If it’s not avian flu, it’s global warming. Now that we no longer have to worry about being eaten by prides of lions, torn to pieces by packs of wolves, or being wiped out by the plague, we cast about for some other reason to fray our nerves. Fear and anxiety are humankind’s natural state. That made sense in the days when men had to hunt the day’s ration of woolly mammoth and the women had to guard the kids against sabre-toothed tigers, but it doesn’t make sense any more.

Now that we’re safe in our homes, we can’t accept that life is much better for us than it was even for our parents and grandparents. We’re programmed to think up fresh reasons to have palpitations in the night. Five thousand years ago we slept lightly because of marauding bears. Five hundred years ago, we slept lightly because of that knock on the door from those sadists down at the Inquisitor’s Palace, and because our only son had been sold into slavery. Now we sleep lightly because it hasn’t rained all winter and we imagine that this might somehow affect the price of our property.

People who lived with the constant threat of war didn’t worry about desertification in the remoter parts of Australia, or the melting of the polar ice caps. They were too busy hoping that when Chamberlain waved that document about and spoke about peace in our time, that peace would last for another, oh, five years or so at least. Then they were too busy worrying about surviving the bombs and getting enough stale bread to eat, while picking lice out of their daughters’ hair in the shelters.

We forget that every generation has its reason to live in a state of fear – which, incidentally, is what Michael Crichton called his book about why he doesn’t believe in global warming or that temperature fluctuations are mainly man-made. Call me a cynic, but my own view is that global warming is what humankind has come up with to fill the state-of-fear vacuum created by the end of the Cold War. Gosh, we have short memories. We forget that in 1989, the world was left suddenly with nothing at all to panic about. Nothing. At all. It was the first time in human history that this had happened. Right up to 1945, people lived with war, disease, pestilence, hunger, cold, misery, death, destruction and all manner of horrors and discomforts that the coddled of today cannot even imagine. It was life, ordinary life. Then, for the next 45 years, people in the western democracies worried about Communism, while people behind the Iron Curtain worried about finding food and keeping warm. And everyone everywhere worried about the Cold War, the finger on the red button, and the nuclear mushroom. My generation was the last to be brought up with the fear of being nuked as a real and present danger, so I know what I’m talking about here.

The fear of the Russian bear, of reds under the bed, and of having the Soviet Union Hiroshima us while we were sitting on our school benches was the ever-present bogeyman. The words “nuclear disarmament”, “Cold War” and “Communism” were the backdrop to my 1970s childhood. For the generation before mine, it was even worse. They had to live, probably on tenterhooks and kalmanti, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the point in 1962 at which the world came closest to full-on nuclear war. Nuclear war wasn’t just an abstract concept to us. It was the guillotine hanging over our heads. If you’re old enough to have lived through all that, when it comes to stuff to worry about, you’ll know that global warming and avian flu are as nothing by comparison. The human mind has a way of making us forget the troubles and worries of the past – or at least, not the troubles and worries themselves, but what it was like to experience them. This ensures the survival of the species, as otherwise no woman who has given birth by the proper channel will ever want to repeat the experience. It also helps us survive without getting a nervous breakdown.

But here’s the problem: because we can’t remember what it was like to live with the constant spectre of starvation and war, before penicillin when even a simple infection could kill you, we imagine that the present is frightening. Come on, what’s so frightening about it? I would much rather live with so-called global warming than with all the other factors that were present in the 1930s. It was in 1942 that the first person was successfully treated with penicillin. Before that, if you had a bacterial infection you lived with it – or you died. We’re hooked on antibiotics now. We shove them down our throats at the slightest sign of a tickle. Well, imagine living without antibiotics. Imagine your toddler being seriously ill and your only medicine being a vow to the Virgin Mary, the entire family gathered in the front room reciting the rosary, and lots of candles lit before icons. My grandparents were born at a time when the infant mortality rate in Malta was 50 per week. Just to make sure you understand this clearly, I’m going to repeat it: around 50 babies and children under five died every week in the Maltese Islands a hundred years ago. And those are the just the ones who were recorded. Given what life was like then, we have no way of knowing how many infant deaths went unrecorded in rural areas and in the slums. Do you want to swap life in 2007, global warming and all, for life in 1907? I thought as much. Let the sun shine, let the world warm up. At least we’re not being burnt at the stake or dying of an infected graze.

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I can’t really take global warming too seriously in any case, no matter how many panels of United Nations experts come charging out to justify their existence and their salaries by telling us that it’s happening, and that it’s man-made. Short memory and a hopeless sense of perspective don’t just cause us to worry about global warming in the same way that older generations worried about Nikita Krushchev and John Kennedy pressing the Big Red Button at the same time. The world’s climate has fluctuated hugely, and with dramatic consequences, since time immemorial. But because we can only think of the weather in terms of our own lifetime – and more to the point – in terms of our own part of the globe, we fail to put it all into perspective. Drought in Africa? Hurricane in South Carolina? Storms closing airports in Eastern Europe? Oh, then it must be global warming.

It’s as though someone, somewhere decided at some point that the world’s weather had became fixed and unchanging, and would go on the same way until the end of time. Our arrogance has led us to believe that we have a right to expect no change in the climate, just as we have become accustomed to living in the west without hunger, pandemics, infant mortality and war. Everywhere there are groups of people nowadays, you are going to find someone who’ll remark about this year’s spring-like winter that it must be global warming. Oh really? Well, as far as I can remember, last winter was one of the most horrid and the wettest I’ve ever had to live through. I still have the black mould spotting all over the ceiling and many of the walls to prove it. Instead of worrying about the constant sunshine, try something new: enjoy it. Go and lie on the beach in February, then next year, when it’s bucketing down and you’re shoving one gas cylinder after another into your heater, you’ll have something to moan about: “Oh, Jane, don’t you remember? This time last year we were having a picnic at Ghajn Tuffieha.”

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Two thousand years ago, large parts of North Africa were green and fertile, instead of bare and arid like they are today. The only amphitheatre in the Roman world to rival the one in the capital city was in the area now known as El Djem in southern Tunisia. You drive out to it feeling sick in the heat, open the car door to the same rush of blistering air that you get from opening the oven door while something is roasting, and then you wonder what in hell’s name those people were thinking of, building that massive amphitheatre in the middle of semi-desert nowhere. And the answer, of course, is that the place wasn’t arid and bleak when the theatre was built, and it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, either. The region deteriorated over the course of the next few centuries, when there were no cars, planes, motor-boats or trains, when no fossil fuels were burnt, when nobody imported container-loads of tat from China, and when there were no refrigerators to produce CFCs or United Nations experts to sound the warning. It became like that because climate changes and geography changes with it, and in the ninth century after Christ, they didn’t hang around discussing global warming. They just upped sticks and went to live on the coast.

It wasn’t man-made global warming that caused Malta to pop out of the sea, or that cut it off from the mainland later. What, in heaven’s name, do you think all those pigmy animals are doing in the Ghar Dalam museum? Climate change created them, and climate change killed them. Refrigerators and cars had nothing to do with it. Climate change made it possible for Siberian people to walk or row to North America, to get cut off, and to develop into a separate race. For a long stretch of time, Britain was so cold that it was uninhabitable, but then, in medieval times, grapes were grown in the south of England and wine was made there. Climate change is what gave us the biblical story of Noah and the Sumerian myth of the great flood. They’re thought to be the remnants of memory of the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago. But Noah’s ark, as far as we know, didn’t run on diesel. Ah yes, the ice age – we’d forgotten about that one, and how our ancestors survived polar conditions wrapped in animal skins and probably eating the neighbours to survive until the next day.

I’m not going to worry about global warming. I’m too damned grateful that I don’t live in the past. If I find myself living through a massive water shortage, as the university’s Department of Physics has warned will happen in Malta, it will come as no great shock to my system. Anyone who lived in Sliema between 1980 and 1986 is trained to cope without any water at all. If Malta runs dry, we can show others how to do it.