Gods of climate change
Released 19 Jan 2011
By Don Nicolson, Federated Farmers President
With deep snow in the USA, parts of Australia awash and mudslides in Brazil, it's unsurprising we're seeing professors of climate change pinning this ‘evidence' on the climate change donkey. But is it? Eighty years ago, the world's worst known natural disaster struck China claiming upwards of 2.5 million lives. Natural disasters are called that because they occur naturally on our dynamic planet. And with a global population over three times higher than in 1931, it's unsurprising natural disasters impact many more people. Any ‘sense' of increasing frequency may simply reflect modern communications. We now know of things in the past we wouldn't have.
While Federated Farmers is talking with our Aussie farming counterparts to see how Kiwi labour could help with recovery, only four years ago, newspapers were reporting "few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier". The drought breaking is now hailed as ‘evidence' of climate change. Talk about a dollar each way.
Our climate is ever changing, which explains the ice-age. Yet 6.8 billion humans harvesting the environment will have an impact, but that impact pales beside geophysics and astrophysics. I'm not arguing against reducing emissions because that's a path to efficiency. But the rigid debate and skewed policies we have ignores the role the free market has and can play. So for those agricultural efficiency ‘deniers', since 1990, Kiwi farmers are producing seven percent more lamb but from 55 percent fewer sheep. Beef volumes are up 23 percent but from 11 percent fewer cattle. Dairy production growth is up some 26 percent per cow since 1990. All from less pastoral land due to urban expansion. But few urban New Zealanders will have heard about these successes. We've done it all without subsidy but Government wants a lot more to feed its growth.
Building a climate of fear is big business, just ask Al Gore, Hollywood producers or those learned professors seeking research grants. The UK's Sunday Times revealed this stunning post last year by a UK Met Office employee, "this will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings". That logic doesn't give me confidence.
Yet the Hartwell Paper does. Published by the London School of Economics and the University of East Anglia, "it is not possible to have a 'climate policy' that has emissions reduction as the all-encompassing and driving goal...The key for completing the job is for policy makers to focus on the first steps, and not on outcome targets or timetables." The Hartwell Paper wants research to unlock cheap, unsubsidised but clean energy. This is about breakthroughs to drive efficient economic development. This will help lift the developing world out of a poverty trap without eating up the planet in the process. It's a highly positive view of the future I support as it's about solutions. So instead of lining the pockets of largely foreign owned forestry companies, why aren't we putting the billon dollars earmarked in the Budget for the ETS, into international collaborative research instead? That could massively help produce more food in a world, where one in six people live in food poverty.
Or are we just going to tell the world ‘let them eat trees'. I just hope it's not Time to Eat the Dog, the published ‘sustainable' nirvana of two non-pet-owning Victoria University professors.
