Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele hits out at climate change sceptics during fiery speech

Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele has lashed out at climate sceptics and urged Australia to make deeper cuts to carbon emissions to help save Pacific Island nations from the "disaster" of climate change.

Samoa's Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele has delivered
 a fiery speech at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, saying
any world leader who doesn't believe in climate change is stupid.

Mr Sailele told the Lowy Institute in Sydney that climate change posed an "existential challenge" to low lying islands in the Pacific, and developed countries needed to reduce pollution in order to curb rising temperatures and sea levels.

"We all know the problem, we all know the solutions, and all that is left would be some political courage, some political guts, to tell people of your country there is a certainty of disaster," Mr Sailele said.

Read the story by Stephen Dzeidzic from ABC News - “Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele hits out at climate change sceptics during fiery speech.”

People in the wrong place with the wrong values and ideals - 'I weep'

(I weep, metaphorically, when people who doubt and question climate science are elected and subsequently appointed to influential positions within government – here is another example of people desperately clinging to 20^th Century values and ideas being given the responsibility of influencing decisions of the 21^st Century that will have a legacy well into the 22^nd Century, and even longer. It is obvious that most people have serious trouble thinking beyond the lives of their grandchildren, and some are not able, even to consider life that far advanced – Robert McLean.)

Liberal member for Hughes Craig Kelly with Tony Abbott
during question time in 2015. Kelly has been appointed
chairman of the environment and energy committee.

The  Liberal MP Craig Kelly has been appointed chairman of the backbench environment and energy committee, with National party MP Kevin Hogan as secretary.

The committee will provide feedback on legislation and policies relating to the environment and energy, including to the minister, Josh Frydenberg

Kelly served on the committee during the last parliament and previously invited climate sceptics to “balance” a presentation given by top climate scientists.

He has been writing on the issue for a number of years, noting that the convicts found it hotter in the 1700s.

“But I wonder if any of these people actually knew that Sydney’s so-called ‘record hot day’ on Tuesday 8th Jan this year [2013], that had them screaming “Global Warming”, was actually COOLER than the weather experienced by the convicts of the First Fleet in Sydney way back in the summer of 1790/91?” Kelly wrote.

He wrote on his Facebook page during the election campaign: “And with freezing temperatures and even snow forecast for Melbourne’s outskirts and in parts of New South Wales, I hope many of the warmists haven’t sold their coats.”

Read The Guardian story - “Climate sceptic MP appointed chair of environment and energy committee.”

'Brexiters' doubt climate change, distrust climate scientists, have sympathy for creationism, oppose windfarms and support fracking

Many prominent leave campaigners are openly
opposed to action on climate
change or have cast doubt on man’s role in it.

British people backing a leave vote in the EU referendum are almost twice as likely to believe that climate change does not have a human cause, according to a new poll.

Brexiters are more likely to think the media exaggerates how settled climate science is; distrust scientists; have sympathy with creationism; oppose onshore windfarms and support fracking.

The findings come in a ComRes poll of 1,618 people evenly split between those intending to vote out and in.

Many prominent leave campaigners are either openly opposed to action on climate change or have cast doubt on man’s role in it, including former chancellor Nigel Lawson, former environment secretary Owen Paterson and columnist Matthew Ridley.

Boris Johnson once penned a column suggesting snow on his windowsill means we should consider believing climate sceptics over governments and leading scientists across the world, but has not openly denied manmade climate change.

Read The Guardian story - “Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change.”

(About the time Britain was deciding to leave the European Union a video clip illustrating the importance and value of standing as one (teamwork) was spinning through the Facebook world. It demonstrated that if even the smallest of things worked together, they could “see-off” larger and seemingly overwhelming threats.

Climate change is a threat bigger than any one country and to have any chance of addressing it, the world community must stand and work together.

The decision taken today by British people contradicts good sense and marks the beginning of a divide that could well be a bifurcation from which the world may never recover – Robert McLean.)

Humanity will never be able to defeat a threat it cannot perceive

Elizabeth Boulton.

In 2013, one of the world’s leading public relations experts, Bob Pickard, cried out to the climate world: “mobilise us!” In a frustrated op-ed, he listed 20 key problems with climate communication. One of them was “story fatigue”: bland stories with “highly repetitive and stale” themes.

Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse. Linguistic analysis found that the most recent IPCC report was less readable than seminal papers by Einstein. Last year, in America, climate news media coverage rates dropped despite the historical Paris Climate Summit and Pope Francis’ climate Encyclical.

One key risk is complacency – a perception that the issue is now resolved. This is despite the risk increasing, as our response lags.

One study found that Australia had the highest percentage of climate sceptics in the world, (17% as compared to 12% in the USA). Analysis of global attitudes in 2015 found that, while across the world, 54% of people considered climate change a “very serious problem,” in Australia this figure was only 43%.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a PhD Candidate in cross-disciplinary approaches to climate and environmental risk at the Australian National University, Elizabeth Boulton -  “It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story.”