The hysteria about the impacts of climate change is building to a fever pitch as the doom sayers rachet up their rhetoric in a bid to urge the Rudd government to go for huge cuts in the Emissions Trading Scheme.
We will record the public figures predictions here so that some years down the track we can go back to them and ask them how their credibility is doing.
Todays doom sayer is Conservation Foundation’s Executive’s director Don Henry.
Henry quoting a new report which the Conservation Foundation have just released ‘Saving Australia’s Special Places’ is truly incredible.
According to Don Henry [pictured] , unless you support the government cutting Carbon Emissions by 60% in the next 40 years there will be no lawns, no barbcues, no wine, no food, no jobs, no snow, no Great Barrier Reef, no Kakadu, 88% of all our wildlife will be extinct, no holidays at the beach, and if you don’t die of heat your home will probably be burnt to the ground in wild bushfires.
You think I’m exaggerating – heres what he had to say -
- Not only will the lawn die off; so, too, will the great tradition of the Aussie barbecue.
- And thousands more people will also die:
- In Queensland, scientists predict 4000 more heat-related deaths each year
- Australia’s grape-growing areas will decline by 44% by the middle of the century, and grape quality will nose-dive.
- By the end of the century, the winter sports industry, which employs 17,000 people and adds $1.3 billion to the economy, will have disappeared as the snow simply fails to fall.
- $50 billion to 150 billion worth of houses, property, businesses, and public infrastructure are under threat from flooding due to sea level rises.
- The Kakadu wetlands are in danger of inundation by salt water, with a 59-centimetre sea level rise to hit about 90% of the national park and up to 88% of species in the bush facing extinction.
- Increasingly fierce and frequent bushfires will sweep areas that were hitherto immune.
- The Murray Darling Basin, will lose 92% of its agricultural production by the end of the century.
- The Great Barrier will be completely destroyed.
- Hundreds of thousands of tourism-related jobs, and $37 billion in exports from tourism could collapse, not to mention the damage to agriculture.
There was a time when people who made statements like Mr Henry’s were completely ignored or we just assumed they’d stop taking their medication.
But now in these crazy times they are leaders of major environmental groups and quoted in the mainstream media as experts.
Sssshhhheeeeessh.
.
Have Your say!
