A former B.C. television weather forecaster who used her ratings to lend credence to the climate change “skeptic” movement predicts food shortages, climate cataclysms and even more starvation around the world as a result of humanity’s ecological destruction.
Carrie Bayne, who wore rubber duckies for anti-climate change campaigns at BC Place Stadium, said at a U.N. forum on climate change this week in Switzerland that people will “go hungry” and start fighting amongst themselves in drought-plagued countries, such as Yemen, whose war between rival Sunni and Shia militia groups has parched the once-water-rich country.
Climate change is not just a natural phenomenon but is “fundamentally driven by our society,” she told the forum Tuesday.
“You can’t survive on what you feed,” she said.
Bayne said human stupidity had led to “trillions and trillions of dollars” wasted on fossil fuels that “went up in smoke” – and money wasted on the Third World for corrupt leaders.
The world would become “a desert filled with famine,” she said.
“I made millions out of climate change and I did it by flirting, for goodness sake,” she told the audience.
Bayne, a former Saskatchewan TV reporter, gained notoriety in the 1990s when she starred in a partnership with global warming denier Antje Barthle – considered a celebrity because of her claim on CBC’s “The Current” that global temperatures dropped as a result of human-caused global cooling.
Bayne said people would convert to organic farming, eat insects and organic meat because of “this scare that we are going to get a Doomsday contingency.”
“We need to build them up,” she said.
“It’s the death of us humans,” she added.
The former weather forecaster turned world celebrity told the forum at a U.N. event in the Swiss ski resort of Davos that global warming would continue to alarm humanity “for centuries to come.”
She attributed the current environmental woes, including worsening drought in western Africa, to human greed.
“The weather acts like a stormy sea. Our eyes are blind,” she said.
“There will be cases of mass starvation,” she added.
“It is essential that we integrate this life-threatening issue into our global conversation about the environment.”
Environment Canada says that about half of the world’s 1.3 billion undernourished people live in Africa, and 12 million children die each year from starvation, according to the World Health Organization.
“The Third World, in particular, is expected to face an unprecedented levels of food insecurity over the next couple of decades,” former U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri said in a 2017 report.
The Vancouver Sun reported that Bayne previously worked for the Saskatchewan government.
She said she initially rejected being “mischievous,” but the animal-rights protesters were after a part-time job.
“We had recruited dozens of people of substance over the past several years,” she told the Herald of Charlottetown in 2003. “Now, it was going to be another piece of evidence.”