Tim Flannery: people are shocked about climate change but they should be angry

Tim Flannery laments that young Australians today will never be able to experience in the same way the natural wonders he enjoyed in his youth.

 Tim Flannery: ‘We’re in a different world now, a world where
 people are living with climate change consequences’.

He grew up in Melbourne on remnants of the sandplain flora, “one of the great floristic gems of Australia,” he says. Once smothered in flowers in springtime, it has now largely been lost through development and altered burning regimes. Flannery, 63, spent his youth swimming and scuba diving in northern Port Phillip bay, which he says is now also gravely deteriorated.

He further points to the Great Barrier Reef, which suffered unprecedented mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 and the “serious questions” about whether it can now be saved. “Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,” he says.

But without detailed records on species distributions, it’s impossible to map the losses due to climate change, explains Flannery, who recently returned to the 192-year-old Australian Museum in Sydney, where he was principal mammalogist from 1984–1999.

Read the story from The Guardian by John Pickrell - “Tim Flannery: people are shocked about climate change but they should be angry.”