My new friends had put their heads together and started analysing factors that affected the price of gold. They came up with 240 variables – including the value of various currencies, the state of world peace, the price of eggs in Singapore etc. Then they crunched the numbers via an algorithm of their own devising, and discovered they could reliably predict with 64 per cent accuracy whether the price of gold will go up or down on any particular day. That's a 14 per cent advantage over the rest of the market. If you bet a million dollars, that's a $140,000 profit each day. Its called financial modelling and it makes a few people immensely rich. Now, computer modelling is something I happen to know a little bit about because climate change has been my abiding passion for the past 10 years – since I met Tim Flannery and discussed, unsuccessfully – how to make his book The Weather Makers into a film. At the time I went on a research trip around North America and met the scientists who are working in this space – most of them authors for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body charged with collating and assessing scientific information relevant to human-induced climate change. The IPCC has published five assessment reports, the first in 1990 and the fifth in 2014, so roughly one every five years. These reports, compiled from the findings of thousands of scientists worldwide, constitute one of the most fine-grained and comprehensive scientific models ever devised to predict the likely future of life on earth, our oceans and rivers, forests, farms and fisheries.

These models exist as computer simulations, which can be tested, running them back in time to replicate with scary accuracy the climate events that have occurred over the past century. They can be run forward in time to indicate for us what the climate will do in the future, given the slow but steady rise in the planet's surface temperature. That's the machine I'm talking about: the Machine To Predict the Future. It can suggest which land will remain arable and which parts will dry out, which cities will be flooded by sea-level rise and which will run out of water because glaciers disappear. It can tell you which resorts will prosper and which will fail, where to buy real estate, where to invest in farmland, and which foodstuffs will be in short supply. You would think that governments would be falling over themselves to get their hands on it; that banks and financial institutions would be avidly consuming its results, looking to get an edge on the global markets. Politicians especially would be hungry for that kind of knowledge because it affects our security, our very survival – right? Well, apparently not in Australia. Sceptics will always argue that climate modelling is not 100 per cent accurate but they are missing the point. A delegation from the IPCC recently visited Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, to impress upon our leaders the importance of the Paris summit in December. In Canberra, the Coalition wasn't much interested in receiving them. Environment Minister Greg Hunt took a meeting but reportedly did more talking than listening.

By contrast, the financial sector is quickly waking up to the importance of this information. In 2014, climate-change group 350.org and others ran a divestment campaign warning various institutional investors that coal was vastly overvalued. Most institutions ignored this advice but it turns out to have been rather prescient, given that coal company values have since dropped markedly. The most forward-thinking banks are now entering a close dialogue with environmental groups, assessing the science rather than dismissing it as greenie claptrap. It was partly as a result of such a dialogue that the CBA pulled out of a partnership with Adani in the Galilee Basin. Tony Abbott and George Brandis remain strong supporters of the project. You don't need to be an economist to know that fiscal policy in Australia is a bit of a mess. The Coalition came to power railing against the debt and deficit, but have since added $2 billion of debt to the national overdraft for every week it has been in power. This is partly because it has backed its own retrogressive coal-fired energy policy over the Machine To Predict the Future. Its findings and policy implications will be discussed in the COP21 meeting in Paris. If we're interested in economic survival, the very worst thing we could do is to go along to such a meeting with finger-in-the-wind ideas of "what Australia can afford to offer". Ideally we should listen to scientific evidence from thousands of scientists in 196 nations and then calculate the real risks of inactivity. Sceptics will always argue that climate modelling is not 100 per cent accurate but they are missing the point. With a sufficiently large bet, anything better than a random guess is highly significant. The predictive machinery at our disposal is now pretty reliable, but Australia's current strategy ignores its findings, and in Paris we are betting the planet.

John Collee is a film writer and a director of 350.org.australia.