Death stalks on a parched lake shore - Australia

ON THE shores of the beautiful but beleaguered Lake Bonney - where the turtles have started dying as the water retreats, stagnates and grows increasingly salty - live sceptics of man-made climate change.

Robyn O'Dea, who runs the newsagency in Barmera, the South Australian Riverland's town on the edge of the lake, is one.

"I think we are more in a cyclical thing," she says of the conditions that have left the Murray-Darling Basin parched in recent years.
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"We need to get an environmental flow into the lake," Mrs O'Dea says. "All the aquatic life is stressed.

"I am a climate-change sceptic. I believe politicians are brainwashing the public into believing in climate change to shift the blame off of their mismanagement of our water resources. My biggest fear is that the politicians will continue to use climate change as an excuse to not do enough about water over-allocation. The easiest thing will be for them to sacrifice environmental sites across the Murray-Darling Basin."