Kate, you are on a hiding to nothing on this site when it comes to climate change it's full of the willfully ignorant and down right dishonest.

@Peter Lang "The planet is currently in an ice age" Peter post of link to a single climate research organisation that believes that.

Most if not all would agree with this statement "The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago."

Oh and Peter a political think tank doesn't count as a climate research organisation nor is a blog.

Yes Cobber and bankers and insurers are at the very least, risk averse pragmatists, given to precautionary practises.

And who is going to invest good money in any area that's repeatedly ravaged by ever more intensive drought and attendant fire storms, which as seen in Canberra's suburbs, is a forerunner of what the future might hold for southern cities facing a very real prospect of desertification and burial under repeated sand storms? At least those still above the high tide mark.

If city planners won't bury their roads, rail, bridges and services, where they'll remain largely unaffected by future storms, which may get less frequent even as they could increase in average severity. It may well be that Bankers and Insurers won't finance or insure them?

And given those changes could also be latitudinal affect southern cities as was the case for the UK 90 million years ago, which saw it regularly ravaged by wind storms with winds that regularly exceeded 300 kilometre per hour, which according to the paleontological record left a salt laden desert that supported no life for the hundreds of years it took for plants and planet normal to return.

Our future will not be harmed if it includes plans for worst case scenarios, all while hoping for the best outcomes.

Those plans should include an inland shipping canal that doubles as a ever reliable and repeatedly self replenishing water source, to water underglass intensive agriculture (Bulletproof polycarbonate)- and future submersible shipping that sails under storm tossed seas rather than on them and at very real risk of being wrecked on any rocky shore or overturned by waves as high as three story houses?

Nor will underground systems need to be repaired or replaced every two more three years if they're laid out underground! And as such, last much longer, regardless of surface conditions?
Alan B.

On 1 June 2016 the Bureau of Meteorology Issued Special Climate Statement 56 - Australia’s warmest autumn on record. The report contained the mandatory photo of the drought stricken plains and went on and on about the high temperatures and lack of rain.

Then in the last 3 days Sydney has received more than twice the average mean rainfall for June.

Tim Flannery in the mid-2000s made a series of predictions that resulted in desalination plants being built in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and the Gold Coast. Am I right in saying the total cost for the four plants was over $10 billion and all four plants are moth balled?

Cobber the Hound,

Clearly, you have no idea what you are talking about. You clearly don't even understand the difference between, thousands, millions and billions of years. What an eegyt.

Look at IPCC AR$ WG1 Chapter 6, Figure 6.1 to see what the climatariate thinks about paleoclimate through the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic Era's. https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-1.html

Notice where the ice ages occurred, ignoramus!

Gee Peter you got into name calling pretty quick.... rather pathetic...
Thanks for the link but I've read it before. I think you need to take bex and some of your own advice. The scale of the graph would not show the we are now considered to be out of a ice age.

As I said most if not all would agree that we are 11,000 years into a inter-glacial period called the Holocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
For those of you following at home here is a broader explanation of the geological time system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

Now Peter if I'm misunderstanding the information you have provide then please post a calm reply

@cobber the hound, please forgive @Peter Lang, he is obviously becoming very frustrated about repetitive arguments by Climate Change denialists. Arguments about this being some kind of normal cycle were exploded decades ago. Here is a whole barrage of refutations https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
For a more reasonable view, try this Wikipedia article on the "Anthropocene" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene It shows how the mills of sciences are grinding every so finely towards formalising the current consensus.
@Kate Mackenzie is simply pushing us to discuss the ramifications and suggesting that we may have to change.