of globalisation in recent years. He sees the growing interdependence of world society as driven not only by the increasing integration of the world economy, but above all by massive advances in communications. As he has noted when he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures just before the turn of the century, the Internet was in its infancy. However, now it has expanded in a wholly unprecedented way, linking people and organizations across the world on an everyday level as well as intruding deeply into everyday life. Billions of people have access to it and the numbers are growing every day. An increasingly interconnected and wired-up world offers many advantages and benefits, yet it carries new risks too, some themselves of global proportions. In the 21st century, work opportunity and risk combine as never before. Giddens refers to the emergence on a global level of a "high opportunity, high risk society". Both on the level of opportunity and risk we are in terrain human beings have never explored before. We do not know in advance what the balance is likely to be because many of the opportunities and risks are quite new as we cannot draw on past history to assess them. Climate change is one of those new risks. No other civilization before the advent of modern industrialism was able to intervene into nature to even a fraction of the extent to which we do on an everyday basis. Climate change was referred to in several of Giddens's books from the mid-1990s onwards, but it was not discussed at length until the publication of his work The Politics of Climate Change in 2009. Giddens says climate change constitutes a fundamental threat to the future of industrial civilisation as it spreads across the globe. Given that is the case, he asks why are countries around the world doing so little to counter its advance. Many reasons are involved, but the prime one is the historical novelty of humanly induced climate change itself. No previous civilisation intervened into nature on a level remotely similar to that which we do on an everyday level today. We have no previous experience of dealing with such an issue and especially one of such global scope, or of the dangers it poses. Those dangers hence appear as abstract and located at some indefinite point in the future. Giddens's paradox consists of the following theorem. We are