For years, it has struck me as bizarre how people could look at our behaviour on this planet, and assume no consequences whatsoever.

Over the last 150 years, our factories, our steam engines, our cars, our planes, our electrical power stations, our lorries and our machines of war and peace have been burning fossilised carbon. Day after day, year after year, the burning has increased as the whole world industrialises. A dramatic, unprecedented innovation, way bigger in magnitude than any volcano or any solar cycle.

The signature is there, plain to see. 400 parts per million of CO2 in the very air we breath. A record level, way above anything the planet has experienced over hundreds of thousands of years. Not only that, but this concentration was achieved, not over centuries or millennia as would be expected, but mere decades. 400 parts per million of CO2 and rising rapidly.

In this time, global temperatures have increased, just as would have been expected. The properties of carbon dioxide are well known, not from computer models, but from the lab. CO2 stores heat, and as its concentration rises, so too do temperatures.

For decades, we have been seeing changes taking place. Glaciers melting, permafrost disappearing, sea ice vanishing, oceans acidifying, climate patterns changing. The only reason for this is a warming of the planet – a warming seen in our air and ocean temperatures. A warming that cannot be accounted for through natural causes alone.

And now, we learn that West Antarctica is shedding its ice caps. One great force of nature – chemistry – yields to another: gravity. These ice sheets will fall into the ocean – they are falling already – and this in turn will lead to massive sea level rise in the next 200 to 300 years.

This is enough to convince everyone but the dangerous fools. The dangerous fools who use every trick in the book to persuade others that either it’s not happening at all, or that, sure, ’tis only natural and we’ll be grand.

Despite a huge consensus of scientific opinion, we have let these dangerous fools take power, dictate our politics, protect vested interests, poison the discourse and impugn the scientific enterprise. We have let them block, bluster and even incentivise the polluters. The result is that nothing much is done while each year, the signs get more stark, the evidence more blatant.

Damned fools. Make no bones about it, they will continue to fiddle while Rome burns about them. Such is their investment in their cause and their desire to be right. We need to move on from them. Let them play in their sandboxes while the rest of us figure out what to do. Fuck them. The world has run out of time listening to their arrogance and their idiocy.