Frank Fenner doesn't engage in the skirmishes of the climate wars. To him, the evidence of global warming is in. Our fate is sealed.
"We're going to become extinct," the eminent scientist says. "Whatever we do now is too late."
Fenner is an authority on extinction. The emeritus professor in microbiology at the Australian National University played a leading role in sending one species into oblivion: the variola virus that causes smallpox.
And his work on the myxoma virus suppressed wild rabbit populations on farming land in southeastern Australia in the early 1950s.
He made the comments in an interview at his home in a leafy Canberra suburb. Now 95, he rarely gives interviews. But until recently he went into work each day at the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research, of which he was director from 1967 to 1973.