Last week I went to hear David Bellamy speak at the Beaulieu Estate’s Countryside Education Trust. The title of his talk was ‘Stitching the World Back Together’ and it was a whistle stop tour of various of his activities over the years where he has used botany to repair environmental problems across the globe. There was some interesting stuff such as how to bring land back into use that had been made barren through the felling of trees which had allowed the salt in the ground to rise to the surface (this was on a low lying Atoll in the Indian Ocean).

But after his talk Prof Bellamy provided a question and answer session. This was where things got very ‘interesting’. I had known that he was somewhat outspoken on the subject of climate change but I was amazed at what he came up with. He started by asserting that there was not really a problem at all. The world has actually been cooling down since 1998 according to ‘The Jolly Green Giant’ (the title of his autobiography). In addition, he said, CO2 was not to blame for climate change. CO2 was actually a really good thing. If anything it was water vapour that caused high temperatures. On top of that Polar Bears were not having a hard time – their numbers were increasing rapidly.

Prof Bellamy laid much of the blame for misinformation at the foot of the BBC and while acknowledging that oil would eventually ran out he said that we really shouldn’t take much notice of the merchants of doom who talk of an impending man-made catastrophe.

Although there were some in the audience who were concerned by his approach (one person, a science teacher, asked what message he had for young people as the current curriculum differed somewhat from the world according to Bellamy) most seemed amused and even heartened by what he said. He got quite a laugh when saying that it was cold outside and so whatever happened to the idea of global warming! (Bear in mind this was November in the middle of the New Forest and the air temperature was hovering around zero degrees C).

Now, I’ve always been a supporter of free speech and believe that we should look into all sides of a problem before coming to a conclusion. But the fact is that 99% of the world’s scientific community is agreed on what’s happening and why. There has not been one peer reviewed serious paper that disputes the majority conclusion. The real problem continues to be that we don’t want to believe it and we’ll cling on to any shred of ‘evidence’ that we can use to justify carrying on as before. There’s little enough being done already without the likes of Prof Bellamy bolstering inaction. It’s really not what the planet needs right now is it?