When the World Economic Forum lists the climate crisis ahead of growing social divides, heightened cyber risks and an uneven economic recovery as the top global risk for 2022 amid a lingering pandemic, you know it is time to seek divine intervention - or at the very least, call the Pope's climate change adviser.

There was a time early in his career when Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan's lectures to the American Meteorological Society were so thinly attended that the then Nasa scientist would ask his wife to join the audience to make the hall seem a little fuller. These days, as one of the world's top oracles on climate science, his audiences tend to overflow.