While the art world's response to climate change is only recently emerging, pop has been producing ecologically concerned songs for decades. The fag end of the hippy movement, under the heavy influence of Gaia theory, saw Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell and the Beach Boys releasing records rightly fearful for the future of the planet.

The steady stream of eco-friendly tracks that followed has become a slew as climate change has risen to the top of the political agenda. Everyone from Madonna to Will.i.am and Miley Cyrus has addressed the subject of global warning. In October, a motley crew of stars, including Duran Duran and the Scorpions, released a cover of Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning to coincide with the Copenhagen summit – currently scheduled to close with a thud of disappointment – accompanied by the customary video full of clenched fists and meaningful stares down the camera.

This may well be the first time that Marvin Gaye has ever been compared with Miley Cyrus but, despite the obvious musical disparity, what these songs have in common is their almost offensively inane lyrics. Political music in general might not have the best track record when it comes to poeticism, but it does occasionally happen. When the subject turns to the environment however, the "rivers are crying / the earth is dying" template of earnest, misguided drivel seems to be the only one on offer.

It may be that today's lyricists are reluctant to tackle climate change for fear of being lumped into the Sting-Bono-Geldolf axis of hypocrisy. Or perhaps it's simply not possible to tackle climate change without resorting to the glib and the gauche. Are the consequences of global warming of such magnitude that they mark the limits of what can be said within the constraints of pop?

For those of us who still have faith in the power of great lyrics, a more positive theory might be that for most pop artists, and indeed for the developed world as a whole, climate change remains in the realm of the abstract. It exists as an inchoate fear, a faint background noise often drowned out by more pressing everyday concerns. This kind of deep-seated, incipient emotion is extremely difficult to articulate in artistic terms, which is why it has taken so long for the art and literary worlds to address it (Cormac McCarthy's The Road still stands alone as a great climate change novel).

It's also why, for now at least, the best climate change records are those that, like Radiohead's Idioteque or Godspeed You! Black Emperor's apocalyptic instrumentals, are lyrically opaque, or without words at all. It will probably be the least of our concerns, but it may be that great climate change lyrics will only arrive when the temperature has irrevocably risen, and the consequences are impossible to ignore, or infantilise.