Thread by @BBQPossum

My farming family and I are fed up with all the 'climate sceptic' letters published in the @farmweekly. I'm a palaeoclimatologist and this week I spoke up. My letter was printed.. it goes like this (thread):

1/ I write to challenge the letters from 'climate sceptics', which regularly appear on these pages. I grew up on my parents farm in south-west WA and now work as a scientist researching Antarctic ice cores.

2/ The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide this week crossed 415 ppm. When I was born the level was 340 ppm. When my great-great grandparents settled on their farm in Walpole it was 300 ppm.

3/ This rate of increase is utterly unprecedented; within the space of a few generations we have pushed CO2 higher than at any time in the past 3 million years. Carbon isotope measurements show that the rapid rise in CO2 is unequivocally due to fossil-fuel burning.

4/ It's well-established physics that more CO2 in the atmosphere means a hotter and more extreme climate. Just this month, new satellite infra-red measurements from NASA confirmed--yet again--that the planet is warming and CO2 is responsible.

5/ To avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, including much more severe droughts and fires and an estimated 9 m of sea level rise (from melt of the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice sheets) we must globally reduce CO2 emissions to around 45% below 2010 levels by 2030.

6/ Coal and oil fueled the industrial revolution of centuries past; renewables, clean-tech and smart farming can fuel a cleaner and brighter future.

7/ Human-caused climate change is real. Letter writes on these pages who disagree are at odds with the huge weight of evidence collected by the likes of the CSIRO, the Australian Antarctic Division and BOM.

8/ Denying climate science is bloody-well foolish; it is a risk to agriculture and an abrogation of our responsibility to future generations.

Joel Pedro
Palaeoclimatologist
Hobart, TAS