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.