Climate change: our wilful blindness

But this fire has to be left to burn as it is impossible to fight.

But are we worried? Not while our small world can be contained in its air-conditioned capsule and we have the coal-fired power to watch the television and be rendered numb to reality.

We may be reassured by the doubt and confusion given to the science by faux and some actual scientists in the pay of big coal. This has been documented by Naomie Oreskes in her book, Merchants of Doubt.

The same scientists who deliberately cast doubt on the science of ozone, acid rain, asbestos, and tobacco are campaigning against the science of climate change. Their achievement has been to add to the delay in action in all these death-producing phenomena. More lives have been lost, while more environmental destruction has been allowed to occur. Our failure to become alarmed and to take precautions and to act against climate change is profoundly shocking and dangerous.

A lasting example of this remains with me, of the young woman, reassuring her mother on the phone, as the fires of Black Saturday approached. They were staying. They had a fire plan. She was monitoring the fire reports on her computer, the air-conditioning cooled the house and the children were happily watching episodes of playschool. The fire struck an hour or so later. They all perished.

There is some talk of adaptation, as though climate change will get to a point and remain there; somehow becoming manageable. This is an extravagant illusion.

Humans are masters of adaptation. But if we fail to reduce emissions all our efforts at getting by, are doomed to fail.

Cassandra in ancient Greek mythology was given the gift of true prophecy, but the curse of not being believed. Many Cassandras are warning us that it is time for civil disobedience and opposition to coal and fossil fuels. But we are largely not heeding the warnings.

Our fragile infrastructure systems, and bodies would be devastated by the predicted 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century, as the Earth's services and eco systems collapse.

Extreme weather and food and water insecurity could all become the new normal.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its thousands of world scientific experts have got it wrong. Yes climate change is happening, but much faster than had been predicted.

We need to wake up and demand action. Many are concluding that civil disobedience is the only rational response to this gargantuan threat, concludes Professor Mark Jaccard of the IPCC. Jaccard is currently writing a book 'Deluding Ourselves to Disaster'.

The softly softly don't scare the horses approach is not working.

We must face the reality that we have no place to flee. Earth is all we have.

My 93 year old mother, whose family wisely fled the Nazi holocaust approaching Poland in 1937 maintains, "Nobody thought it would be that bad. Nobody wanted to believe it."