Today, the Scientific Alliance is holding a conference, “2020 Vision — Powering the UK’s Future”, at the Royal Institution in London. The “grand narrative” of “global warming” will be cross-questioned in a debate on the science behind the myth and on its relationship to what passes for the Government’s energy policy. One keynote speaker is a formidable American scientist critical of the whole scenario. It will be fascinating to observe how her optimistic science fares in our doomsday world.

All last week, of course, we were bombarded by the Prince of Wales and his grey goo. I had hoped the noble Prince was inveighing against filthy chewing gum on our pavements; but, no such luck, it was just another everyday Post-Modernist tale of the end of the world, this time, not from “global warming”, but from nanotechnology and teeny robots.

Of course, we all have 1.4kg of “grey goo” between our ears, not to mention the staggering nanotechnology of 100 billion neurons. Some folk’s wrinkly matter, however, is gooier than others, and the Prince’s goo seems to be particularly sticky over science. Sadly, he, and far too many others who should know better, have become the genetically regressive symbols of a society frightened of its own shadow — nostalgic for a past that never was in an increasingly risk-averse world. Alas, poor science, I knew thee well. DVDs, antibiotics, dentistry, vaccination — how you have threatened us with constant disaster. How marvellous our lives would be if you had never been invented.

But “the end of the world” is the new Islington dinner-party chic, from Michael Crichton’s Prey to the latest blockbuster by Margaret Atwood (Beware, Oh Handmaid, The Oryx and the Crake!). And remember the Guardian Editor’s dire TV drama, Fields of Gold, which even the delectable Anna Friel couldn’t redeem. We are surrounded by dystopians and millenarians. If a UFO doesn’t get us, there is surely a GMO in a field near by. And we are all deeply concerned about cruelty to Schrödinger’s cat — although we won’t know if it is suffering until we look in the box.

Scientists, unfortunately, have not helped their case. Whoever called the “seed preservation” gene the “terminator” gene should be force-fed limp organic carrots at every meal. Or, more constructively, they should be made to read those totally opaque French philosophers who have been warning us for some time that science is rowing towards troubled waters in our Post-Modern, or non-modern, age.

But philosophers haven’t made things easy either. Who can understand a word they write? Lyotard (Leotard to my students) and Latour (modern non-modern philosophers must have unlikely sounding French names) confound us with grandiose terms like the “social bond” and unfathomable “hybrids” of science, technology, nature and politics, when all they mean is that “science” will be increasingly legitimised (or delegitimised) by the fads and fancies of the Today programme. These are the “grand narratives” of our non-modern world of herbal remedies, organic dandelion tea, talking to plants, and the Earl Grey goo. As someone said, how lucky we are that Sars erupted in China, where it can be cured by ancient holistic herbal healing.

Thus, at today’s jamboree, I suspect the dystopians to be desperate for “global warming” to be true (doom). If it were genetic modification and nanotechnology, they would, of course, demand the opposite (more doom). Yet, the latter will help us to survive in an ever-changing world, along with antibiotics, dentistry and vaccination — and Schubert on CD. Thank you science.

The author is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography in the University of London.