What a pleasure to be in a place where they drive on the left, speak French, have UK power plugs, are Christian, and have never had a population that claims to be First Nations people as a ruse for wealth theft. There is neither graffiti nor flags flying for some divisive cause attempting to traitorously split the nation.

The capital and port town of Victoria has fewer than 30,000 inhabitants and is certainly not like the morally and financially bankrupt place in Australia of the same name. The guano deposits are exhausted whereas south of the Murray, the bovine droppings just keep coming and are inexhaustible.

Here, the locals get out of bed early, work hard in this resource-poor country, have a laid-back lifestyle, and, thanks to tourism, enjoy the highest per capita income of any African country south of the equator.

The East India Company landed in the Seychelles in 1609, although the French retrospectively claimed to have discovered it.

French possession of the uninhabited Indian Ocean islands in 1756 led to a spice-growing industry. The local Creole population derives from slaves from Africa, India, and the Middle East who were used by the French as farm labour.

When the Seychelles became British in 1811, slavery was already illegal in the UK and, under British rule, slavery was abolished in the Seychelles. The islands were then governed by the British as a dependency of Mauritius, became an independent republic and Commonwealth country in 1976, and retained the Civil Code of Napoleonic Law.

Cop28 was graced with five delegates from the Seychelles. Was their presence paid for by wealthy westerners or did the poor local taxpayer have to shell out hard-earned Seychellois rupees?

What could these delegates possibly achieve as the outcome of their jaunt? Carbon dioxide is food for the island nation’s forests, crops, and coral. The island economy is totally dependent upon fossil fuel-burning ships and airplanes for supplies. Transport on the island is by fossil fuel-burning vehicles with internal combustion engines on roads surfaced with granite and coral aggregate made using energy generated by fossil fuels. Electricity is generated from imported diesel. The three terrestrial and six marine national parks restrict the land area that could be destroyed by any future wind and solar facilities. The cloudiness and gentle trade winds are not conducive to ruinous renewable energy.

Without fossil fuels, the Seychelles could not be supplied with the essentials to feed, clothe, and house the small population and would be dependent upon supplies from sailing ships, donkey transport on land, and scarce local foods. There would be no electricity and no economy based on tourism. That is the fate of small oceanic island populations around the world, especially those, like the Seychelles, with neither minerals nor oil.

What’s a geologist doing on the world’s only granite mass sitting in the middle of an ocean? Well… it’s a long story starting 750 million years ago in western India and finishing with modern, coral-fringed islands just south of the equator.

The first scientist to visit the Seychelles was the great natural philosopher Charles Darwin. The Seychelles is not very biologically diverse and did not underpin Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Visits by the German Alfred Wegener however and the South African Alexander du Toit in the early-20th century, half a century later, underpinned the theory of plate tectonics. They both realised that the Seychelles was once part of western India some 3,000 km away. How did this happen? Geological tramping of the hills, analysis of rock chemistry, ancient magnetic and heat flow measurements, and ocean floor drilling gave the answers.

The Seychelles was initially an Andean mountain chain joined to western India and Mauritius at the edge of the supercontinent of Rodinia. Around 630 million years ago, the supercontinent started to fragment into smaller masses; mountains were weathered, eroded, and flattened into plains; basins were filled with sediments; basalt lava poured into new ocean basins and, where continental masses pushed into each other, rocks were crushed, bent, broken and melted.

A new supercontinent, Gondwana, formed 600 million years ago when Africa, India, Arabia, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Australia, Antarctica, and South America were glued together.

Gondwana started to fragment 180 hundred million years ago and East Gondwana fragmented 120 million years ago leaving the Seychelles attached to India, Madagascar and what is now the submerged Mascarene Plateau north and east of modern Madagascar.

For 4,567 million years the Earth has been cooling as great plumes emanate from the core of the planet carrying heat and greenhouse gases to the surface.

The heating of the oceans and the atmosphere from these plumes is part of the long-term cooling of the planet that is totally ignored in climate models.

Heat flow maps of the Earth show that most of this deep heat ends up in the oceans. It is ocean heat that drives the Earth’s climate.

Plumes stretch and fragment continents and, at times, lead to pulsating outpourings of monstrous volumes of molten rock. This happened in India 66 million years ago when many pulses of basalt lava, up to 9,300 cubic kilometres in volume, formed the Deccan Traps. The sulphur- and mercury-rich gases released may have destroyed plant and animal life resulting in a mass extinction.

Crustal movement and rotation driven by plumes broke the Seychelles off from India and pushed Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Mascarene Plateau 3,000 km southwestwards to their current positions.

The past shows that major planetary processes such as climate change cannot possibly be due to human emissions of a trace gas.

No one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive climate change. We should fill asylums with those who think that government mandates on human emissions of plant food can change a major planetary process.

If Australia is ever blessed with a new pragmatic government, rigorous audits of every item of expenditure should include the climate con.