At almost every farmers’ meeting that I go to, opinions that could be described as climate change sceptic are expressed.

Sometimes it isn’t during the meeting, it’s afterwards, when the cup of tea is being shared.

It’s something that fascinates me, because I don’t know how anyone who works outdoors and whose work is weather and climate dependent can deny that our weather has changed significantly.

I’m going to try to work through this step by step, because there is a lot of fog within the debate. Bear with me please, some of this may sound obvious.

Climate and weather are different things

What is the difference between climate and weather? Our weather is what we are experiencing in terms of atmospheric conditions at any given time. It’s the temperature, precipitation, sunshine, humidity and wind.

We report back on weather over the past day and look at months and years in relation to recent comparisons. In the same way, we forecast the weather hours, days and weeks ahead.

Climate, on the other hand, is the average weather conditions over a longer period of time. When we talk of climate trends, a year is the standard term of reference. And climate is looked at both locally and globally, whereas weather is localised.

For instance, the weather I experience on the sunny side of the Blackstairs Mountains is unique. While only 800m high, Mount Leinster dominates the local weather patterns as it dominates the landscape.

With the prevailing winds coming from the southwest, the mountains often keep rain at bay or divert it north or south. Unfortunately, over the last two years, it has felt that we have got every shower going, with weather often swirling into the southeast from the Irish Sea.

Is that changed pattern due to a change in climate or simply the vagaries that we should expect within the range of weather typical for this little corner of the planet? The answer is probably the latter, in that two years is too small a range to assess from.

The evidence that climate change is occurring is overwhelming

It’s hard as farmers to stand back from whether we have had a couple of late springs or difficult harvests, but we must to properly consider climate change.

When we look at the global climate, it becomes apparent that something is happening over the last century. The planet is heating up. Average global temperatures are at their highest since records began. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year since 1850. In fact, the hottest 10 years have all been in the last decade since 2014.

The second thing is the rate at which the planet is heating up. 2023 was 1.8 degrees Celsius hotter than the average for the 20th century. Something is definitely going on. But why do people think human activity is having an impact? Is the climate not constantly moving in one direction or the other?

After all, we know there have been ice ages through the planet’s history. This is the area of debate I most often hear among farmers.

Sure, the climate might be changing, but that’s just nature in operation. People will talk about the volcanic eruption on Krakatoa and how that affected the global climate - I’m afraid I can’t go along with that.

The evidence that climate change is significantly man-made is overwhelming

The global human population hit one billion people in 1800. It was well into the 20th century before that doubled to two billion - 1927 is the year it’s estimated we passed that benchmark.

That’s essentially the journey from Father Murphy and Robert Emmett to Charles Lindbergh and “talkie” movies.

It’s astonishing that the population doubled in such a relatively short time, but we had developments in medicine and healthcare, in living standards, and in agriculture and food production.

Since then, the global population has increased fourfold, to over eight billion. That’s an extra six billion people in 97 years, which is staggering if you stop to think about it.

And for those of us in the developed world, our living standards are higher than any generation that came before.

We’ve gone from outside toilets and hauling water in buckets from springs and hand pumps to a world where what was luxury in Victorian times is now considered essential.

That is rapid change in the context of the evolution of mankind and the planet we live on.

Consider the bare facts. The universe is over 13 billion years old - that’s five trillion days. The earth itself is 4.54 billion years old, which is 1,657,100,000,000 days (not counting leap year days, you can add them in yourself if you are so motivated).

Humanoids first appeared about one and a half million years ago, but homo sapiens (us) only came on the scene 200,000 years ago. So mankind has only been on the planet for 0.0044% of its existence.

In contrast, plants have been growing on land for 700 million years, dying, decaying and being absorbed into the earth. Over time, they have been converted into carbon forms.

The age of the carbon deposit and the level of compression determines what form that takes. It could be coal or oil or gas or even diamonds.

People started using coal a few thousand years ago, but we only started consuming significant amounts during the industrial revolution. Oil exploration is little more than a century old; there were only 8,000 registered cars in the United States in 1900.

The truth is that we have extracted about one and a half trillion tonnes of CO2 from the earth since 1750. And that 1,500,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 has been released into the atmosphere in only a few generations. It’s a tonne for every day of the earth’s existence.

Meanwhile, over the last thousand years, we have harvested vast tracts of forests, sometimes for timber for all its uses, sometimes to clear land for agriculture.

So mankind has released masses of carbon into the atmosphere, while simultaneously removing a high proportion of the most effective natural carbon absorption system the planet possesses.

Taking all that into account, is it any wonder that the level of carbon in the atmosphere has steadily increased?

In the thousand years prior to the industrial revolution, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was pretty consistent at 280 parts per million (ppm). It has steadily risen since then and now stands at 420ppm.

That’s a 50% increase, one which aligns with the carbon release from mankind’s fossil fuel use. This is warming the planet and it’s warming it quickly. Again, this effect is in line with the predictions from the vast majority of scientists working in this field.

So climate change is real and climate change is man-made.

Not everyone agrees

While the scientific consensus is so broad as to be overwhelming, there are many who hold a different point of view.

The climate-sceptic community varies from people who reject the science completely - called climate deniers, to those who have doubts, the climate sceptics.

One big mistake some climate activists make is to ascribe all climate scepticism as cynical, self-serving or extremely stupid. That is not helpful, it only widens the divide. Some people are undoubtedly cynical and self-serving, but many are sincere in their beliefs and their doubts.

For some people, their religious beliefs strongly clash with the science around climate change. For instance, people who believe in the Bible as a literal text hold the universe to be no more than 6,000 years old.

It’s very hard to reconcile the timelines of evolutionary science with that. And once a person has rejected the timelines as impossible, then they are going to find it hard to accept the rest of the science.

Appalling vista

In 1980, six Irishmen serving prison sentences in England brought civil proceedings against West Midlands police. They contended their signed confessions for IRA pub bombings in Birmingham in 1974 had been beaten out of them.

Lord Justice Denning dismissed their appeal on the grounds that if they were telling the truth, “it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous”.

Denning described this as an “appalling vista” which could not be countenanced. The Birmingham Six eventually saw their convictions overturned, but it took until 1991.

The “appalling vista” phrase has always stuck with me. Lord Denning was a highly intelligent man, but he allowed his fear of the implications of police corruption to blind him from the truth in this instance.

Why am I bringing that up here? I believe a lot of climate scepticism is because of the implications of accepting that the climate is changing due to human activity. The road ahead for all of us suddenly gets a lot narrower and more uphill.

We may have to give up some of the trappings of modern life, cut our cloth to suit. For instance, there are obvious implications for flying, but food production is also being affected, particularly the production of nitrogen fertiliser.

It’s easier to think we can keep going as we are. I find a lot of farmers have this mindset. The problem is that if climate change is real and we refuse to try to minimise it, the planet becomes a much more hostile place, not just for humanity, but for most of the species we share it with.

Fatalism will indeed be fatal

There is a first cousin to the appalling vista mentality. That’s the “sure nothing we can do will make a damn of difference” mentality. This one points out that while China are busy building new coal plants, nothing an individual can do will have any impact.

And in the macro sense, this is true. But as the old saying goes, you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.

It’s true that we can’t do anything about what happens in other parts of the world, but all we can do is do our bit and hope more people start to see climate change as real and as worth tackling.

And if you feel that way, and you’re a farmer, I have good news. There is plenty you can do to play your part.

Farming can help combat climate change

As farmers, we are at the coalface of climate mitigation. Collectively, we are responsible for vast tracts of land, a little each. We can do a lot of little things that will help - and we should.

What we should not do is apologise for food production. It’s essential for humanity and that includes livestock production.

There may be a future where we no longer farm animals, but it’s down the road a little. For now, we need milk and meat protein.

And, yes, many mistakes have been made in the past in terms of how we produce food. It’s a little unfair to blame individual farmers for faithfully following the advice they were given.

But the past is the past and we have to turn the page. For me, that means accepting the daunting reality of climate change and then doing what I can in my little patch to combat it, both in terms of mitigation-reducing the carbon footprint of the farm, and adaptation, farming in this changed climate, which has changed the weather.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but when was farming ever easy?