Climate campaigner's road from 'raving idiot' to Australian of the year

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2007

SYDNEY (AFP) — Australian scientist Tim Flannery grew used to receiving quizzical looks in the 1990s as he pounded the corridors of power in Canberra urging politicians to do something about climate change.

"You'd go and see a federal minister and they'd stare at you like you were a raving idiot," Flannery says of his early lobbying efforts.

"You could see them thinking 'what's this guy spouting on about?'.

"That only changed recently."

A shift in the Australian public's attitude towards climate change, brought about in no small part by Flannery himself, means politicans are now far less dismissive of the scientist-turned-environmental campaigner.

The extent to which the views that Flannery's critics once derided as fringe nonsense have...