Jim Hopkins: Grab a snorkel and make your way to higher ground

Should the unnerving prospect of another fractious and discordant Waitangi Day weigh heavily upon you, then take heart. Hope is at hand.

It will all be over soon. In a few short years, the whole petulant pantomime will be a footling irrelevance.

Forces far greater than those fuelling the outrage of history's ambiguous victims are at work. And, verily, they will sweep the baggage of 1840 before them.

Because we're doomed. Apparently. Thoroughly, totally, utterly doomed. Global warming has done for us. And there's nothing we can do.

There's no point shutting the stable door after the sea horse has bolted. It's too late. The damage has already been done.

Whatever measures we might take, whatever Protocols we might sign, whatever penalties might be slapped upon the owners of larger SUVs and such, the ice caps will still melt, great cities will still be inundated and the end will still be nigh.

The good news is that this is official. It's not coming from some demented soothsayer. It's coming from H.M. Government's finest scientific minds.

These erudite eminences released their latest report on Tuesday - which was nice since it allowed plenty of time for any dissidents intending to occupy Dame Silvia's garden party to make other, less incendiary, plans.

The British report is not merely sombre; it's positively apocalyptic.

The oceans will rise, say the boffins, as much as 100ft, or 30-odd metres. Millions will be made homeless. Crops will fail. Waves of despair will sweep over the land.

Basically, all we can do now is nip down to The Warehouse, buy a snorkel, then head for higher ground.

The most alarming thing about such dire forecasts - and there've been many - is that they have, at least to date, conspicuously failed to generate the massive outbreak of fatalistic hedonism that has historically been our response to disaster.

Turn on the wireless - if you're desperate; watch the telly - if you're dead; go to a mall - if you're desperate and dead - and you won't hear people frantically saying to each other "Let's eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may drown".

Yet they should be. We all should be. Because there's no point worrying about how the two versions of the Treaty might differ or whether there's going to be a recession or mourning the loss of old-style, coastal camping grounds if, in relatively short order, the coast is going to be halfway up Mt Tongariro.

What we should be doing is having one last defiant knees-up; a whopping great "Up yours, Adolf" orgy before the rising waters put an end to rising house prices once and for all.

We should be doing what Paul McCartney suggested. We should be doing it in the road.

Not before it's tolled, but before it's under water.

Quite why we haven't cast off our inhibitions - and our underwear - is a mystery.

It could be that we're simply apocalypt'd out. What with bird flu and that ginormous volcano thing in Yellowstone National Park that's due to erupt any time now and turn us all into dinosaurs with DVDs, we might have suppressed the revelry impulse by inoculating ourselves with indifference.

Or we might dimly recall the odd contrary fact that tends to undermine the experts' fears.

When they confidently predict the Greenland ice cap will melt and flood us all, we might vaguely recollect that the place is actually called Greenland because that's what it was when the Vikings turned up.

"Gush Sven," they said in their guttural Nordic fashion as they surveyed this (much warmer) farming paradise, "ert's vorry grun, oosn't ert?"

And we might remember that History Channel doco about human migration and how there's very little evidence of our ancestors' earliest coastal settlements in places like India because there was an Ice Age back then and the sea level was 400ft (120m) lower.

And we might conclude that all this greenhouse gloom is more religious than scientific in its foundation.

We might decide the hectoring insistence that our pollution is the cause of our predicament is simply sin in modern guise; part of a creed in which nature is God and we are just our old, wicked selves.

We might say, if the Sahara was a verdant forest 24,000 years ago - before the world had a magnetic conniption - then there are things going on that make my clunky old diesel pretty damned insignificant.

But we mustn't allow such heresies to taint us. Especially not on Monday.

On Monday we should embrace our common humanity by embracing each other before we all go under for good.