‘I’m going to take a moment right now to say a few words about the dearly departed Bramble Cay melomys,’ Stephen Colbert says on The Late Show, acknowledging the small Australian rat which has become the first mammal to be declared extinct because of human-caused climate change. ‘We’re all responsible for climate change, therefore we all killed this animal,' Colbert says. The melomys lived on a small island in the Great Barrier Reef which became inundated with rising sea levels. Colbert's monologue was a response to Donald Trump's appointment of William Happer to head a new panel on climate change. Happer once compared the ‘demonisation’ of carbon dioxide to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany