In a nauseating display of triumphalism, the appalling Tim Blair describes an entirely reasonable admission from Tim Flannery in his interview with Andrew Bolt on MTR1377 as if it was some gigantic faux pas that "blows the entire scam wide open".

The offending quote was this:

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Far from exposing some kind of scam, it just shows how wise, visionary and far-thinking Professor Flannery is. It also reveals the mind (and heart) boggling scale of the man's compassion. I mean, he doesn't just want to save the planet for this generation, the next, or even the one after that. No, he's thinking on a time scale at least ten times that! The man is truly a saint (but not in the Christian sense, of course).

Even if you find fault with his reasoning - and surely no sane person could (he's a scientist, you know) - you would simply have to agree that he cares deeply, perhaps more deeply than any human who has has ever lived. For this reason alone we should go along with everything he says without question.

Granted, it probably wasn't the best thing to say on a denialist shock jock's radio show, what with so many if the great unloofahed listening in their air-conditioned McMansions in tasteless suburbs like Chadstone. Those revolting, soulless Gaia-phobes will surely seize on this quote of Flannery's as yet another excuse to keep pack-raping the Earth and spewing still more carbon. Not only that, but they vote, unfortunately. (Oh, if only we could do as fellow traveller Clive Hamilton so wisely suggested and suspend democratic processes. We really would be able to make the world a better place, now wouldn't we?)

But this primitive voting ritual has proven very difficult to deconstruct. People really are attached to it, clinging desperately to the idea that they know what's best for them and not us. So we'll just have to put up with it for the time being (subverting it when and where we can, of course).

That's why I fear this "thousand years" quote of our Tim's is going to cause much trouble for our sassy sister in the Lodge. Unfortunately we do live in a patriarchal, capitalist, Judeo-Christian, Gaia-phobic society. So people are always thinking: Me, me, me! More, more, more! Now, now, now!

Still, there is some hope we can take from this. Gaia must surely know that our Tim and his supporters (of which I am proudly one) are absolutely on Her wavelength, and that we really do care. And She appreciates the sentiment, I'm sure.