TS Eliot wrote this oft-quoted line in his poem The Hollow Men in 1925 . He later said he would not have written it after 1945 because everyone would then associate it with the nuclear bomb.  As a master of allusion, he realised that words get their power from associations they trigger in readers’ minds - and presumably he didn’t want readers to make an association he had not intended.

Today it seems some people are keen to do the opposite with global warming - to turn it into a phrase that quite clearly sets off associations with the end of the world, or at least a very big bang. Film-maker Roland Emmerich, for example, makes his living as a purveyor of environmental apocalypse. A few years back he gave us The Day After Tomorrow, where climate change brings a new ice age to New York in a matter of hours. 

Now we get the $160m budget 2012 where LA and Rome crumble as survivors desperately try to board arks in Asia. Lower key, lower budget, and in general much more real, is the UK’s drama-documentary The Age of Stupid, which provides snapshots of what global warming is doing now - for example through the eyes of an octogenarian Alpine guide. But it nonetheless still manages to suggest the world will be largely underwater by 2050. 

Sometimes governments also seem to be playing the doomsday card. Earlier this year the UK Government attempted to awaken a complacent public with a report on the impacts of climate change in Britain. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, the most dramatic impacts predicted for the UK are simply not blockbuster material. 

We were told, for example, that there might be 22% less rain in Yorkshire - and not until the 2080s at that. Even allowing for the stoicism of Yorkshire folk, one isn’t surprised at the lack of panic in the Dales. The main projections for the UK are relatively benign. The country’s wine-growers, for example, are delighted by the idea of a warmer climate.   

The danger with all this is that people will start to discern a gulf between climate fiction - which is to do with imminent catastrophe - and climate fact - which appears to be about mild and manageable change.

That in mind, it came as a profound wake-up call to attend an event in London a few nights ago and hear the reality of what is happening right now as a result of extreme weather that may be linked to climate change. The testimony came largely from Londoners with families or roots in Bangladesh. We heard a young man describe how a cyclone had destroyed his home and killed thousands of people.

We saw a dramatised account of how Bangladeshis are losing their lives and livelihoods, based on an Oxfam ’climate hearing’ held on boats tethered to the goalposts of what had once been a football pitch.  In an earlier session a Bangladeshi woman described how the winter is no longer cold, the summer is too hot and salt water has brought dysentery, malaria and skin disease to the community. 

"There is nothing growing in the villages. My children don’t have their father. They have me but I am helpless because of the salt water." 

Meanwhile in East Africa, the killer is the opposite problem - drought. The rains have failed and millions are relying on aid agencies for food.   Are these events climate-related? Scientists are unsure. But they are certainly the kind of climate change impacts that many experts have been warning of for years.   Crop failures in Africa and flooding in Asia are both on the increase.  Whether directly attributable to global warming or not, they represent a more powerful call to action than Hollywood fiction or Government spin. 

This will be the way climate change works - not with a bang, but a slow, inexorable rise in the familiar ravages of natural disaster. The other day someone said to me; "What’s new? I’ve never known a time when there wasn’t famine in Africa." True. The problem isn’t new. But the scale will be new. It’s more of the same. Much more.

Neither are the solutions as dramatic as we might like them to be. The International Energy Agency’s new World Energy Outlook examines several future scenarios, including one in which the world does what is needed to limit the global temperature rise to around 2°C on pre-industrial times by keeping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to around 450 parts per million. This doesn’t mean ending the use of all fossil fuels, banning airplanes, building giant solar thermal farms or mirrors in space. It comes about mainly by halving the rate of growth in energy consumption through boring old energy efficiency.  And even under that scenario, fossil fuels are still the main element in the energy mix come 2030

It seems as though the harder the makers and shakers in the public debate try to dramatise the narrative, the more the public remain unimpressed. Polls show less than half of Britons and US citizens now believe global warming is both real and man-made. Maybe the overblown visions are themselves the problem.

Appeals to the public in the developed world on the basis that they will be underwater by 2050 or that their roofs will be blown off fail to pass the ’oh, yeah?’ test.   Perhaps instead of the big-budget, special effects, version of climate change, people would be more motivated to support action by the simple, real, worsening plight of flooded-out Bangladeshis and hungry Ethiopians. 

Orwell’s fictional projection of 1984 was a totalitarian nightmare that didn’t happen - at least in the west. And 25 years on, 1984 is remembered more for the reality of a famine that touched the global conscience and prompted an outpouring of aid. 

Likewise, maybe the best hope for 2012 - the year not the movie - is that it will mark a moment when the reality of what global warming means at the sharp end will have really hit home, with an acute awareness that the industrialised world is directly responsible and accountable. The truth is not only inconvenient, it’s also often unsensational and uncomfortable. 

David Vigar authored Tomorrow’s Company’s report on global warming and business, Tomorrow’s Climate: Beyond Peak Carbon. It is also available at GLOBE-Net.com