Climate change: our wilful blindness

At the approaching wave of the Asian Tsunami, the sea drew back as though mustering its full fury. Like a gigantic creature drawing breath before giving a mighty overpowering roar until it returned and swallowed all in its path. .

Many people failed to read this signal, or perhaps thought they might outrun the big wave, and rushed to gather the fish that had been left high and dry on the now exposed extended sandy shore. They perished as a gigantic wall of water overcame them.

I am reminded of this phenomenon by the number of people who have expressed delight at Melbourne's hot and tropical summer of 2013. How great to be basking in a Sydney like summer in Melbourne .The bougainvillaea in a pot on my balcony is thriving.

But this summer is the hottest ever recorded. It is part of the predicted trajectory of global warming.

To be enjoying the warming, is like applauding weight loss as a terminal illness progresses. Who hasn't wanted to be thin and live in the tropics without moving a muscle?

In likeminded mode, mining magnate, Clive Palmer recently announced his Titanic Mark 2 dream; in New York declaring that one good thing about global warming, is that there will be less icebergs in the Atlantic Ocean

It is a double irony that the voyage of the original Titanic has come to be seen as emblematic to mankind's hubris and failure to prepare for likely disaster. Like planet earth, it had been seen as too big to fail.

It has been a very hot summer in Australia, a summer of extreme events, and dubbed 'The Angry Summer.' The Climate Commission indicates that 123 weather records have been broken.

Professor Tim Flannery, Chief Climate Commissioner reports that we now in effect have a "climate is on steroids" and that we are entering new territory.

This is a worldwide phenomenon. More frequent and more intense events are cascading as predicted by climate scientists

But denial is also a world wide phenomenon

Al Gore, dubbed 'warmist' 'alarmist' by climate denialists, could be laughing all the way to his next temperature graphs if the inconvenient truth were not so rapidly becoming the awful inescapable truth.