The content on this webpage contains paid/affiliate links. When you click on any of our affiliate link, we/I may get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure for more info -----------------------
Last updated on July 16th, 2017 at 11:53 am
Jane McAdam – senior lecturer and director of international law at the University of New South Wales, director of the Climate Changes ‘Refugees’ and International Law Project, associate rapporteur of the Convention Refugee Status and Subsidiary Protection Working Party for the International Association of Refugee Law Judges, member of the Executive Committee of the International Law Association (Australian Branch), author of Complementary Protection in International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007), former general editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal and a former member of the editorial board of the Sydney Law Review – is also a climate clown:
On Christmas Eve last year, the first inhabited island disappeared underwater as a result of global warming. The residents of Lohachara island in the Bay of Bengal had already fled to a nearby island …
Wrong. The Independent reported on Christmas Eve that global warming had claimed Lohachara (in a piece apparently removed from the paper’s archives), but omitted any actual submersion date. That’s because the island went under some 20 years ago, for reasons apparently not related to warming.
The Independent’s environment editor Geoffrey Lean – for he is the source of this myth – will be proud that his work lives on. Why, Mr Lean is a regular Jacques Cousteau:
After a speech to UCLA students, a young reporter by the name of Dana Rohrabacher, who happened to be a scuba diver, asked Cousteau if he wasn’t being too pessimistic about the difficulty of obtaining fish, clams, oysters, and lobsters from the oceans in the future. Cousteau came up to his face and said, “Did you not hear me? Within 10 years the oceans will be black goo, totally dead, destroyed. The oceans will be lifeless.”
A few years later the young reporter, by that time Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), reflected on the ocean’s clear water and abundant wildlife in a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives:
“Why did Cousteau feel he had to lie to such a degree? Was it that he did not know that he was lying, that he did not know that the oceans were not going to be black goo within 10 years or even 20 years? No, Jacques Cousteau was part of a movement that feels they have a right to lie and they have a right to frighten people, because they have a higher calling; their higher calling is to save the environment.”
(Via Andrew Bolt, who wonders if the ABC – which broadcast McAdam’s claim – will run a retraction.)
