Is “climate change” real?

Well, yes – to the extent that the climate seems to change a little every day. After that, all bets are off.

Lord only knows how many words have been written about “climate change” over the last decade. Billions for sure.

Initially, we called it “global warming.” But the whole idea of a warming planet never gained much traction. Skeptics reminded us that that global warming “alarmists” had predicted the next ice age in the 1970s. Talk about embarrassing.

But never underestimate the power of a skeptic scorned. Global warming was quickly shelved in favor of a far more inclusive – and delicious – concept: climate change.

Now it doesn’t matter if the earth is warming or cooling [it does both every day], there will always be a crisis somewhere and, thus, always someone to blame [read “regulate”]

The “debate” about whether our planet is warming or cooling or whether, ahem, the climate is “changing,” has become a free for all over the last couple of years, thanks largely to the inconvenient efforts of former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore.

Like him or not, Mr. Gore has turned what ought to be a serious discussion reserved for qualified scientists into a food fight reminiscent of a scene by the same name in the late John Belushi’s iconic Animal House.

One of the latest to enter the fray is an Australian dairy farmer named Leon Ashby. Mr. Ashby gained quite a name for himself his native Australia by pointing out that grazing cattle in that country’s national parks was, at the very lest, removing vegetation that would otherwise only add to the unnatural buildup of biomass, which was fueling increasingly destructive forest and rangeland fires. Sound familiar?

Now Mr. Ashby is out with a Power Point presentation in which he explains why emission trading – what we call carbon credits – isn’t necessary. What is most alarming about this presentation is that it makes good sense, though we hasten to add that common sense is not a descriptor we would use to describe much of the climate change debate.

Mr. Ashby believes – among other things – that the alarms sounding around man-caused climate change [he says global warming] constitutes one of the largest deceptions in mass hysteria ever perpetrated. We agree, but that’s a story for another time.

Meanwhile, click here to run through Mr. Ashby’s Power Point presentation. While you’re at it, give some thought to the latest climate change flap – this one reported earlier this week in the London Telegraph. It seems that hackers have unearthed several hundred e-mails suggesting that climate scientists associated with the prestigious University of East Anglia may be falsifying monitoring data in order to make it appear that the earth’s climate is warming when, in fact, it is actually cooling.

Climate activists have already shifted into damage control mode, but for those who will end up paying for “climate change” legislation the Obama Administration has crafted, this latest episode isn’t least bit amusing – especially the effort to minimize the role vibrant forest plantations could play in sequestering carbon.

Mr. Ashby touches on carbon sequestration in his presentation, and we will have much more to say about it in the weeks to come. 

An Aussie Dairy Farmer Weighs In on Climate Change