Bill Maher puts the fate of the Great Barrier Reef in the spotlight – but something’s missing from the soundbites

Bleached and dead coral off Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, which has just been through probably its worst mass coral bleaching event on record. Photograph: David Gray/AFP/Getty Images

Instead of an existential crisis for species worldwide, or threatening to submerge entire Pacific nations and coastal cities where hundreds of millions of people live, or a phenomenon driving unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires, the climate crisis was characterised somewhat differently on the major US cable show Real Time with Bill Maher.

Climate change was “a problem”, the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg told the comedian, but would only shave a few percentage points off global GDP by the end of the century and in any case, he said, by then people would be much richer anyway.