I went to a picnic with some friends yesterday, and we happened to see the so called 'Walk Against Warming' go past.

Now, before I go into a rant, I want to get some things straight. The planet's climate probably is changing. I'm not about to tell you that almost all meteorologists and climate scientists are dirty liars. Installing solar panels, saving water, recycling, reducing waste, improving efficiency, reducing our reliance on coal and petroleum - these are all good ideas. I just wish that the people who support these things hardest weren't also such goddamn morons.

For example, so many people, even our dear Prime Minister, will sincerely say things like 'we must tackle climate change' or 'climate change must be stopped'. Think about that for a moment. It is practically the same as saying something like 'we must eliminate tides' or 'cyclones must be stopped' or 'sunsets are happening too early in the day - we must take action!'. I'll put this in big letters for the benefit of those who are a little bit hard of thinking: CLIMATE CHANGE IS A NATURAL CYCLE. To believe that the climate on our planet is fixed and would naturally stay exactly the same until the sun explodes is utter ignorance. Recent human history has been lucky enough to take place in a relatively stable and hospitable stage of the climate cycle, but as most people surely realise, the earth has been around a lot longer than human civilisation. The climate has changed, often catastrophically, many times over the history of life on Earth, and it has done so without human assistance. Global temperatures go up and down like a sine curve. The ice ages happened perfectly naturally, without humans to start them up.

Now, many people out there might reply to that 'alright, alright, but humans are accelerating the climate change, and nature cannot adapt fast enough!' This is also a lie. What they mean is that ' particular species cannot adapt fast enough' - nature adapts just fine to almost anything. Here's an interesting fact: of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, almost all of them, 99.9 percent, are extinct. Climate change - the perfectly natural kind - has wiped out far more species than humans have ever managed. Nature is perfectly capable of making a species extinct - shock! - without humans around to kill them off.

This is certainly not an argument against conservation; humans are very good at making things extinct, and we need to try to stop doing it. What I am trying to say is that it is arrogance and ignorance in the extreme to assume that every single thing that happens on this planet revolves around the actions of humans. It seems to be a human trait to put ourselves at the centre - we take credit for everything, good or bad, and we've been doing it for ages. For thousands of years it was 'the crops have failed? We must have offended the gods!' - if anything, we've become even more silly; now we're saying 'the crops have failed? It's because you aren't a vegetarian/still use plastic bags/didn't recycle that beer can, you bastard!' There are actually people out there - this is not a joke, we saw them in the parade - who believe that climate change will stop if people stop eating beef. Their argument has something to do with the fact that cow farts are a major source of 'greenhouse gases' (top tip: beware of anyone who uses the phrase 'greenhouse gas' at you) - they don't seem to have realised that even if we stop eating them, cows are still going to fart. Although; perhaps they aren't actually vegetarians, they just want an excuse to machine-gun a lot of cows. (Their website adress is 'suprememaster dot com' though, so I'm pretty sure they're just another nutbag cult)

In short, all this climate change hoo-hah is like the classic story of King Canute - setting his throne at the sea shore and commanding the tide to halt and not wet his feet. When the tide rose anyway, Henry of Huntington tells us, Canute leapt back from the advancing sea and cried 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings'. I think Kevin Rudd could certainly learn something from that.