Climate Change. Is it happening? If it is happening is it because of humans? If so, is it all bad? And if it is all bad (or mainly bad), how to work out what we do can and wisely should do about it? What timescale counts?

In my Civil Service entrance exams back in 1975 one of the questions asked what UK policy-makers should do as a new Ice Age raced in our direction at an unfeasibly speedy speed. I forget my answer but remember being exasperated by the silliness of the question: "Draft a short position paper for managing the end of civilisation as we have known it. (Note: Marks will be deducted for poor presentation, unless the candidate can show that noxious fumes emerging from the new volcanoes in Magdalen College gardens brought about by Global Colding were a contributory factor, in which case the normal appeal procedures will pertain.)".

Here is a splendid new website Climate Debate Daily, from the stable of the magnificent Arts & Letters Daily, which allows one to rummage around in the roomy bran-tub of interesting climate change arguments and try to fathom it all out.

My view? I do find it unsettling that when I shimmy round a roundabout in my Mini Cooper S to jump the traffic queue and get to a shop a few seconds faster I am burning off the remains of some rather good plants bequeathed to us millions of years ago.

Failing that, sitting in traffic jams allows me to try to fathom out whether energy efficiency actually saves energy. Welcome to the ultra-coolly named Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate… 

Yet it all comes from the sun anyway. Maybe the wasteful and rather violent Petrol Century (from 1930-2030 or so) will turn out to have been simply the way humans in the world’s inventive capitalist countries were able to build the knowledge base needed to discover how to use the sun’s energy cleanly for the benefit of all.

In the meantime I am unimpressed by headlines like this one in the Times in November reporting analysis by a senior UN-supported scientific panel that warns of ‘abrupt and irreversible’ consequences for the world’s climate brought about by human activity.

What would ‘reversible’ climate change actually be and achieve, in the unlikely event we could organise it sensibly? For the past gazillion years the climate has changed ‘irreversibly’. That’s what climates do. Would we really want to stop that?

Putting it another way, if the scientific evidence suggested that the ghastly natural phenomena now looming into view apparently because of human activity were all indeed occurring naturally, would we try to stop them?

Just say we did find a sure-thing way to stop nasty natural hurricanes from weighing into the Caribbean and to keep the Antarctic ice-shelf exactly the same size as it is now. Would we dare do it, confident that the myriad ripple-effect chaos theory consequences down the next ten, hundred, thousand, million years would all be pretty much OK for Gaia (and for us)?  Pick your definition of hubris – plenty to choose from.

Above all, we come back to timescales. If we really do end up with masses of higher taxes and lots more socialism to ‘confront’ and slow down climate change, my best guess is that the forthcoming Age of the Giant Mutant Cockroaches (the fearsome Roachosaurs) will inherit the earth 15.1 million years from now rather than 15.2 million.

In answering the Last Question, the long run is very long.