by Viv Forbes, winner of the 1986 Australian Adam Smith Award for “outstanding services to the free society”

No one has noticed a looming global warming crisis. Since July, temperatures in Australia have soared by over six degrees centigrade. If current trends continue, we can expect another three degrees of warming by Christmas.

This rapid warming has caused massive environmental disruption — alpine snow has melted, birds are migrating, there is an epidemic of weeds and we can expect more storms, cyclones, floods, mosquitoes and solar radiation burns.

This is far more serious than the UN’s forecast of a piddling 1-2 degrees of warming over the next hundred years or so.

What caused this dangerous new global warming?

The old people called it “summer”.

Summer heat is generated by a slight increase in the solar radiation received at the surface, caused by cyclic changes in the positions of the sun in the sky. It is obvious that longer term solar cycles also dominate the climate. Even The Farmer’s Almanac knew that cycles in moon, planets and sunspots could be used to forecast the weather.

However, since people started to let computers do their thinking, knowledge of climate cycles has been lost. We now let computer nerds and taxaholics tell us that the climate is controlled by minute traces of a harmless invisible natural gas exhaled with every breath, generated in every bushfire and exhausted wherever coal, oil and gas are burned. Some even believe that a tax on carbon dioxide will cool the world.

It’s time we abandoned climate Cassandras with costly computers. There was more sense in The Farmer’s Almanac. And a warming tax on the sun makes as much sense as the Carbon Tax