Changing climate and weather extremes are enduring features of earth's history.
Change is what climate does – floods or droughts, stinking hot or snow storms, hurricanes or doldrums.
The cycles of ice age extinctions and verdant warm eras are well recorded in earth history. Only 17,000 years ago, much of the northern hemisphere was covered in ice and sea levels were 130m lower. Then followed a long warm period with several peaks hotter than today. This time of warm abundance was terminated by a sudden return of the cold.
But good times returned with the Roman Warming. It was not Roman use of coal which caused the warming and no carbon tax triggered the lethal Dark Ages cooling which followed.
Then, with no help from man's carbon dioxide, earth recovered into the Medieval Warming Period but soon slipped back into the bitter Little Ice Age.
Finally, well before man's engines and smelters became numerous, the Modern Warming started.
This warming too will end when the earth, moon, sun and stars command. Taxing carbon to subsidise green playthings will not stop the floods, prevent the snow or change future climate.
Man must do what our ancestors did – adapt or die.
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
