Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, announced that the era of global warming has ended, and the era of global boiling has arrived and it's terrifying! Now, we know that the climate alarmists terrify people with their language, but, even by their own standards, this latest foray into the catastrophic language is pretty outrageous. It's, quite frankly, set the Left in this building off like a rock. They've been running around all week, waving their arms around like the robot from Lost in Space, and it's all because of this, I believe. This isn't about facts, and it isn't about data, science or the environment; it's about politics, control and fear. The alarmists need to remain fresh with their language to stay on the cutting edge, otherwise some other activist will crawl out from their mum's basement and take their mantle as chief alarmist.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, they used the term 'greenhouse effect', but who's going to fear that? A greenhouse is a friendly place. So, when the 'greenhouse effect' became defunct, they started using 'global warming'. But you're not going to frighten kids with that, so they moved to on 'climate change', and then they could blame a snow storm and a hurricane on climate change. But they needed to grow the fear exponentially, so then we got 'climate crisis', 'climate emergency', 'climate breakdown' and even 'climate apocalypse'.

The question really is: where to from here? I've taken the liberty of coming up with five suggested names that I think will be much more terrifying so that the UN can use them in advance. I've come up with (1) 'global climate inferno', which sounds pretty terrifying; (2) 'mega universe heat death', which would work; (3) 'super global spine-chillingly hot'; which I think might terrify the kids; (4) 'stop using your stove, you capitalists'—I reckon that one will work; and, finally, (5) 'you will die soon', which I think will do the job of terrifying everybody and informing nobody. That's the way of the world now.