The US has Al Gore. UK has James Lovelock. And Australia has Tim Flannery, the author of “The Weather Makers”. Tim Flannery, an expert on global warming, has now revised updated his climate forecast for the world, and it’s much worse than he thought just three years ago.

According to Professor Flannery, climate change is happening so quickly that mankind might need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive. The gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.

“It would change the colour of the sky,” Professor Flannery says in Melbourne’s The Age. “It’s the last resort that we have, it’s the last barrier to a climate collapse.”

Regardless of what happens to future emissions, there is already far too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Simply cutting emissions is not enough. Mankind now had to take greenhouse gases out of the air. “The current burden of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is in fact more than sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change,” Professor Flannery says.

Appropriately enough, next to the article in The Age is a Google ad linking to a free book on prophecy from www.the-end.com. The title is “2008 - God’s Final Witness”. I couldn’t possibly imagine a better product placement.

In today’s Times Argus, a Vermont publication, Dr. Alan Betts reflects on the analogy between smoking and the “global carbon-dioxide pollution” that comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

We now have public health advertising to warn teenagers of the long-term hazards of smoking. Why? Because for decades the tobacco industry encouraged teenagers to start smoking as a way of building its future market. (…) The biggest consequences from all our carbon dioxide emissions are also in the future, so it’s hard to grasp the significance of our addiction to fossil fuels for our children.

Dr. Alan Betts is Vermont’s leading climate scientist and the past president of the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering. He received his B.A. in Theoretical Physics in 1967 and his M.A. in 1971 from Cambridge. He received his PhD. in Meteorology in London in 1970. From 1971-1979, he was a professor at Colorado State University before founding Atmospheric Research in Pittsford, Vermont, in 1979. Now how can such a well-educated man call carbon dioxide a pollutant and compare its effect with that of nicotine fumes?

All animals, including us humans, breathe out carbon dioxide, which is then used by plants during photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is the principle food of plants. When the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases the food available to the Earth’s plants increases. Carbon itself is the basis of all life on Earth and carbon atoms continually move through living organisms, the oceans and the atmosphere. When you watch your child grow, you actually watch CO2 being further processed. So why all those horror stories about CO2 poisoning the planet?

Another climate change scientist, Dr James Lovelock of Great Britain, predicts Apocalypse in The Daily Mail.

We’re all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe – and there’s NOTHING we can do about it.

What is it with all those scientists? Are their predictions of total disaster just clumsy efforts to get noticed and published? And are journalists really so ignorant to the basic facts of biology?