Tenant farmers told to not believe the hype, be sceptical on climate change

IT was certainly a speech with a difference.

Over the past 12 months, farmers have been bombarded with rhetoric about their frontline role in the fight against climate change and how their carbon footprint is now the only thing that really matters.

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So when a respected scientist told tenant farmers they were being conned and everything they had heard up to now on climate change was wrong, they sat up and took notice.

Philip Stott is rare thing in that he is a scientist who refuses to buy into the prevailing theory that human carbon dioxide emissions are the main driving force behind climate change.

He ridicules the idea that politicians can control the earth’s climate and says the current global drive to reduce CO2 emissions is not only futile but is diverting attention and resources away from issues that really matter.

During a charismatic speech at the TFA’s annual meeting he pleaded with farmers to remain open-minded on the issue. “Everybody is trying to use global warming for their own ends and beware of politicians trying to bear gifts because they want to use you for their agenda. That could backfire badly for farmers on the ground.”

Prof Stott, emeritus pProfessor of biogeography at the University of London, stressed he was not saying climate change was not happening or even that humans were not playing a part.

He argued, however, that the role played by CO2 emissions in creating a greenhouse effect that traps the sun’s heat above the earth was relatively small.

Prof Stott, who is well known as a media commentator on the environment, featured in a groundbreaking programme on climate change on Channel 4 last Thursday, which brought together scientists who dispute the CO2 theory.

They argued, for example, that while fossil records have shown a correlation between climate and CO2 over time, it is not CO2 that has made the earth hotter but the other way round. Warmer oceans, for example, have produced more CO2, they said.

They put forward the theory that linked climate change to the interaction between the sun’s cosmic rays and water vapour and cloud cover, and produced convincing graphs to demonstrate their theory.

Prof Stott said the planet’s temperature had always fluctuated – in the 1970s the great scare story was the next ice age – and numerous factors together combined to create the variations.

“Climate is governed by everything from the tilt of the earth, to volcanoes, ocean currents, sun spots, cosmic rays, solar sunspots, meteors and reflection from the land. So to put it all down to one factor – human CO2 emissions – is just not credible and the idea that politicians can control the climate is nonsense. It’s Alice in Wonderland stuff.”

Even if CO2 was a major factor in global warming, just ‘tinkering’ with emissions was going to make little difference, he said. It would take ‘massive emission cuts’ to make a real difference, as much as 90 per cent, according to one commentator, he said.

Yet politicians and the media were fully signed up to what was now ‘fundamentally a religion divorced from science’ where opposition was ‘simply not allowed’.

At the farm level, policy was being distorted by the obsession with reducing the industry’s carbon footprint, which was shifting the focus and funds away from research in areas that really counted – including food production and mitigating the impact of climate change. “We need research into new forms of farming help farmers adapt to climate change but all that is seen as secondary,” he said.

The vital debate about energy had also been skewed by the emphasis on CO2 emissions. While local farm renewable initiatives, whether it be biogas or biofuels, were important, large scale biofuel production had environmental downsides and would be divisive for the industry, he said.

“Having ignored them for so long, the Government has decided farming is important because of the climate change rhetoric but it is not for you, it is for the image it gives the public about them,” he said.

On a global level poorer countries were being lectured on energy use by western politicians who did not even live by their own rules, such as climate change campaigner Al Gore, recently exposed for using 12 times the average amount of energy in his own home.

He dismissed the Stern report’s key finding that climate change would cause a 13.8 per cent loss in global income by 2020, claiming this would be compensated for many times over a general increase in wealth.

“We are trying to benefit a rich future generation by taking from a poorer current generation and that does not make sense. We have four billion people in poverty, two billion with dirty water and two billion with no modern energy – we should be trying to solve those problems not a future problem that may never happen,” he said.

Prof Stott remains in a very small minority – 2,500 scientists signed the global Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report backing the CO2 theory in February – and is often attacked for his views.

He counters by saying most scientists are being ‘dragged along by a great story’ and the knowledge they can get funding easily for research in the area, while the media is making the mistake of believing science works by consensus.

“It does not and never has done – remember Galileo. Science progresses by scepticism and paradigm shifts when new theories rise up and displace dominant ones. I think we are at the hysterical peak of the CO2 theory and this paradigm is bound to fail as it predicates it itself on one factor when climate change is a very, very complex thing.

“So my message to you as farmers is to remain sceptical, don’t get drawn in and fight your corner as practical land stewards of this earth.”