While a minority of sceptics continue to question the science of global warming and climate change, an increasing number of companies are putting that debate behind them, or at least to one side, and moving on. In a number of cases, they are moving ahead of governments.

This is surely sensible. Few chief executives would see themselves as experts on climate change. But they are well versed in the art of taking decisions under conditions of uncertainty. So when 11 national scientific academies say "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action", most CEOs adopt as their starting point the probability that the scientists are right.