Fairly big changes in our climate in my lifetime

A letter to all farmers and crofters was sent out by RPID informing us of the changes to the conditions to be met with regards to the financial support primary food producers can expect from next year and was reported on in your newspaper.

Much of the changes we can expect are about reducing our carbon footprint and increasing biodiversity.

In the latest edition, you have reported on a new publication from the National Sheep Association – UK Sheep Farming And The Sustainability Agenda – and anyone reading it may be forgiven for thinking it is a report that puts the environment ahead of the sheep that the association represents.

Looking after nature and sequestering carbon in support of some very questionable and incomplete science regarding a climate that has continually evolved over the last 560m years seems to have gathered such momentum as to be hard to stop or even slow.

The cost to the farming sector alone hardly bears thinking about, and as far as I know none of the farming organisations have got a handle on how much money us farmers are paying in order to support a theory that burning fossil fuel is responsible for warming our planet, and disregarding the fact that our climate was warming 200 years before we started burning fossil fuel on a commercial scale around 1860.

The cost of converting an old slurry tanker to be compliant with new regulations is over £10,000 just to give one example of extra costs borne by farmers. Land is being lost due to flooding with Sepa making it virtually impossible to bring this land back into production.

Wetter land is increasing the challenges we have in controlling parasites such as liver fluke, compounded by the medicines we use to control these parasites lacking the ability to be as effective as they were only a few years ago.

What is the ongoing cost in loss of production due to species introduction, lambs lost to sea eagles, crops lost to beaver dam breaches?

There are more examples that quickly come to mind I am sure, but here is the challenge: our farming representatives should come up with a figure in regard to the extra costs our industry will have to bear while still producing the cheapest food in Europe and not passing that cost on to the consumer.

Even if we do achieve net zero, there isn’t a soul on this planet who can definitively say by how much we will reverse global warming, or even if it is achievable at all.

It seems to me that the farming organisations have accepted these theories without question and are willing to see the farmers they serve carry the financial burden of these policies – and not at least wonder if there is even a shadow of a doubt as to whether they stand up to scrutiny or not.

I have spent a considerable amount of time over the last few months studying the evidence, and have finally come up with a paper I am happy with.

The evidence I have found suggests that the climate has always gone through a flux of change, getting both warmer and cooler over the last 560m years, and will continue to do so regardless of man’s interventions – and that the science driving present policy neglects to look at an awful lot of factors that drove these changes before homo sapiens first walked on this planet a mere 200,000 years ago.

I am enclosing a copy of my paper with this letter, but think it doubtful if it can be printed in the pages of The Scottish Farmer due to the fact that the graphs are not my own and I don’t own copyright to them.

The graphs I have used are not unique, but chosen from the myriad similar information available on the internet but the ones used best compliment the evidence I have uncovered.

Hamish Waugh.