Climate change - is the obscene profit worth the price?

A mock weather report looking 35 years into the future has painted a stark picture of a wintry New Zealand, ravaged by extreme conditions including both drought and flooding. Just days before world leaders meet in Paris to discuss a global climate change deal, a futuristic fake MetService forecast for August 14, 2050 has appeared on social media. TV meteorologist Chester Lampkin shows that winter temperatures that day ranging from 12C to 20C - up to 3C warmer than normal for a winter's day. It shows showers and thunderstorms across Northland, Auckland, and Hamilton, with 70-90mm daily rainfall causing flooding and closures to an "underwater" Northern Motorway, North-Western Motorway, and Tamaki Drive. Coastal flood warnings are in effect for Auckland's coastline. Most of Canterbury, meanwhile, is parched and under a fire risk. The simulated footage showed the Hurunui District in North Canterbury to be at high fire risk. At tourist hot-spot of Hanmer Springs "300-500 firefighters" are fighting a massive wildfire. "Just a year ago, we were talking about extreme rains for this part of New Zealand, and now we're talking about drought and fire. We keep going back and forth in the extremes of the weather," said the meteorologist in the 4.55 minute clip posted on the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) YouTube channel. The video ends with a message from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud who say climate change will "increasingly affect our day-to-day weather". "But we don't have to wait until 2050 to witness its impact," he says. "Already today, many parts of the world are experiencing more intense rainfall, floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts ... we have to minimise these negative impacts and the best way to do that is to rapidly and significantly reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases." There are many ways to help - swap out the gas-guzzler for a hybrid, plant a few trees to help turn some of that excess CO2 into oxygen, stop spraying that awful "shower in a can", recycle, basically anything that will repair that hole in the ozone layer.