Climate change a more serious threat than religious fundamentalism

Posted on October 4, 2007
Filed Under All, Politics, Green Tech |

A telephone survey of more than 1,000 people released today showed that 40 percent of Australians thought that global warming was a greater threat to security than Islamic fundamentalism. Only 20 percent thought it was less serious.

“It is very interesting to see how climate change has moved from the environmental field to the security sphere,” said Alan Dupont, who heads the United States Studies Center, based at the University of Sydney, referring to the report released today. “Most of the government response has been about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than trying to manage the effects of the change.”

The survey came a day after the government’s most senior scientific body said that rising temperatures and reduced rainfall were inevitable in Australia.

On Tuesday, Australia’s most influential scientific research body, the government-financed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, released a report that said a temperature rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit was likely by 2030, along with many more days with temperatures of over 95 degrees and reduced rainfall across much of southern Australia, already the driest part of the driest inhabited continent.

“The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past,” the report said.

From a report in today’s New York Times…

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