I can only assume that Miranda Devine wants to wait until it’s 100% certain, even if that’s risking being too late. Better to wait and be wrong, than to act now and risk being wrong anyway. Or better still, let’s be calm, critical and reasoned – and still wait – rather than impassioned, determined and involved – and do something. Being impassioned can scare folks, after all. Presumably she has rationalised this: there’s a chance after all that we are not impacting upon climate change at all, so let’s go with that idea. It could be a natural cycle and we have not significantly contributed, so let’s just sit here and watch what happens. Or maybe in her mind we just can’t do anything, so let’s not try? Ms Devine is a puzzle of pop-art reactionary nonsense at the best of times.

Sure, I have no problem with criticising the detail of individual speeches, interviews, movies, docos and books – as Miranda does with Al Gore’s recent evangelising; I can also understand wanting to be careful and not jumping to conclusions. But surely there’s a point of no return, where waiting any longer will seriously impact our efforts to reverse what we’ve started. We are talking climate change of course, so the stakes are high.

Thinking about criticising the detail of a public utterance, Miranda wrote (in the SMH): “It is human nature when faced with a problem too large to solve to simply ignore it in the hope it will go away. Funnily enough, the other eco catastrophes so confidently predicted 30 years ago – acid rain, nuclear winter, species extinction, the population bomb – never did eventuate.”

So I take it that Miranda thinks it’s all too hard, so let’s give up? I also take it that she is unaware of the appalling, continuing loss of species; unaware that the world’s human population is a frighteningly abundant figure beyond 6 billion and growing; unaware that acid rain did indeed destroy forests and was only countered by concerted action; unaware that we have taken concerted action to reduce pollution and that it has proven effective to some degree, but that we need to continue the fight for sustainability. As for a nuclear winter, thankfully we haven’t as yet put that to the test. What exactly has to happen to ‘prove’ an eco-catastrophe in Miranda’s mind?

So how long do we wait before we fry?