EDITORIAL: Is it me or am I just cold?

Just the place to survive the new ice age ... or, at least, winter.

TODAY I have a more optimistic view of where we might be heading.

Where once I was convinced that human pollution was bringing climate Armageddon upon us, now I wonder where we might be if there was no human-caused adjustment to the natural life cycle of the planet?

Weren't we headed for an ice age, and aren't our fossil-fuel ways countering and delaying that?

The recent night-time and early morning chill is certainly helping to make me somehow less outraged at that scenario.

For the record, we are playing Russian roulette with our survival and should adopt clean energy asap.

But when climate science really hits its straps, we'll be able to control the planet's atmosphere to maintain an optimal climate with neither ice age nor desert ages but just perfect - as it would be now if our heat pump wasn't struggling against this cold snap.

Of course, a comet could still get us, or we may nuclear-wave oven ourselves a really long artificial winter ...

But get through the next 50-to-100 years and I think humans have a shot at going a very long way. At some stage we will evolve, as we did from our ancestors, and Homo sapiens will become another dead branch in Darwin's tree.

But our offshoot will remain human, perhaps augmented with computerised technology to make us as all as smart as Einstein and robotics that will make us faster and stronger than Wonder Woman.

Perhaps artificially lab-grown organs and nano-robotics will bring us immortality, or at least allow us to live a really long time. And genetic engineering will give us the ability to enhance our desired traits.

Yes, we will become superhuman in ways only dreamed of in science fiction.

The comet, though, could remain problematic - as could magnetic pole reversal, coronial mass ejection, Donald Trump, neutron star explosion, the guy running this experiment flicking the off switch ...

Or maybe I'm just cold.