Another thing about climate change (which, sadly, pushes me towards the 'Que Sera Sera' school of action): as a species, we're not built to deal with change on this kind of scale. Various despots may have made shouty commitments to a thousand year reign, but then they've failed. Its not so much collapse or survival that intrigues me. It's just that the kind of time the planet lives in is on such a different order of magnitude than anything we can grasp, either individually or as a community. It's as if the permanent resident bacteria on our skin started a campaign to to stop us showering next morning. A lovely piece of writing on the permanence of the planet's skin:

Such mountains surround us like some fundamental border between the homeland and the strange land. Life springs from them, flows out and down and away to the weary plains but they remain, altering at a slow pace that enables us to make them our symbols of permanence, if not of eternity. Sheep graze them bald. Their lower slopes are trenched by prairie-buster ploughs, then blanked over with the dark trees of government. A duke or a queen commands the servants to blast a scar of a track across the mountain's face so that the rich may lurch across it in the autumn and leave the grouse dying dabbled in their own rowan-red blood... The mountains are neutral about all this. We gut them for their congealed metals, rive off whole masonries of limestone or slate, tread their weaknesses into running sores that will never heal while our civilisation lasts... They are above it all.

from Native Stones, David Craig.

I'm reminded also of Denethor, Steward of Gondor: 'you may triumph on the field of battle for a day, but against the power that has risen in the East there is no victory'. Admittedly, he was bonkers. But the fight to stave off climate change draws one's eye to the larger picture: over tens of thousands of years (not so obscene a time-scale as mountains and molten rock live in) the Earth's landscape and atmosphere have changed drastically. They will again - and in that breadth of view, we're also a little rock floating in a colourful void, full of a miscellany of space-based perils. All very jolly.

So what? Does it mean that everyone's most vital and urgent task is the pursuit of hedonic sensation? The shining spark of your life will blink out in but a moment, it will blink out forever, and the planet won't notice either way in the end. Drink from the cup of wotsit whilst ye may. Grab life by the goolies and, with steely voice and squinty eye, demand to be shown a good time, etc. Or get out there into the 21st century spiritual marketplace and buy yourself a tapas of religion: that way, you get an extra bonus added moral code that gives some foundation(alism) to any remnant stub of concern for the species you might have...

Ah, I Dunno. Answers on a postcard please.