Bill Maher puts the fate of the Great Barrier Reef in the spotlight – but do the claims stack up? | Temperature Check

The Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has told the US cable host its biggest threat is not the climate crisis, but do his claims stack up?

• Great Barrier Reef's worst bleaching leaves giant coral graveyard: It looks as if it has been carpet bombed'

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.