This week, I will witness a key test of whether we will betray our children, grandchildren and future generations through a lack of ambition and will. I will be at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York on Thursday to listen to David Cameron, Barack Obama and more than 120 other political leaders outline how they intend to tackle the growing risks from climate change.
The summit has been called by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to try to build high-level support for efforts to reach an international agreement to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, which is due to be signed in Paris in December 2015.
The ambition is that countries will outline how they intend to stop and reverse, within the next 10 years, the growth in annual emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and put us on a path towards zero emissions by the second half of this century.
Without a treaty, it will be hard for the world to avoid the potentially catastrophic impacts of the global average temperature rising by more than 2C degrees above its pre-industrial level.
The consequences of creating a climate not seen on Earth for millions of years will not be suffered primarily by us but by those who will be here next century. By then, if the climate has warmed by three degrees or more, the Earth is likely to have passed a number of tipping points, such as irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, leading to gradually accelerating and potentially irreversible disruption of lives and livelihoods.
Even though nearly all of us will be gone by the start of the next century, it is we who have to determine in the next 15 months whether our descendants in the 22nd century will have to cope with the risks created by a climate that modern Homo sapiens, less than 250,000 years old, has never experienced.
This choice is shockingly clear from the scientific evidence for climate change that has now been assembled. But we have constructed an economic and political system that leads us to disregard this threat to the prosperity and wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.
We make decisions about our economy based on models that discount the future such that the further in the future someone is born, the less they are worth. This means the impacts of climate change on them are simply dismissed.
Yet a major report published last week, The New Climate Economy, showed that many of the actions we have to take to prevent future generations from facing huge risks from climate change would also have other more immediate economic benefits, such as reducing local air pollution.
We hold public discussions about climate change that are mediated by newspapers and broadcasters, many of whom are obsessed with perpetuating controversy about whether there is a problem, instead of focusing attention on what should be done.
Yet few of the editors of our national media bother to cover the mounting evidence that the UK is already experiencing climate change. Our seven warmest years and four of our five wettest years on record have all occurred from 2000 onwards. This year has so far been both the warmest and wettest since records began in 1910, and has included the rainiest winter we have seen.
But worst of all, we have constructed a political process that focuses on narrow, near-sighted concerns rather than on the profound long-term challenges that we face. In doing so, we have undermined the legitimacy of our democratic elections by alienating many young people who are turning their backs on traditional party politics, not out of apathy, but out of sheer disgust and disillusionment.
It is a symptom of how little politics has to offer the young that none of the leaders of the three biggest political parties in parliament has made a major speech on climate change since the last election more than four years ago.
Meanwhile, Ukip has surged in popularity, mainly among older voters, while embracing outright denial of climate change as part of its laughable energy policy that pledges a revival of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.
It is little wonder then that there could be a record low turn-out of young voters in the general election next May, even though whichever party wins will help to decide whether there should be a strong international agreement on climate change.
Our best hope is for young voters to express their despair about our dismal politics, not by boycotting the general election as some have advocated, but instead by speaking out loudly and fiercely, and forcing potential MPs to confront long-term issues such as climate change in the run-up to the next general election.
In doing so, they would ensure that their best interests, and the best interests of future generations, are not betrayed by those political leaders who will decide in Paris next year whether the world will avoid dangerous climate change.