Does climate change make you sick? | RICHARD COOKE - theage.com.au

...There should be a name for it - the small pang of ill-feeling we all get reading or hearing the words ''climate change''.

''Climate change'' now carries the little, pre-emptive defeat previously only attached to phrases like ''Middle East peace process''. Encountering it is exactly like answering the phone to a charity telemarketer: the same feeling of prodding repetition, strained goodwill, and small-bore guilt that lingers about as long as an ad-break during an episode of House. It's dripping with the feeling that there's no problem so big we can't argue it into a state of hopelessness, as long as we work together.

How did we get here, wanting to be somewhere else? The anorak nature of the debate can't help (as I write this, I know a retired engineer somewhere is readying an unintelligible post about how the hockey stick graph is rubbish - check the comments section when this article goes online); nor can the weary return to the left-right argument about regulation versus risk, which would operate in exact reverse if the solution proposed involved launching cruise missiles. Then there's the stall when gears change between talk and action. But none of those things are really fresh - there's something deeper, more nefarious and more stupid happening right now. Climate change has fallen out of fashion.