Last Friday students across the country and the world took part in a "climate strike" attracting large crowds to the capital cities.
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Arguments raged about whether the students would have been better served going to school or whether the protesters should have done their march on the weekend to avoid disruption.
There were those who suggested the students were deluded or led on, and one Brisbane newspaper said they would not be able to find Carmichael mine on a map.
I've even seen fake images circulating on social media purporting to be the mess of plastic bottles left behind by protesters after the event in Brisbane (it wasn't - it was from an unrelated protest in London's Hyde Park over 10 years ago).
All of this behaviour is aimed at discrediting the students and none of it addresses their central concern - that our climate is being irreversibly changed due to human behaviour and those in power are not acting quickly enough to do anything about it.
The students have got good reason to be worried.
The IPCC wants to limit warning global warming to 1.5 degrees to give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds,
All the creditable science tells us that a warming of two degrees by 2100 would lead to sea level rises of 50 to 100 cms and almost 100 percent obliteration of our coral reefs.
Science has also predicted an increase in wilder weather, which we are already seeing across the globe.
Welcome to the new normal.
Those who marched on Friday will be in their 90s come 2100 if they survive.
But chances are, many of them will live that long.
It's fair to say none of today's policy makers - nor me for that matter - is unlikely to see the next century in.
So those students of today have a strong vested interest in decisions made today that will affect their lives in the next 80 years.
So complaining about traffic being slowed down for a few minutes, or the loss of a school lesson pail in comparison to their existential need for a liveable planet.
We must listen and act - or otherwise be judged harshly by history.