I now have a bit less ear than I woke up with on Friday morning. Later that day, a friendly and highly professional bunch of NHS medics cut out a basal cell carcinoma, a mild form of skin cancer, caused by exposure to UV rays from the sun.

And of course that made me think about the original big global environmental concern: the hole in the ozone layer. CFCs used as propellants and refrigerants were destroying the ozone that protects us from those UV rays. But the world’s Governments got together, signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and the use of ozone-depleting substances dropped dramatically. When I worked in defence procurement in the mid-1990s, the Montreal Protocol was the only environmental requirement built into every contract – it had an annex of its own in my project.

And, hey presto, the hole is starting to mend. Maybe kids born today will be much less likely to get bits carved off their ears than me – they already have a much better awareness of the need to wear sunscreen than 1980s me.

Unfortunately the Paris Agreement on climate change isn’t having the same (relatively) easy ride the Montreal Protocol did. The reason is obvious. There are relatively straightforward alternatives to propellants and refrigerants which can be swapped in to do the job. The vast majority of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels and there is no easy substitution – see the issues at Drax around burning biomass instead of coal.

Electrification of the energy system is winning the transition race, but that is requiring a whole new relationship with energy which permeates everybody’s home (heat pump domestic heating in place of gas), transport (where/how do I charge my EV?) and, often, vistas – all those wind turbines and pylons. As a middle-aged man, I find it weird that so many will complain about wind farms but didn’t seem bothered about coal-fired power stations filling the air with soot. But radical change is uncomfortable and ‘better the devil you know’ tends to apply.

But we are winning, if a bit too slowly. Look at the lengths Donald Trump is going to to try and reinvigorate the US coal power industry – demanding the DoD buys only coal power (how?), reducing limits on mercury emissions, filling the White House with helmet-wearing miners to watch him award a ridiculous trophy to himself. And yet, as Carbon Brief have calculated, more coal-fired power stations have shut under Trump than any other president. And nobody wants to invest in US coal as Trump will be gone in three years but it takes five to build a power station. Along with the court order to lift his ban on offshore wind, Trump is truly the King Canute of clean energy.

Will the sceptical voices ever subside? Going back to ozone, I once saw a presentation by climate sceptic Matt Ridley (whose family fortune was built on coal) list the hole in the ozone layer as an ‘environmental scare’ that never happened, alongside acid rain and, bizarrely, the Millennium Bug. If we win the race to keep global warming to a less-than-catastrophic level, then the Ridleys of this world will pop up and say “See, told you you were exaggerating!” And I’ll smile from ear to (slightly smaller) ear.