The Battle for our Grasslands and Livestock

By Viv Forbes

Grasslands and arable land cover just 10% of Earth’s surface but (with the oceans) they produce all of our food and fibre. But the productivity and health of our grasslands, farms and livestock are under threat from disproportionate global warming alarmism and immoderate green preservationists.

We are afflicted by methane madness. It is poor public policy that condones restrictions on grazing operations, or taxes on grazing animals, based on disputed theories that claim that bodily emissions from farm animals will cause dangerous global warming.

New Zealand was the first country to propose a “livestock fart tax”. Four hundred farmers then drove 20 tractors to the Parliament in Wellington waving placards and banners saying “STOP THE FART TAX”. The proposal was laughed out of Parliament. But the war on farmers and livestock continues

Used by permission. Cartoonist Steve Hunter. www.clexit.net

Ruminants such as sheep, cattle and goats cannot make long-term additions to the gases in the atmosphere - they just recycle atmospheric carbon and nitrogen nutrients in a cycle-of-life that has operated for millennia. Grazing ruminant animals with their emission products have always been part of healthy grasslands.

Many otherwise genuine environmentalists are assisting the destruction of grasslands with their native pastures and endangered grass birds. Blinded by their love for the trees, they neglect the grasses, legumes, herbs and livestock that provide their food. In Australia they pass laws to protect weedy eucalypts invading the grasslands but ignore the valuable and declining Mitchell grass that once dominated Australia’s treeless plains.

Grasslands are also under threat from cultivation for biofuel crops, from subsidised carbon credit forests and from the remorseless encroachment of fire-prone government reserves and pest havens.

We have the modern methane madness. Mobs of grazing ruminants have been roaming the grasslands since cave-man days. Methane has also been seeping from marshes, bubbling out of oceans, leaking from coal seams and oil seeps and being released in huge quantities from volcanoes. So what more can a few domestic cows and sheep do to affect this? Methane from domestic ruminants is a non-problem.

It is a foolish and costly fantasy to believe that Earth’s climate can be controlled by passing laws, imposing taxes, attempting to manipulate the bodily emissions of farm animals or trying to prevent farmers from clearing woody weeds invading their pastures

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Read more:

In pdf format:
http://clexit.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/grasslands.pdf

Or doc format:
http://clexit.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/grasslands.doc

The Clexit (ClimateExit) Coalition, comprising over 190 representatives from 26 countries, has formed the Clexit Grassland Protection Group with nine representatives from five big grazing countries.

 

Rising Seas are Nothing New

by Viv Forbes

 

The most careful analysis of world sea levels suggests they are rising at between zero and 2mm per year. Measurements to this accuracy are questionable as they are complicated by changes in ocean currents and wind direction, and shorelines that may rise and sink.

Sea levels are never still, but with global temperatures flat and snow cover and polar ice steady, sea levels are probably as stable today as they ever get.

Image sourced [here]

However, we still have creative climatists concocting complex computer models that predict dangerously rising seas to justify their goal to ban coastal development and to revive their failing war on carbon.

Alarmists should study earth history.

At the depth of our recent ice age, just 16,000 years ago, a thick sheet of ice covered much of North America and Northern Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So much water was locked up in ice that humans could walk on dry land from London to Paris, from Siberia to Alaska and from New Guinea to Australia. The River Rhine flowed across a broad coastal plain (which is now the North Sea) and met the Atlantic Ocean up between Scotland and Norway.

image sourced [here]

 

 

 

 

There was no Great Barrier Reef as Queensland’s continental shelf was part of the coastal plain, and rivers like the Burdekin met the ocean about 160 km east of its current mouth. Most of its ancestral river channel can still be recognised beneath the Coral Sea.

Then, about 13,000 years ago, with no help from man-made engines burning hydrocarbons, the Earth began warming. This was probably caused by natural cycles affecting our sun and the solar system, aided by volcanic heat along Earth’s Rings of Fire under the oceans.

The great ice sheets melted, sea levels rapidly rose some 130m and coastal settlements and ancient port cities were drowned and are being rediscovered, even today

 

As the oceans warmed, they expelled much of their dissolved load of carbon dioxide. The warm temperatures and extra carbon dioxide plant food caused vigorous plant growth. Permafrost melted, forests colonised the treeless tundra and grasses and herbs covered the great plains. Iceball Earth became the Blue/green planet, supporting a huge increase in plant and animal life.

Without any zoning laws to guide them, our smart ancestors moved ahead of the rising waters and adapted happily to the warmer climate with less snow, more rain, more carbon dioxide plant food and more ice-free land.

This warming phase peaked in the Medieval Warm Era about 1,000 years ago, when sea levels also peaked. They fell during the Little Ice Age, rose slightly during the Modern Warm Era, and are relatively stable now.

Rising seas are never a lethal threat to life on Earth. The danger sign is falling sea levels caused by a return of the great ice sheets. This would quickly put high-latitude farming into the deep freezer, thus creating widespread starvation. Trying to grow crops on emerging salty mudflats in an icy climate will give some future farmers a real climate concern.

And despite World Heritage listing, when the next ice age comes the skeletons of the stranded Great Barrier Reef will become bleached limestone deposits on the coastal plain. The indestructible coral populations will abandon their marooned homes and build new reefs further out under the retreating seas.

Image sourced [here]

For those who would like to read more:

Ice Age Europe
http://donsmaps.com/icemaps.html

Nothing New about Rising sea levels:
http://carbon-sense.com/2013/11/30/nothing-new-about-climate-change/

Sea levels were probably been higher than this during the Medieval Warming, and fell in the Little Ice Age:
http://carbon-sense.com/2013/12/02/endlich-sea-level-claims/

The Buried Burdekin River Channel
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geosciencefacpub/386/

Sea level in the southwest pacific is stable:
http://carbon-sense.com/2010/01/01/south-pacific-sea-level-changes/