People are quick to connect attempts to reduce the effects of climate change with the protection of the environment. However, responding to climate change is much more important for humanity than for nature. In the history of the planet, the relative stability of temperatures in the last ten thousand years is the exception rather than the norm. Nature has always found a way to adapt to large temperature variations but human civilisations, all of which have evolved in the last ten thousand years, have developed in a period with unusually reliable and predictable weather. Nature will find a way to move on, but climate change is potentially devastating for humans.