Riley's article has some entertainment value but the bulk of its philosophical musings may be countered by suggesting that she have the same conversation refered to in the article with an industrialist rather than a fellow intellectual. For when asked why he is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the industrialist would respond by saying that he is just trying to make people happy - by giving them jobs.
She also suggests that the current fight against climate change is akin to World War II, requiring total mobilisation. A better analogy would be the Vietnam war - one that we have no real hope of winning and, years after its lost, will probably realise that the theorists were wrong and there was no need to fight it in the first place.
Riley also makes several references to the current intergalacial period we are in (the gap between two ice ages - often referred to as the Holocene)), which has gone on much longer than many of the previous intergalacials. No-one knows why it has and any attempt to forecast when it might end is pure speculation in the current state of knowledge. However, Riley characterises the period as humans emerging into Spring which they are turning into summer by deliberate climate change.
A better anology is emerging into summer which is slowly turning into spring. Climate in the holocene is characterised by a regular series of peaks and troughs in temperatures (there is a scholarly journal called Holocene which publishes stuff on this, and its not in dispute), and there is some evidence that the swings are getting weaker (that part is controversial). The climate models beloved by the AGW people are completely useless in explaining any of that stuff. Riley should not want to be remembered as the climate equivalent of the people who argued for continuing the Vietnam war.

Well said, Curmudgeon.

I like the leader: “If our generation can hold back climate change we will have outstripped, and maybe even redeemed, all our forebears.”

Naivety based on Greenpeace lies, and an insult to our forbears. The arrogance of these people is stunning. This one lauds Aristotle, but condemns those still alive or only recently dead. All those expect the warming mongers and human-cause climate change hysterics, that is.

If Aristotle were around today, he would be able to tell her and her fellow naifs about climate change over the ages when there was no industrially generated C02. He would also tell her that nature is the only ‘cure’ for climate change.

Riley is so busy waffling along about other people most of us have never heard of that she forgot to tell us why she believes that the “ideal temperature is 15ºC”. I’m sure that grain growers and other food producers would have something to say about this.

Her final sentence, “That is why I love climate change” is unwitting self-judgement on the huge ego trip she and those of her ilk are on. Perhaps they really know that all the blather and money (carbon taxes and other huge imposts on Australian society) will not make any difference to climate change. Perhaps part of the ‘curing climate change’ is a ploy by the anarchic Left to bring Western society to its knees, which has always been their goal.

It’s a pity for these wreckers that the climate hasn’t been co-operating with very much since 1998.

that's adorable, it really is..

I'm sure if you were an honor student in the late sixties, you would have been out there protesting the Vietnam war, and whatever age you were in, you would be there passionately involved - and loving it!

I hope you eventually give up this goal of "stopping the climate from changing", it's akin to stopping tectonic plate movement. Don't be taken in by this age's arrogant self centered scientists who demand they be given the planet's controls to experiment with, and think they know all there is to know.

Tim Flannery wants to fill the sky with supher dioxide, Penny Wong is frightened of "Carbon Pollution", (does she really see black skies, I can't?) and wants us to do what her scientists say and stop all CO2 emmissions. (stop breathing Penny!)

You are heading for a lifetime of dissapointment if you think changing climate is so simple as reducing CO2 output. Possibly you will find out climate is a rogue if you go too far, what about that? What if you do stop it, what happens then to seasons? Oh, you want to stop climate changing, but still want seasons.. hang on, so you want to control climate? So who gets to set the thermostat, is it a committee? Does the UN set the temperature range .. good luck with that. Does everyone on the planet agree with the way YOU want to fiddle with the controls?

In generations to come when people look back, they may curse the names of people who naively and arrogantly wanted to meddle with the climate, instead of adapting to it.

The nay-saying brutalists are out in force today!

Green philosophy is inwardly morally bankrupt which normally leads to outward piety. This amounts to false religion.
Hariet writes
'We are part of a planetary community, and serving it, through actions both simple and great, is the only thing that can bring us happiness.'

Absolute rubbish. We were created to serve God and people. At the end of the day doing what we were created to do will bring peace and joy. Happiness comes and goes with circumstances in life and earth worshiping and lies about saving the planet will never cleanse us of our inward selfishness and sin. This is only possible through God's Son the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blaming our evil forefathers who overall had much more integrity than the me generation is an exercise in sickening self righteousness. The 'humbling responsibility' spoken of is a cloak of pride.

This article goes a long way towards explaining why people are so fond of apocalypse scenarios. Just a dull little cog, working in a boring job! Fear not! You can be a hero saving the planet! Just come up with a suitably tenuous theory that allows you to paint what you and your friends do as 'good' and what everyone else does as 'wicked'. Then you can go on doing the things you like doing and feel virtuous about it. You don't have to disarrange your life; merely write a few articles and attend a few protests while continuing to use the washing machine and the heater and the TV and the PC at home; because, after all, it's what _other people_ do that's really important.

But of course, IF global warming is a real threat to the future of life on this planet then none of this fiddling around the edges is going to be any use at all. The only hope is for the USA to dig out some of the biological weapons it has in cold storage and exterminate everyone but its own citizens, and the sooner the better. It's the logical solution. Oddly enough, I don't see any AGW alarmists advocating that -- yet. Letting someone else fix it doesn't fit well with a messiah complex.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

I am so important that the fate of the whole world depends on the wind blowing out my arse. Forcibly reducing the production of goods on which hundreds of millions of lives depend will, it is true, require human sacrifice on a largish scale - but think how much better I'll feel about myself!

Following on from the logic of the brutalists why dont we close most of the universities down.

A bit like during the disastrous cultural revolution in China under Mao---get all of these starry eyed idealists like Harriet out in to the real world, doing real things. Which was also done in Cambodia under Pol Pot. And by all the book-burners from all the totalitarian regimes---Nazi Germany for instance.

That is, abolish all of the schools and departments which teach what are called the Humanities and Arts: any and every thing to do with social studies, philosophy, theology (religion), art, literature etc.

Except of course so called philosophy and religion(which is completely lacking in Wisdom) that justifies and extends the brutalist world-view. The kind of philosophy promoted by the right-wing think-tanks.

Apart from the hard sciences (the really useful subjects). And get on with building more bull-dozers etc etc and so on, to get on with the REAL purpose/project of trashing the planet as quickly as we can.

And of course more and bigger weapons.

Amazing coincidence that what you see as the climax of civilisation should be happening in that small moment in history that you are completing your undergrad at uni, Harriet. Happened in mine too.

"...Plato (427-347 BC) argued in Timaeus that global warming occurs at regular intervals, often leading to great floods...Aristotle (382-322 BC), recorded evidence for climate change in Meteorologica. He noted that during the Trojan War, Argos was marshy and not arable, whereas during Mycenaean times, the land was temperate and fertile. Theophrastus (374-287 BC), in turn a student of Aristotle, followed the tradition with De ventis and observed that Crete's mountains had peviously produced fruit and grain whereas at the time he wrote, the winters were more severe and had more snowfalls." (Plimer, Heaven & Earth)

I think you write quite well, but good luck "holding back" back climate change. Many of your forebears, and still too many today, have more humble, down to earth concerns like survival. You might want to think more about where best to direct your intelligence, philosophy and youthful passion.

Alexander was one of the more robust influences on that era; he killed those that dissented, although his ambitions might have been great, his means were somewhat suspect. That was how you became great back then.

Philosophy does not mix with any climate change criteria, you can philosophise all you like but this great earth (which really is only a speck in the scheme of things) will go on doing what it has done for millenia until the cosmos changes. I hope human kind does not start to think we can change the cosmos. We are microbes in the universal scheme of things and there is nothing the climate change protagonists can do about that.

What is the fear, change, change of what? The weather, that will change anyway.

To point out the bleeding obvious this country is normally a drought ridden country; with periods of incredible flooding rains and drought -years not a week or two. There have been bush fires and floods since people populated this earth and before of course. CO2 emissions in the last 50 years have not been of any significance to any weather that is taking place now!

Thus it has been for millennia and thus it will be so for millenia. Only the sun can change us or a single quick large, meteorite perhaps!

W S Gilbert described the acting of Beerbohm-Tree (Famous 18th century actor) as Hamlet in the Shakespeare play as "funny without being vulgar". I think if he were alive today he would say the same about Harriet.

Perhaps before trying to "hold back" climate change, a trial run with the tides?

The debate isn't about climate change. It's about the extent that it is being made worse by - but not necessarily the result of - human activity, and how we are to cope with it's effects.

There seem to be so many experts wasting their time on these pages when they should be rushing off to all those expert scientific forums and telling them where they are going so horribly wrong. Pick up your Nobel prizes on the way out - one only per customer please.

The author says: “The planet may – be lucky, - stabilise again, and evolve the same diversity of life we know today.”

Stabilise? From the geological record, the climate has always been dynamic. It just happens that the passing phase which humans have occupied for the past ten millennia is the most benign for our species so far.

Those ten thousand years are only a tenth of our total existence. Most of the total were rough conditions compared with this last tenth. We survived through those earlier ones, in spite of adverse periods of climate change, and bred up to be a couple of million by the arrival of this ‘holocene’ - when organized agriculture became possible.

Following that, we mined the planet’s soils etc.; and our numbers swelled to a billion by the time of fossil-fuel accelerated food production, just after 1800. Subsequently the rate of this extractive procedure took off like a fossil-fueled rocket: an increase of from one to almost 7 billion people has been made possible by depletion of resources. That is a seven-fold increase, in the space of less than six generations (since my grandmother’s mother’s time in my case), enabled by rapidly emptying the food cupboard. Stocks of fertile soils, fisheries, forests, etc. are seriously depleted; the health of oceans and atmosphere diminished by wastes. There has yet to be any increase in these fundamental resources in spite of “more sustainable” practices by ever-expanding industry and populations.
Homo sapiens(?) has over-exploited its good fortune, no preparation for any reverse and downturn. Ian Plimer extols the theme that “Life thrived” through similar changes; but carefully omits mention of the accompanying extinctions. How he takes such a biblical outlook - a mystery to anyone other than a creationist. For those of a more sane outlook, it is indeed a worry that our species is pushing so hard to change earlier, rather than later, the climate parameters within which our current civilization/social parameters are hazardously perched.

“Gaia” rolls restlessly on as usual, like a python after a gut-busting feed.

While I believe that global warming is due to CO2 and that we need to do something about it, I, however, firmly believe that "going it alone to provide an example for others to follow" is pure naivity.

While not claiming to be an expert negotiator, I have been involved in several large scale negotiations, and where Australia emits less than 1.5% of the CO2 and contributes a tiny fragment to the world economy, I seriously doubt that we are noticed let alone followed. China and the US are as likely to follow our lead as we are to follow that of PNG.

We have the option to get involved in what is happening in the rest of the world and make a small contribution, or go it alone and make none.