That title conveniently absolves humanity from any responsibility for the rapid increase in the frequency and intensity of climate catastrophes over the past decade.

It is a figure of speech that needs to be eliminated from the lexicon. Climate change is real. It is a product of global heating that has been fuelled by the consumption of fossil fuels. Humanity has made its own weather and is now complaining about the rain.

While it is a given that the usual suspects will trot out Dorothea Mackellar's famous line about Australia being a land of "droughts and flooding rains" in the wake of the current flood emergency, a tipping point has been reached. Australians are living with a different climate to that of 20, 30, 50 and 100 years ago.

When parts of the country have had two, three, or even four, one in 50, one in 100 or one in 150 year floods in under 18 months it is clear there is a climate emergency that abating emissions alone won't resolve.

While achieving net zero by 2050 is essential to minimise the damage to the planet's climate balance it won't put the drought and flood genies back into the bottle.

Australia needs to be much better prepared for droughts, floods and bushfires than it has been to date.

Councils and governments have always known which areas are subject to inundation and yet they still sign off on green fields housing developments on floodplains. People are still being allowed to build homes in areas with a known catastrophic bushfire risk. In much of NSW and Victoria small and not so small regional communities can be cut off for days - even weeks - because successive governments have failed to floodproof roads with bridges and causeways.

That is partly because of our historic "once in a blue moon", "once in 100 years" and "she'll be right" complacency. But catastrophic weather doesn't happen once in a blue moon any longer. It is increasing in both frequency and severity.

This is what Ross Garnaut predicted 14 years ago. While his primary concern was the likely impact of extended droughts Dr Garnaut noted that unless emissions were curtailed "much coastal infrastructure along the early 21st century lines of settlement is likely to be at high risk of damage from storms and flooding".

2022 has shown it is too late to dodge the climate change bullet. Waiting for the inevitable disaster and then spending billions to clean up isn't good enough.

There needs to be a massive investment in resilience and mitigation. While one of the success stories of recent weeks has been the construction of a massive dyke to protect parts of Echuca why did authorities wait until water was lapping at doors before they started work?

Why do so many other towns and cities lack the basic, and often very low tech, infrastructure to protect people from predictable catastrophes?

According to a report released by the McKell Institute in September federal government expenditure on disaster relief between 2005 and 2022 came to just under $24 billion.

Only $510 million was spent on disaster prevention and resilience over the same period.

"We are living with the consequences of climate change," the report noted. "We must begin to adapt to the new reality with an increasing focus on resilience while continuing to do all we can to limit the warming of the planet".

That's excellent advice and it needs to be acted on right now.