Bumming on Bali? Well wipe your nose, urges Gwynne Dyer.

As we now all know, the just-wrapped United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP-13 did not set the hard emissions-reductions targets that humankind so desperately needs.

But there was a silver lining in the South Pacific, argues Dyer, who is perhaps best known for his 1980s TV miniseries War. His new column pulls back the scope, and places COP-13’s non-outcome in the wider context of human evolution.

“Do not be downhearted,” the one-time Oscar nominee says. Though millions may now die who might otherwise have lived, Dyer notes, the talks at least revealed “the human race trying to grow up and take responsibility for its common future.”

That may be little consolation for those among us who know far too much about where this roadmap is really leading us, but the leather-jacketed sage also springboards off Al Gore’s regime-change remarks with a tidbit of hopeful strategy:

“The next big conference, scheduled for Poland next December, will probably be allowed to slip by a couple of months so that the new U.S. administration is in office.”

In other words, sure, it really sucks to deny and delay for another year, but just leave the space blank, and let’s all hold the phone until the superpower at the table has sworn in a new, presumably more sensible, boss.

The question is: Can the U.N. push back Poland a few weeks without the cooperation of a lame-duck administration hell-bent on ruining it for everyone?