JOHN HOWARD & Climate change: "Well, it would be less comfortable"

On a Lateline program Broadcast: 05/February/2007 in , the presenter, Tony Jones, was interviwing the Ausyralian Prime Minister on a range of subjects including climate change....

TONY JONES: Prime Minister, what do you think living in Australia would be like by the end of this century for your own grandchildren and for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of others, if the temperatures, the average mean temperatures, around the world do rise by somewhere between four and possibly even more than six degrees celsius?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, it would be less comfortable for some than it is now,...

The PM is determined to ensure that Australians don't "adopt the doomsday scenario. There have been plenty of examples in the past where those sorts of scenarios have been embraced and they haven't been realised"

Mr Prime Minster, there have been plenty of examples where people have not adopted the doomsday scenario and it has been disastorous. Just to be clear.....

• If we get warming of two or three degrees Celsius, then I would expect that both West Antarctica and parts of Greenland would end up in the ocean, and the last time we had an ice sheet disintegrate, sea level went up at a rate of 5 metres in a century, or one metre every 20 years. Dr James Hansen, NASA Scientist
• Australia's Great Barrier Reef could lose 95 percent of its living coral
• "Australia has significant vulnerability to the changes in temperature and rainfall that are projected" Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• more bushfires and more intense cyclones. More intense tropical cyclones would have serious implications for storm surge heights, ...CSIRO
  
• three quarters of all bird species in northeast Australia ... could become extinct WWF