A SCOTTISH aristocrat currently touring Australia has a climate change message not too dissimilar to what many of our farmers have believed for some time –there is no climate change problem and concerns about global warming have been greatly exaggerated.
Lord Christopher Monckton, whose reputation is not as a scientist but as the "high priest of climate scepticism", will speak at a farm lobby-endorsed climate change forum in Canberra next week to explain what he sees as "climate nonsense" and how Australian farmers have been caught up in a major carbon "dodge".
Lord Monckton concedes he has no piece of paper that qualifies him as a climate scientist.
He says he's a classical architect by training, but his experience in policy making for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, assessing scientific scares, gives him credibility.
He's become a very rich man making and selling mathematical puzzles, but for the record it's believed his two-week trip to Australia, largely sponsored by climate sceptics groups in Australia, is earning him a cool $100,000.
His address at the National Press Club next Wednesday is neatly timed to coincide with the reintroduction – for a third time – of the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Speaking to Rural Press ahead of his Canberra talk, Lord Monckton said it was "very clear that we do not have a climate problem".
"This has been made up and then exaggerated beyond all reason by lobby groups and academics anxious to gain wealth and status at the expense of ordinary working people, including farmers," Lord Monckton said.
"In particular, farmers in Australia have good reason to be concerned that a combination of State legislation and Federal Government policy has taken out vast areas of agricultural land and turned them into so-called carbon sinks where the owners of the land are not allowed to use it and because they can't use it they can't sell it either.
"The climate nonsense is an international nonsense. There are politicians, scientists, media people, big businesses and bankers making a lot of money out of peddling the notion – which is false – that adding a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide to a very large atmosphere is somehow going to make a measurable difference to global temperature. It won't."
He said because scientists have made so much money pretending there is a global warming problem "they won't let go".
"I think the scientists who do understand why it is that there isn't a problem are beginning to close in on the scientists that have got away with pretending there is one," Lord Monckton said.
"These scientists on the whole don't get reported in the mainstream media."
Lord Monckton went further, suggesting the media had "overstated the case prodigiously" therefore misleading politicians into thinking global warming is here and it's bad "and we are headed for doom".
He said Australian farmers should reject climate change and related mitigation policies as a "dodge" because farmers land has been "re-designated as unusable carbon sinks in the name of saying that this is going to save the planet".
"It's simply a dodge, negotiated by the previous administration so that Australia could appear to comply with the Kyoto protocol without actually cutting its carbon emissions," Lord Monckton claimed.
Lord Monkton said Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has rainfall statistics for the Murray-Darling Basin going back 100 years and he defies anyone to find "any trend whatsoever up or down" in the rainfall figures over the last 100 years.
"It hasn't changed. We also don't know whether the temperature has changed all that much in the last 100 years because the temperature records have been so much tampered with over the last 100 years," he claimed.
He said Australia's political class as a whole was not well educated scientifically and has not had the time to delve into the science and doesn't know, for example, that there's been no decline in rainfall in the Murray Darling basin.
"Kevin Rudd for instance made a speech the other day in which he said that Australia is the driest and hottest continent in the world. It isn't, actually.
"The driest is Antarctica, and the hottest is Africa.
"I don't just believe a supposed fact because it happens to fit in with whatever point of view I would like to see, I check the fact, and if the fact turns out not to be true then I don't rely on it, and Kevin Rudd needs to learn this trick."
The Government has dismissed Lord Monckton as a climate denier.
* Lord Monckton appears at the National Press Club on Wednesday, February 3, at 3pm. Tickets available by contacting NSW Farmers Association at www.nswfarmers.org.au or (02) 8251 1700.
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