Phillip Adams on his Radio National Australia show "Late Night Live" spends about 50 minutes chatting to Tim Flannery about his new book "The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change"
[Tim Flannery is contributor to New York Review, and a scientist with 90 papers to his credit...]
Greenhouse gases increase Sea SurfaceTemperatures.
The gases are already there. The tropics are fucked [Tim didn't use that word :) ]
But how far south will they go before we end our selfish materialist madness?
Brisbane? Sydney?
[could be appropriate justice... being redneck and yuppie capitals of Oz... Tim didn't say that either ]
[16:38]
"Once the surface of the sea gets above a certain temperature it will generate hurricanes
and that temperature is about 23.7 degrees.
[In the last two summers in] the Northern Gulf of Mexico
surface temperatures there of the ocean have been about 30 degrees.
So this has been a catastrophe just waiting to happen.
Last year we had 4 very devastating hurricanes in a row in Florida...
this year we had the earliest hurricane on record,
now we've got the most expensive natural disaster to hit America."
[17:34]
"The great Barrier Reef is dying at the moment because this temperature of the sea is getting too high.
That same temperature will end up spawning hurricanes and tornadoes and cyclones off the Australian Coast.
In fact in January this year we had a ctaegory five cyclone heading for Cairns,
thankfully it veered to the north.
The Cyclone that destroued Darwin in 1947 was a category three cyclone.
Is there a building in Cairns that could withstand a direct hit by a categroy five cyclone?
I Don't think so.
How many people would we be looking at dead or evacuated in North Queensland were we hit with a cyclone like that?
In the thousands, maybe tens of thousands".
[33:25]
And this is the beginning.
We've had 0.6 degrees temperature change last century and are looking at three degrees this century.
Sound small? Consider this...
This is a rate of change 30 times at least as that which ended the last ice age.
*** THIRTY TIMES ***
[34:35]
"15,000 years ago,
which is not very long ago at all given that given that Egypt [empire] was atound 4000 years ago
there was enough ice frozen on the North American Continent alone to lower the sea level around the world by 74 metres...
The ice cap extended right down to NewYork; in Central Park you can see scrape marks showing the retreat of the ice 14,000 years ago.
[35:16]
"North of Boston you can see a piece of rock two thirds the size of Ayre's Rock [Uluru] that was carried there from Canada 15,000 years ago by a massive glacier".
[36:33]
"Great Britain is the place i think we should look to.
The reason is that the very first political leader to address the issue of climate change was
Margaret thatcher who was advised by the "Gaia" man, [James] Lovelock.
We've seen with Blair a continuation of that policy and a real commitment to reducing emissions.
Britain now is producing 20% less CO2 than it was twenty or thirty years ago and yet
its economy has grown by 37%."
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