What on Earth are we waiting for ScoMo?

I never hear this accusation without privately, shamefacedly, owning up that I am one of those unable to fully do the necessary grasping. My failure is altogether different from the prime minister's, for his failure in this is probably just a dullard's willful indifference and lack of imagination.

No, my kind of failure in this (which I know I share with bewildered billions) has to do with how hard it is, with the best will in the world, to get one's under-evolved little mind around something so gigantic as the notion that our very planet and its human inhabitants are in catastrophic jeopardy.

There is the big problem with the ways in which we poor creatures have evolved to respond, quickly, nimbly, with fight and flight, to immediate dangers to our lives, but are so poorly equipped to see and respond to a danger like climate change, that unfolds over time.

Then as well, relatedly, there are our delusions about Nature and Time, as diagnosed by Bill McKibben in his famous, climate-catastrophe-anticipating essay The End of Nature.

"Nature, we believe, takes for ever," McKibben diagnoses.

"It moves with infinite slowness through the many periods of its history ... We have been told that man's tenure is as a minute to the earth's day, but it is that vast day that has lodged in our minds. The age of the trilobites began six hundred million years ago. The dinosaurs lived for a hundred and fifty million years. Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is: Nothing happens quickly. Change takes unimaginable - 'geologic' - time.

"[But] this idea about time is essentially misleading, for the world as we know it, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, is of quite comprehensible duration [and] the world as we really know it dates back [just] to the Renaissance ... the world as we feel comfortable in it dates back to perhaps 1945.

"In other words, our sense of an unlimited future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion. True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously. We have accepted the idea that continents can drift in the course of aeons ... but normal time seems to us immune from such huge changes. It isn't, though. In the last three decades, for example [McKibben is writing, prophetically, in 1989], the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than 10 per cent, from about 315 parts per million to about 350 parts per million."

But of course it is one thing to read and to intellectually accept insightful explanations of why some of us are failing to grasp the enormity of climate change but quite another to then be able to stop failing in this, to begin to comprehend. Human beings only arose a relatively recent 300,000 years ago and perhaps there hasn't been enough time, yet, for the minds of most of us (the clear, unbewildered minds of the Sir David Attenboroughs and Greta Thunbergs are obvious noble exceptions) to grow to be big enough and nimble enough to grasp what needs to be grasped in time to save us.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is unpatriotic of me (I do hope it is) but I find myself siding instinctively with the president of France as he and our prime minister give conflicting accounts of which of them is lying about the submarines imbroglio.

All thinking Australians know (and choose to believe either that it matters or that it doesn't) that Scott Morrison tells lies. Crikey has for some time now provided the useful service, useful to a democracy, of cataloguing Morrison's duplicities in its Dossier of lies and falsehoods - how Scott Morrison manipulates the truth. It's predicated on the Crikey belief that forensically following what Scott Morrison says "exposes the Australian prime minister as a systemic, consistent and unremitting public liar".

Unpatriotically, perhaps biasedly (for this is a leftie's column), one fancies that the French president's canny, Gallic, inner-polygraph has detected a little of what Crikey is collecting, bale by bale, to store in its roomy dossier-warehouse of Morrisonisms.