It's always suss when someone pays for an NDA. In this case he paid $375,000 for her silence. Looking at wikipedia he also had rape accusations by two women in the UK that couldn't be proven to the point he could be taken to court and received a two-year suspended jail sentence with a fine of €16.8 million for tax evasion.

Interesting how this stuff largely gets brushed under the carpet.

>We would be in a lot more trouble if the earth was running out of water

Ah but we are... at least the water that matters. The effects of climate change are reducing fresh water supplies significantly and leading to greater pollution of surface water areas. Aquifers in particular are a problem as they are not being refilled at anything like the speed we are depleting them.

You ever heard the fable of "the boy who cried wolf too many times"? It's supposed to be a lesson for children about not claiming something bad is going to happen constantly because people will eventually stop believing you. That's where you and others are when you dismiss climate change. The problem is though that in the end of the story the wolf did come, no-one believed the boy and the wolf ate the boy and all the sheep.

From an adult perspective we can perhaps look at that and understand that believing an individual unreliable source is not a good idea but equally we understand "the sheep" still need guarding as there are wolves out there. If you look at the current evidence such as consistent record temperatures, rapid fluctuations in weather, significantly increased green house gases in the atmosphere (something we understand very well affects temperatures) and all the other known factors then ignoring it now would be the equivalent of dismissing the sound of wolves howling, sheep screaming and a whole group of reliable shepherds saying there really is a wolf this time.

Fables aside previous worries were often theoretical ideas about future events without the weight of long term proof and wide scale scientific consensus behind them. This is simply not the case with anthropogenic climate change as now we have decades of evidence supporting the idea and the scientific consensus is both overwhelming and international. The problem is also much larger than previous issues we've been able to solve without significant disruption as while serious they could be dealt with relatively behind the scenes which may have lulled people into a sense of complacency (Millennium Bug, Ozone Layer etc).