Antinuclear

Senator Ludlam said Australia needed to stop giving climate sceptics airtime and just get on with the job of responding to climate change.

He said the weather had become a political actor.

“We are swinging back into an El Niño cycle, this country is going to cook and people are going to die. It will be, I think, much harder to sustain the argument that nothing unusual is going on,” he said.

Senator Ludlam rejected suggestions that he was being alarmist or extremist.

“We are in steep trouble here. I don’t think I am being an extremists in just stating the bleeding obvious. The weather is turning violent on us because we have left this for decades,” he said.

Senator Ludlam, re-elected with an increased vote in a re-run of the West Australian senate election, said the solution, renewable energy, was available, but that Prime Minister Tony Abbott was trying to decapitate the industry.

“That’s why people are responding to the sense of urgency that the Greens bring to the table,” he said.