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Climate change: World check-list

"In Greenland the barley is growing for the first time since the Middle Ages. In Britain gardeners were warned this week that the English country garden will be a thing of the past within the next 20 years. In Italy skiers were told yesterday that melting glaciers will mean an end to their pastime unless they can get above 2,000 metres."

If that isn't frightening enough-a-prospect, things are not much better around the globe - as The Indpendent catalogues in this article here. It make for frightening reading.

The dire warning of how things are shaping up in the world in the light of climate change, comes against a background of the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, starting to screen in Australia - and with the PM [whose Government won't join the Kyoto Protocol] not planning to see the movie and only speaking with Gore via the phone and the Industry Minister asserting the movie is "just entertainment". What erudition! No better than columnist Andrew Bolt - whose credentials to question anything would have to be more than suspect - attacking Gore in one of his weekly columns. The Trade Minister and Bolt share at least one thing - ignorance!

Postscript: Paul Sheehan, who writes op-ed pieces for the SMH, is hardly a lefty-Greenie or rampant liberal. Writing in the SMH today under the headline "Face facts: It's not just a movie" he says:

"If only George and John would grab some popcorn and go to see An Inconvenient Truth".

Read the Sheehan piece here.

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