NOT too long ago I spent a month following the annual whale migration up the east coast of Australia. We started from Adelaide in South Australia, through Victoria and New South Wales, on up to the nearly the most northerly tip of Queensland.

Travelling by camper van at every campsite the first thing we and every other camper checked was the latest fire status. Huge moving arm signs everywhere gave the latest up-to-date state of the risk of forest fires. Australians took these warnings very seriously and recent catastrophic events down under show they were right to do so.

The recent fires have already caused nearly thirty human deaths with many more still to be discovered when rescue teams can safely access burnt out houses. Millions of dollars worth of housing stocks, other buildings and infrastructure as well as huge losses on farms need to be added to the cost of the disaster.

Yet many so-called world leaders from Donald Trump upwards are still denying climate change. As with most things our Prime Minister Johnson faces both ways. He says he wants more air travel, more flights from Britain — and leads by example, flying off to the Caribbean for Christmas.

On the other hand he says he is going to reorganise Whitehall to make it tougher on protecting the environment.

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has conceded there were “things I could have handled on the ground much better.” Climate change denier Morrison is deeply involved and committed to the Australian coal industry. Not only does Australia use coal to generate virtually all its electricity but in many years it is the biggest exporter of coal in the world.

Unprecedented temperatures, up to 49.9°C (121.8°F), have led to equally unprecedented fires among the highly inflammable gum and eucalyptus trees that make up so much of Australia’s woodland.

Fires are nothing new in Australia, but they have been growing more intense and becoming more destructive in recent years, a problem that has been made much worse by climate change.

As well as the cost in human lives and disruption of so many people’s lives there has also been a vast destruction of the continent’s varied and, in many cases, unique wildlife.

Australia is a mega-bio-diverse country with between 600,000 to 700,000 species, many of which are not found anywhere else in the world. If they are wiped out here they will be gone for good.

Many species are still to be discovered. For instance among the continent’s 250,000 insect species only about two thirds have been named. Insect species have not been included in any counts of dead animals.

There has been much speculation about just how many animals have died in Australia’s wildfires? One well publicised estimate has suggested that more than a billion animals have been killed. Others have put the number at three quarters or half a billion. Those figures include birds, reptiles, and mammals but not bats, insects and amphibians like the continent’s many frogs.

Even those lower estimates make this one of the largest natural disasters in the history of our globe.

Australia’s best loved animal is the adorable and cuddly little bear that lives high in the eucalyptus trees — the koala. This arboreal life and exclusively eucalyptus diet has made them particularly at threat from the fires. Some 25,000 koalas have died in fires on a single island reserve.

Another animal hit hard is the wombat. Not as loveable as the koala, the small stubby-legged marsupials don’t cope well with heat or stress, and panic at the smell of smoke. They can’t run very fast or far, and are largely at the mercy of the flames.

Some animals, like koalas, wombats and kangaroos, are primarily killed directly by the fires being incinerated in flames or suffocated by smoke. Other species don’t die from the flames or smoke, but instead from the fire’s aftermath.

Smaller mammals and reptiles can escape the blazes by burrowing underground or hiding in rocks — but afterward, there is no food or shelter left. Certain predators such as feral cats and red foxes are drawn to fire sites because they know it brings easy prey.

Neither koalas nor Australia’s many species of kangaroo are in danger of going totally extinct due to the blazes. They are spread out across the country and it is probable that a much reduced population will survive.

Numbers of feral camels, an invasive species that arrived here to provide transport for early settlers have now reached over a million in the wild. They are so hot and thirsty they are invading residential areas in such numbers that amateur shooters have been encouraged to cull them in their thousands.

Other animals that live in niche environments and have smaller populations may have been wiped out entirely; these include the eastern bristlebird, the mountain pygmy possum and the corroboree frog. For each of these small species if its habitat burns, it’s a goner.

It’s not that animals are unprepared for natural disasters. They have been dealing with fires for millennia. Human interference has changed all that. We have fragmented natural environments with cities and residential areas, cleared land for our use, and introduced invasive species making it harder for native species to recolonise after fires.

The most devastating human factor, of course, has been climate change. Australia is experiencing one of its most severe droughts in decades along with record high temperatures. This is the reality of global warming.

The loss of animals can itself destroy some natural habitats, for instance, a rat kangaroo called the potoroo is crucial to keeping forest soil healthy. If potoroos are wiped out by fire, some plant species will be unable to regenerate which in turn could then kill off other species that feed on them.

The latest threat is that when rains eventually fall, they will wash charred debris into rivers, dams and the ocean, killing even more wildlife like the unique duck-billed platypus and even tainting the drinking supplies of major cities, such as Sydney.

Before I started researching this article I thought knew a bit about Australian wildlife. Koalas, wombats, kangaroos, wallabies, platypus, Tasmanian devils and even imported cane toads. Many of them will suffer terribly but there are a number of threatened species that I had never heard of but are almost certain to disappear from our world.

There are fewer than 150 breeding males of the tiny southern corroboree frog. It is just the size of a fingernail.

With only two known populations, the Margaret River burrowing crayfish is highly endangered. There have been no sightings since 1985.

Once plentiful, the phasmid — a stick insect sometimes known as a land lobster — has been under serious threat since 1918 when black rats were introduced. Morning glory, an invasive plant, competes with the land lobster’s only known source of food.

The southern bent-wing bat hides in caves during the daylight hours and hunts after dark. It lives between Victoria and South Australia, right in the worst fire area. The bat has lost 67 per cent of its population in twenty years and is down to around just 40,000 individuals.

Found predominantly darting through the Victorian and Tasmanian scrub, the orange-bellied parrot is highly endangered with fewer than 90 adults left in the wild.

The elusive and mysterious armoured mist frog had not been sighted since 1994. Then in 2008 a tiny population was discovered in fire-prone northern Queensland.

So does it matter if we lose a couple of tiny frogs, a stick insect and a rather pretty parrot? Morrison, Johnson and Trump might not think so, but I do.

I am beginning to think that the real problem is not climate change but those so-called political leaders who are still too stupid to think we need to do anything about it. Perhaps it is them we need to drive into extinction. Unlike the koala or even tiny corroboree frog I am certain they wouldn’t be missed.