There is no doubt that Anthony Giddens will go down in history for having coined The Third Way, something that has become even more relevant now that British Labour seems to have lost its way.
I am now confident that in the coming months and even years, Prof. Giddens will also make a name for himself for having written a book on the politics of climate change that, according to former US President Bill Clinton, is a landmark study in the struggle to contain it.
He describes his own latest writing as a book about nightmares, catastrophes and dreams that, at the same time, is also about the everyday, the routines that give our lives continuity and substance.
Many people have tried to describe climate change in various ways. Some technical, some scientific, some skeptical, some even comic and some almost theological. According to Prof. Giddens, we are all SUV drivers, because so few of us are geared up to the profundity of the threats we face.
Global warming is a problem unlike any other, however, both because of its scale and because it is mainly about the future.
Many have said that to cope with it we will need to mobilise on a level comparable to fighting a war; but in this case there are no enemies to identify and confront.
Prof. Giddens's paradox affects almost every aspect of current reactions to climate change. It is the reason why, for many citizens, climate change is a back of the mind issue rather than a front of the mind one.
A philosopher once argued that we can't know the future because if we could it wouldn't be the future.
Prof. Giddens makes an intelligent observation when he claims that one should never tackle climate change by merely instilling fear. Fear and anxiety might make people run away from an issue rather than address it.
The biggest challenge is not to address climate change per se but to embed a concern with climate change into people's everyday lives.
On the other hand, he thinks that setting up detailed risk assessment procedures, stretching into the long term, are necessary because the implications of a climate change policy are complex.
While some people tend to be critical of the IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change of the UN - the fact that its findings are almost always expressed in terms of probabilities and possibilities gives due recognition to the many uncertainties that exist as well as gaps in our knowledge.
Meanwhile, while only few people think that Nasa features in the equation at all, the head of their Goddard Institute for Space Studies feels that the dangers from advancing temperatures have been underestimated.
Regarding climate change, people tend to have a bias in favour of the status quo because they are more concerned about losses than about future gains, a well established finding in behavioural economics.
The Giddens theory is that responding to climate change must not be seen as a left-right issue.
Climate change has to be a question that largely transcends party politics and about which there is an overall framework of agreement that will endure across changes of government.
In the final analysis, Prof. Giddens will be remembered for most of the stark questions he poses even if he does not always provide the necessary answers.
Mr Brincat is a Labour member of Parliament.
brincat.leo@gmail.com, www.leobrincat.com