FIRST there was one politician suggesting that his party was not to be blamed for "acts of God" while another, joined by a colleague, was thanking God for there not being any fatalities, at least at the time of making the statement. And when Hurricane Ivan struck Grenada a few years ago another politician thanked God for sparing his tribe from destruction claiming that "Tobago was spared a major hurricane disaster by divine intervention", while another celebrity opined publicly "I know for a fact that there was divine intervention and everything that took place was for a purpose".

Can anyone forget one of America's top born-again televangelists publicly stating that the deadly earthquake that ravaged poor Haiti and its people was divine punishment for their pact with the Devil? Now that Pakistan has experienced a flood of the century killing over 1,500 and Russia has been incinerated with wildfires, logic would suggest that God in his mysterious ways has acted, perhaps to punish Pakistan for sheltering bin Laden and Russia for murdering the Romanovs. When exactly does an act of man become an act of God? Presumably when it is expedient. Poor God, poor mother nature.

Next you can be sure that that small group of climatologists and their local new wave science groupies will be reminding us all that "we told you so". As the atmosphere heats up the planet's climate changes, sea levels rise, floods and droughts become more severe, hurricanes become even more frequent and violent, coastal erosion accelerates, destroying the beaches where turtles lay their eggs, the flavour of Blue Mountain coffee declines, contributing more woes to the Jamaican economy, countered by increased marijuana production there for export to the lucrative US market to make up the deficit. And the sea levels rise so fast in southern Trinidad that the entire Icacos peninsula is drowned, wiping out that den of drug barons and gun smugglers, thus solving the crime problem forever. But remember the words of Genesis – So God created man in his own image. Why complain? You're to blame!

And then you read in one newspaper a commentary from an eminent Caribbean diplomat and newspaper columnist that "Climate change is now undeniable according to a new study headed by the sic US Oceans and Atmospheric Administration", equating man-made climate change with natural climate change. What the author probably meant was that a NOAA study had confirmed to its satisfaction the phenomenon of man-made climate change.

This sort of thing may be understandable coming from someone who is obviously not a scientist and unaware of the fact there is much evidence from the past showing that climate change has been taking place on the planet for billions of years, long before God created man, or indeed man God.

Science, at least the science that I am familiar with, has shown compelling evidence that the planet in the more recent past has gone through a series of wild swings of warmings and coolings, over a few millions of years, long before the human species arrived and commenced burning fossil fuels. The planet is supposedly now currently in an interglacial period, a period of relatively mild climate, which followed a much longer period during which much of the land was covered with thick ice sheets.

Climatologists seem to accept temperature records that go back a mere 200 years or so and reconstruct temperatures before that using different indicators, at the same time as being unable to accept the evidence archaeology and history of global warming in medieval times and a global cooling in more recent times.

Mann, of the famous "hockey stick" graph, smoothly and elegantly eliminated that history of the medieval warming (about 900 to 1300 AD) and the little Ice Age (about 1280 to 1850 AD) giving us a graph that showed a flat line of temperatures up to the time of the commencement of the Industrial Revolution that supposedly led to the global warming/climate change crisis. Somehow that crisis seems to have dimmed although some continue to have great expectations from the coming fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Possibly the doings of the Hadley Centre and their emails, Al Gore's marital woes, the panic caused by gross errors in projection of glacier melting in the Himalayas and the dubious business interests of the head of the IPCC may have been responsible.

Many scientists, while accepting the reality of climate change, are more concerned with adaptation to the phenomenon. Some even speculate on the adaptability of the human species given the fact of the extinction of its closest relative the Neanderthal man a mere 30,000 years ago. If the past is any guide there may be a possibility, if not a probability, of another ice age in the not-too-distant future. Then what? No one seems to want to venture any predictions. And if one accepts the biblical flood, a once-in-6,000-years flood, why not another one?

• Julian Kenny is a biologist and

natural history author. He is a

former UWI professor of Zoology and independent senator