Our arse is grass

When I was a kid I remember reading a book by that grumpy climate change 'denier' Nigel Calder which included an insight that struck me as being quite clever at the time

Calder argued that if you were viewing the Earth from space the dominant life form on our planet would appear to be grass

Rice, wheat, corn, it’s all grass

And that grass is so fiendishly clever it has contrived to enslave billions of the most sentient creatures on this planet into its service




Humanity has torn down woodlands, scoured the earth for natural resources and utilised some its most advanced science in the service of its insatiable Green Master

And it would be fair to say that our continued existence is a lot more dependent on grass than the level of reliance grass is placing upon us

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The reason why we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved in this way is that, with the exception of a few perverse loners who like hanging around hydrothermal vents, all living things on this planet are solar powered

Grass rules because grass enables us to eat starlight

Grass also enables us to eat oil

Humanity has come up with some fabulously elaborate and energy-inefficient ways of turning oil into grass

But oil itself is nothing more than stored sunlight (assuming you believe all that stuff about oil being fossilised fish goo) so the 'all living things are solar powered' generalisation stands

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I am a geological sciences graduate and old enough to have studied the subject before it became heavily politicised

And back then, as a general rule of thumb, one of the conclusions you could draw from studying past epochs was that…

Warm Global Climate = Good

Cold Global Climate = Not so good

which is one of the reasons why I am one of those people who blows off the Man Made Global Warming thing. Historically speaking, a little warmer has generally been better for living things than a little cooler and, given that the Earth doesn't keep a rigidly constant temperature anyway, I'd personally rather be alive during one of the upswings than one of the downswings

I'm also one of those climate change 'deniers' who places more store in trivial stuff like how far our planet is away from the Sun, or how active the Sun is at any given point in time, as being just a teensy wee bit more important than the Man Made Global Warming Lobby currently gives it credit for

And, as it happens, it's a lot easier for a beautifully self-balancing system such as our Earth to shed and deal with a little excess solar radiation than to try and whisk up some extra heat if the Sun cools off a bit

With all that in mind, and with the knowledge that low Sun spot activity can be directly correlated with a cold global climate, pictures like this taken of the Sun today concern me in a way that no amount of the global warming poop we've been subjected to thus far ever could...

A spot free Sun - maybe some other stars will go out with it now

Of course, the most reliable way to find out what the global climate is going to be like in five or ten years time would be to phone up a bookmakers and ask for some odds. Unlike lobbyists, scientific or political, bookies only make money when they get things right


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