Elaine C Smith, whose brilliant stand-up skills remain unbeatable, used to include a routine about how we perceived the future as children. She expressed her disappointment that 40 years ago we were told, with some conviction, that when we reached adulthood we would be wearing silver jump suits and travelling in personal flying machines, when in fact here we all are in anoraks still catching the 64 bus to Auchenshuggle.

What was charming about this, as well as funny, was the comforting notion that although it’s a constantly changing world, it never really changes out of all recognition. Wouldn’t it be smashing if we could be quite as certain that this will be the case for our children? “Ha, ha,” we hope they’ll laugh. “When we were young,” they will say mirthfully to their own children, “we were told that sea levels were going to rise and that two thirds of the world’s population would be wiped out either by displacement and the ensuing wars for territory, food and water, or by flooding, drought and disease.

“We were warned that society as we know it would collapse under the pressure of these disasters, and brutal primitivism would rule the spartan, unrecognisable lives of the northern hemisphere survivors. But hey, look at us, here in the year 2046! Still in anoraks catching the 64 bus to Auchenshuggle!”

You don’t believe that, do you? No, neither do I. The increasing momentum of current events suggests that not only is it unlikely that Auchenshuggle will remain unsullied in 40 years’ time, but it’s even less likely that there will be buses available to take you to its remains. It seems more realistic that the climate change predictions that are being made today are not only going to come to pass, but could also be much worse. And I’m an optimist.

You can look at this in a number of ways. One is a dispassionate, long- termist overview of the history of our planet and species that doesn’t have relevancy to our own immediate, short lives. We’re in our infancy as humans, only really 30,000 years old. What does it matter if the world’s human population is reduced by two-thirds and forced to forge a new civilisation with what dwindled resources we have left, sharing the bruised but still survivable planet with the few remaining species that haven’t been wiped out? Perhaps our self-destruction is part of the complex evolutionary process, and the planet in 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, will be considerably more pleasant to live in than the current jumbled mess of greedy consumerism, inequality, dumb religiosity, and lazy apathy?

Whatever we do to it, the planet will survive us. It may take several hundred million years, but if we learn anything from Darwin it’s likely that it will be back in robust health, teeming with new adaptive species, its climate stabilised, albeit into some new pattern, and business will be as usual. The earth still has some five hundred million years left of habitable time before the sun starts to incinerate it during its slow expansion into a red giant in seven billion years. So, our 21st century climate crisis is nothing but a small blip, quickly repaired as soon as enough of us die and the creation of greenhouse gases ceases. So that’s one view: we had it coming, and it’ll teach the following generations, on their considerably less crowded but horribly diminished planet, how to behave a little better.

Here’s another view. I’m not coolly dispassionate. I’m sodding furious that this is going to happen in my lifetime. I’d rather hoped for an old age painting butterflies, finishing Moby-Dick and pushing grandchildren on swings. Now it looks more likely that the twilight years will be played out huddled in the loft with bottled water, cans of corned beef and a semi-automatic weapon. The fact that there is still a chance, albeit a tiny, rapidly shrinking sliver of a chance, that we could yet avert some of the disaster that awaits us, almost makes the whole thing even more unbearable.

Unbearable because I, and the millions of other people who are now ready and willing to give up anything that would make a difference, change anything that’s necessary and live an entirely different life just to squeeze a few more precious decades of ordered civilisation out of the planet, are hugely, massively, overwhelmingly outnumbered by those who don’t give a monkey’s testicle.

The tragic-comic efforts of politicians to fly the green flag, with pathetic, half-baked attempts to show us they’re “doing something”, is enough to make you weep. Taxing gas-guzzling cars? How about banning their manufacture, sale and use? Incentives for reducing emissions in industry? How about the incentive that we’ll shut you down if you don’t? And the big polluters, America, China, India, Russia? No-one buys anything from you, sells anything to you, unless you cut emissions. One could go on for hours in the same manner, awaiting the standard reply that such draconian measures would “damage the economy”. Yeah? Just you wait and see what’s going to happen to the economy when two million people, not just the impoverished from Asia and Africa, but flooded-out ex- consumers from the West, are made homeless and destitute. Let’s see Richmond Council’s scheme for more expensive parking for petrol hungry vehicles make sense when the Thames is lapping around the parking meters and the army is guarding a newly drawn coast against the displaced and the desperate.

Unless we act as if Armageddon is already here, introducing sweeping, life-changing legislation, not just here but all the way across the globe, then we’re mince. Google Earth helpfully provides a satellite map of the world you can click on at various sea levels and see the instant result. Make it rise two metres and marvel at a world without beaches. Make it rise seven and contemplate a world without law.

Not even Elaine C Smith’s considerable wit could work up anything funny about that.