Every time I hear the words "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" I feel like pulling out all my hair and screaming like a banshee. The scare tactics, the hype, the lies that are being told and the sheer lack of reasoned thought makes me want to spit chips and bang heads together. I am even more furious because our duplicitous Prime Minister is using the GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE lie to raise taxes, increase prices and generally do everything that she can to make the lives of the common Australian people as miserable as she can.
Don't get me wrong. I do not believe in the wholesale, unregulated pollution of our wonderful planet. I don't agree with discharging sewerage into our waterways and oceans, raping the seas of every fish that ever lived, throwing filth into our skies so that the air we breathe is toxic, or cutting down our rain forests, destroying natural habitats and stripping the earth of all its resources. Such activities are the way to disaster. However, all the above abuses can be corrected by careful management and long term planning, so that the needs of the people living on this planet now are balanced with the needs of every other living creature and our future potential. No one has the right to destroy the property of another and that includes Big Business and their seizing the rights of the poorer nations.
However blaming everything on global warming and climate change and using these unproven theories as the excuse to levee unfair taxes and introduce draconian legislation is beyond hypocritical and could well have results that our current short sighted politicians are incapable of imagining.
Climate Change is and has always been a part of Earth's history. During the age of the dinosaurs not only were the continents as we know them non-existent, but the climate was so warm that there were no polar caps. A few million years later we had the ice ages when ice sheets covered a large percentage of the Earth and since then we have alternated between warm and cold phases. Over the 10,000 years or so our climate has been pretty stable. However, technically speaking we are still coming out of our last ice age and so it stands to reason that the world should get warmer, However, we are just as likely to get colder as the world sinks into another ice age, or our climate can just continue on doing what its been doing for the last few thousand years. The scientists have absolutely no idea which of the above three scenarios will govern our lives for the future and all three possibilities have been put forward as fact over the last twenty years.
The trouble is that with our current level of technology - with all the satellites scanning and probing every little part of the earth - we are aware of things that our great great great grandfathers had no idea about. Can anyone say for certain that the ice caps don't melt on a regular basis? Three hundred years ago the only people who would be aware of melting ice caps would be the polar bears and the eskimos. I doubt that anyone else would have had a clue and wouldn't have cared less if they did.
It seems like there is always something that the media and the scientists use as bogey men to scare us.
Remember the crown of thorns starfish that was going to destroy the Great Barrier Reef in the sixties and seventies? Well the Reef is still there and I haven't heard mention of the crown of thorns starfish for a number of years. Apparently the starfish invasions are part of the natural working of the reef - something like locusts which plague the farmers when the conditions are right. Many scientists received a lot of money to deal with the starfish - just as there is a lot of money flowing into the Climate Change Scientists pockets.
Remember the Millennium bug which was going to destroy the world when the computer clocks turned over on midnight 2000? What a laugh that was - but the fear tactics and the media beat up was very real. I remember my daughter chatting with a girl in America who was sitting in her family cellar, surrounded by provisions, waiting for the world to end. When my daughter told her it was already 2000 in Australia and all was well, the girl refused to believe her.
I see the Climate Change scare tactics in exactly the same light as I view the Millennium Bug hype. Certain scientists have a vested interest in maintaining the myth and politicians are happy to oblige especially if they can use those scientists to justify their money grabbing taxation. How much money raised by this tax will actually go to cleaning up our environment and how much is going to go into consolidated revenue to make up the short falls caused by the selling off of our assets to foreigners? That is another annoying gripe.
Our lovely Earth does not remain static. Changes have occurred within recorded memory. Troy was once a coastal town, now it is inland. Pergamum was also a sea town. Now it is surrounded by fields. Travel anywhere in the world and you will find towns which were once by the sea that are now inland - sometimes miles inland- or were once inland but have now fallen into the sea or are in danger of doing so.
There is a theory that the Indians who created the Nasca Lines in Peru left the area because of drought, that the Anastasi Indians of Northern Arizona also abandoned their cliff dwellings because the climate changed. All over the world there is evidence of cultures which abandoned a region because of climate change. Why are we so surprised that such events can and probably will occur again?
Climate change has everything to do with the orbit of the Earth around the sun - it is an elliptical orbit not a circular one - sometimes it is closer to the sun and sometimes it is further away. Climate change has everything to do with the rotation of the Earth on its axis - it wobbles, so different parts of the Earth is closer or further away depending on that wobble. Climate Change has everything to do with the action of the moon on Earths gravity and it especially has everything to do with the Sun and its chemical behaviour - sunspots, solar winds and other phenomena. I doubt it has anything whatsoever to do with the carbon emissions of 22 million people who live in Australia.
Our Prime Minister says that Australians have the highest carbon per capita usage of any country in the world. I have no doubt that this is true. However, she doesn't take into account the fact that Australia does not have a large peasant population or a large destitute population - unlike so many other unfortunate countries. So it is logical to presume that more people in Australia can afford such things as technology, cars, air conditioners etc. At least we could before the Government decided to make sure we couldn't. Of course our Politicians - with their newly increased salary - will still be able to live in comfort even if those on far lesser salaries have to return to the dark ages to survive.
Another thing that is not mentioned too often is that a lot of the carbon we are talking about is actually carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide only makes up about 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere. It is the substance plants use to make oxygen. The more trees there are, the more carbon dioxide can be turned into oxygen. Carbon dioxide can also be metabolised by algae in the oceans, which in turn feeds plankton and is the bottom of the sea food chain which eventually leads to the whales and sharks. Planting two trees for every tree felled would be a good start to solving the carbon dioxide problem. Oh wait. How many acres of rainforest are we losing every minute from around the world? We don't need a tax - we need more trees and less world wide criminal destruction of our natural resources.
Another thought occurs to me as well. We also breathe out carbon dioxide. So I guess our Government has finally found a way to tax the very air we breathe. I always knew they would find a way to do it eventually.
I do hope reason prevails and this whole Climate Change hype is finally acknowledged to be the great lie that it is and the Government finally agrees that this proposed tax is nothing more than extortion.
