).

I say most. Around 20 per cent of the population is apparently on board when it comes to a greener, cleaner lifestyle. There’s another 20 per cent at the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, that doesn’t believe climate change is real.

Then there’s the big, woolly middle – that’s me again – that accepts the science and understands the theoretical importance of these warnings, even tries to be a bit greener, but automatically switches off the full reality. Hence the ability to file last week’s report into the “I really should get round to that at some point” part of the brain that also contains saving for a pension, eating healthily and doing more exercise. Or the “I’m sure scientists will sort it” place.

Climate change is a million times more important than these issues, of course, and I find it fascinating that most of us didn’t collapse into a heap of anguish when we discovered the findings of this latest report. Despite how far we have evolved psychologically over the centuries, our ability to ignore serious issues because we don’t like the solutions remains remarkably strong.

Living less mobile and connected lives, drastically reducing or giving up the conveniences that define our age – the dirty, gas-guzzling cars, the power-hungry gadgets, the cheap air travel, meat-heavy foods that fill our diets, the non-recyclable plastic – seems awful and impossible, so we ignore the whole thing.

Even those of us already suffering the consequences of environmental destruction – those with breathing difficulties, for example – struggle to change their own behaviour because our brains are pre-conditioned to focus primarily on the short-term, and probably for very good reason.

Human psychology has not evolved to point where it can handle the enormity of a challenge on this scale, even if science can provide many of the intellectual and theoretical solutions. In other words, our tiny minds doom us to failure.

And I include politicians in this “our”. Governments clearly have a very significant role in making us change our behaviour if there is to be any hope of averting disaster. But which party will have the guts to write what would have to the most brutal and authoritarian manifesto in British history? How would mere politicians persuade us to vote for this extremely distasteful medicine, even if somewhere deep down we know it is necessary?

No party has ever even contemplated trying to approach a general election in this way, never mind actually winning one. Look what happened to Theresa May last year when she tried to suggest older people should pay even a little bit more towards their care bills. Or how the Scottish Government was dragged through the courts and accused of nanny state-ism over a minimum alcohol pricing policy aimed at making the population healthier.

How the biggest exercise in political persuasion would succeed at a time when governments, the media, scientists and “experts” are less trusted and more despised than at any other point in living memory, and there is global division on every front, only adds to the mind-boggling enormity of the task.

I am horribly aware that this column contains not one practical idea for taking this vital issue forward. I’m not going to pretend I have any answers on this one. But it is important to acknowledge the simple and, let’s face it, understandable reasons why so many of us remain apathetic.

We’re programmed to be this way because it means we will get out of bed even when things are at their most desperate.

Right, on that note I’m off to watch the Strictly results show.