Yes, climate change is a major crisis

In China, more than 700 people are confirmed dead and a further 1000 are missing after floods there triggered landslides. More than a million homes have been lost.

In North Korea, too, lives, homes, railways, bridges, roads and farmland are being swept away in the torrents.

Meanwhile in Russia, unbearably high temperatures are doubling the country's death rate and sparking hundreds of deadly wildfires. As a result, Russia's economy has so far taken a massive $18 billion blow.

You can dismiss these tragedies, if you like, or you can ask yourself if there are any lessons to be learned.Come summer, it could be our turn - and we're still squabbling about whether climate change is a problem and what, if any, action we should take to combat it.

It is now 20 years since the publication of Sustainable Development: Challenges for Australia , commissioned by the federal government and written by Lyuba Zarsky,then the staff economist for the Commission for the Future.

I recall interviewing Zarsky at the time and being alarmed by her predictions - do nothing about sustainable development, she said, and we risk increased flooding in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan due to climate change. Do nothing, and we would eventually face a moral duty to accept more "climate refugees".

And what happened? The Commission for the Future, the brainchild of Labor's Barry Jones, was itself declared extinct in 1998. On the other hand, Zarsky is still fighting the good fight, but is now based in California.

We must question just how seriously our political leaders are working to help future-proof us from the immense harm that climate change can wreak.

Tony Abbott is more concerned with whipping up fear about asylum seekers than fighting climate change. While he dismisses climate change as crap, he also claims that Nauru is a great place to ship asylum seekers.

What Abbott doesn't seem to realise is that Nauru is an environmental catastrophe, the barren landscape is incapable of growing crops or vegetables, and bottled water has to be flown in for the existing residents.

Then there's Julia Gillard's limp citizens' assembly, a sketchy plan to gather 150 Australians to gain some kind of consensus on climate change. If Gillard's plan is to have any hope of moving us forward, the first thing these 150 people should do is examine the so-called Climategate scandal and its role in sinking the Copenhagen summit.

Climategate, you might recall,centred on emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the UK's University of East Anglia.

But the BBC has been forced to apologise to the university researchers for wrongly claiming they had exaggerated the extent of the threat of global warming.

And there are still many, many more in the media who are well overdue in saying sorry for getting it wrong.

Source: heraldsun.com.au