It's easy to go stir crazy in the office, so yesterday I joined 350 odd people attending the 2008 Sentry Conference where FW was the media partner. A big pat on the back to David Richardson and his Sentry colleagues for organising another impressive event and for being courageous enough to put a global warming dissenter on the speaker platform.
We were treated to a feast of ideas and theories on the theme: matching the food, energy and environmental challenge. The highlight for me was the fiesty presentation given by Philip Stott from the University of London. Philip is a professor of biogeography - he looks at how plants and animals respond to climate change, shifting continents and humans. You may have heard him on the radio for the BBC on the Jeremy Vine show and the weekly environment programme, Home Planet. He's one of those speakers who uses no notes, speaks at a rate of knots, marches up and down the stage, waves his arms about a lot and makes alarming statements that you're stilll thinking about days later. I can't imagine anyone ever sleeping through his lectures.
Anyway, his main point yesterday was that global warming and climate change were not the same thing and that the former was invented by politicians, namely Margaret Thatcher in the eighties, to suit their own agenda. Farmers, he said, should beware of taking global warming too seriously. He also argued that whatever we do here ion climate change will have no effect whatsoever because the UK is such a small energy player and the climate has been flipping between hot and cold, dry and wet since an archetypal Nigella Lawson stirred the primordial soup 4.6 billion years ago. If climate stopped changing, it would be truly interesting.
And another inconvenient truth, according to Philip Stott, is that we cannot manage the climate predictably by fiddling at the margins. Climate, he said, is like "Glasgow on a Saturday night - a wee bit chaotic. So, when you are next exhorted to wear hemp underpants to save the planet, remember King Canute and take a wee dram of common sense."
The audience was riveted but many didn't quite know what to make of the flamboyant Professor. There was an irony in his message given that the opening speaker to the conference, Professor Robert Thompson, from Illinois University USA, had struggled to get there because he said he'd been the victim of global warming himself. Freak tornedoes had gripped many US states, killing dozens and grounding most transatlantic flights. Undaunted, the organisers pulled off a live link up with Professor Thompson's own web cam straight into the Chilford Hall conference centre in Linton, Cambs. The poor guy may have had to get up in the middle of the night to deliver his speech, but it was worth it.
His main message was:
* We will need to triple or double production to meet global food needs
* 40% of the earth's land is not suitable for agricultural production
* That we must invest in scientific and technological research to learn how to improve production and land use quickly
* World food demand could double by 2050
In conclusion, he warned it could be immoral to burn food for fuel by the middle of this century if we are struggling to improve production. If you want to hear more from Professor Thompson, look out for him at the NFU conference next week. He is definitely worth a listen.