• Nationals MP, and former deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce has penned a scathing criticism of “barking mad” climate activists, arguing that Australia is powerless to do anything to halt climate change and that any policies that propose to do so could endanger the country’s future prosperity.
• Even if we could, he proposed that the world’s population will likely starve to death during an inevitable ice age anyway.
• Joyce’s comments come just days after Sir David Attenborough singled out Australia for its lack of climate policy, despite already experiencing some of its most severe effects.

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has unleashed a spectacular social media tirade against the climate action movement.

Quoting directly from an opinion piece written by New Zealand geologist David Shelley in The Australian newspaper, Joyce said, “the very idea that we can stop climate change is barking mad”.

“The central theme of David Shelley’s analysis is that sea levels are rising and have been for thousands of years and will fall during the next ice age which is expected about now, give or take a thousand years.

“When the ice age does arrive temperatures will drop around ten degrees. A warmer planet will be a disconsolate chronicle and many, maybe most, will die from starvation as is the usual experience of man or beast in previous ice ages,” Joyce wrote on his official Facebook page.

The stance pits Joyce, a former accountant, and Shelly, a retired geologist in direct opposition to an international cohort of climate scientists. Both are refuting a recent UN report for example that urged “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented” action, based on more than 6,000 citations of 91 different scientists from 40 countries. All are assumedly “barking mad”.

That’s not to mention lifelong conservationist Sir David Attenborough, who just this week singled out Australia’s inaction on climate change.

The veteran broadcaster said he was “sorry that there are people in power internationally” who were not interested in combating climate change.

“Notable of course in the United States, but also in Australia which is extraordinary actually because Australia is already having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change,” Attenborough told the UK House of Commons on Tuesday.

Perhaps they haven’t considered Joyce’s foregone conclusion that the impending ice age and its annihilation of the planet’s inhabitants in 1,000 or more years, is simply something “the parliament of Australia has no power against”.

Once you accept this, Joyce suggests any attempt to fight climate change is “a misguided and quite ludicrous proposition”.

“If we could (change the climate) we should be the first to make it rain and, more importantly, stop the recurrence of an ice age anytime in the coming millennium,” Joyce wrote.

Joyce believes by attempting to enact policies to tackle lower emissions, the Australian government would only endanger Australia’s future prosperity.

“You don’t get the feeling when you listen to the political propaganda or the supporting lobbyists that there is any doubt about their capacity to ‘fix the climate problem’. I do get the feeling that you will be tried for heresy if you dare question the zeitgeist so you basically have to lie about your honest assessment of what the hell we are doing to our economy, standard of living, our basic rights and the real future of our children,” Joyce wrote.

Joyce did not mention that the National Party he once led, along with the Liberal and Labor parties, each accept tens of thousands of dollars in political donations from fossil fuel companies each year.

Joyce himself is no stranger to controversy.

Embroiled in an extramarital affair with an office staffer and forced to step down as Nationals leader last year, Joyce said he was now free to speak his mind and stand by his principles.

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