The Government is out of tune with the rest of the world.

Late this year, the people of the Carteret Islands gave up. Rising seas had turned their home, low-lying atolls off Papua New Guinea, into a salty and difficult place to live. The decision was made to move, 10 families at a time, to drier ground on nearby Bougainville.

These islanders were just one of nature's many victims in 2005. From creeping oceans to terrifying hurricanes, this was the year Mother Nature reminded us who has the upper hand. But it is too easy to cast ourselves as the meek sufferers of nature's whim. This year's real lesson was that humans have become, as leading scientist Tim Flannery puts it, the weather makers.

While you can never categorically attribute one weather event to global warming - the system is too chaotic - the events of this year revealed the human hand on the climate levers. One of the United States' leading climate scientists, Dr James Hansen, declared earlier this month: "Humans now control global climate, for better or worse."

The second realisation that crystallised in the wake of hurricane Katrina was how reliant our communities are on stable climates; how we take this stability for granted, and how easily the social and economic bones of cities fracture under extreme events.

In 2005, research found that levels of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, were higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. In Australia, it was the hottest year since records began. Signs of a warming world were everywhere: widespread coral bleaching in the