Help! We've lagged our planet and can't turn the heating down

As the Copenhagen climate conference struggles gallantly towards the unavoidable shabby compromise, its worth pausing for a note of thanks to all those open-minded, definitely-not-biased, definitely-not-paid, professional global warming sceptics, who have managed to scupper every other previous initiative in this area over the last twenty years.

If you happen to be one of those sceptics, thank-you, from the bottom of my heart, for pissing the future of human civilisation, including that of my children, up the wall, in the interests of...well we know who, don't we. However, you are not totally alone. Even some professional meteorologists of my acquaintaince, have always doubted the science of climate change, despite the plain facts and simple physics being long known, and almost impossible to argue with.

Here then, in belated and pointless summary are what I see as the basic, undisputable facts:

• There are gases in our atmosphere that effectively insulate the warm Earth from cold space, by inhibiting the radiation of heat. It is an easily measurable property of these gases.
  
• "Modern" human civilisation generates large amounts of these gases.
• The proportion of these gases in our atmosphere has been increasing since records began.
• The gases take a long time to go away again.

So, we've been lagging the attic, but we can't turn down the heating down - the sun shines on.  These basic facts lead to predictions up to a century ago, that our climate would get warmer.   There is now very strong physical evidence that our emissions are causing our planet to warm.

You can argue about the details, quality of the climate models, or whatever, but the basic correlation between what the basic physics predicts, and what actually appears to be happening, is surely strong enough to prompt us into major action.

At the end of the day, we may be 20 years too late to do anything, but that doesn't mean its not worth trying. Fiddling at the margins isn't going to cut it though, and neither is waiting to 2050!

I say, lets call in the extra-terrestrials.

Terraforming Terra

So, we're probably going to get a 4 degree rise by 2060? Far from going out and terraforming other parts of our solar system, looks like we've got a little problem to deal with at home first.

However, what would happen if an interstellar mission, from the planet, Kula, looking for Kulaforming opportunities, happens across our small, slightly-used, blue-green planet? On the bridge of the starship "Nordic Social Model" (this is the nearest meaningful translation), the science officer speaks up.

"Captain, this planet could provide the perfect environment for sub-galactic living, if it wasn't for one of the native species running amock, and ruining the climatic equilibrium."

The crew might discuss solutions ranging from polite suggestions to the inhabitants, to bringing in the team from Planetary Rentokill, but lets just imagine what would happen if they just decided to land their tremendously-powerful spaceship, and sort things out.

In its first week the new planetary goverment would probably:

• Ban any chopping down of trees, without written permission from the Kulan forestry agency, (100 light years away), in triplicate
  
• Give people 30 days to decide where they hell they want to be, and then ban flying, on pain of vapourisation
  
• Fund walking, fanning and knitting lessons for North Americans
• Allow the removal of oil/coal/gas from the ground, only with a tree-planting receipt for each barrel/ton/large bag-full
• Circulate the simplified designs for the fusion reactor their species developed several thousand years ago.
  
• Start covering the Sahara with aluminium foil (or something like that...)