I Talk to the Trees

Remember the song, I Talk to the Trees, sung by Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Waggon? Well, I was talking to a tree earlier - an old oak tree and very chatty it was - and I asked it what it thought of climate change.

 

"Son," it said, "I'm four hundred and sixty-two years old and I've seen it all before."

 

"Really?" I said.

 

"The climate changes," it shrugged its upper branches. "That's just how it is. In the 1970s and 80s we had nothing but droughts, now it rains all the time and no doubt, in another few years time, we'll be back to hosepipe bans again. The only thing that remains constant is change."

 

"But," I stammered," a lot of scientists are telling us that man is making the climate warmer, leading to floods and droughts and all sorts of chaos."

 

The oak barked with laughter. "I have a giant redwood in the family and he tells me his great grandfather told him the climate was much warmer back in his day. That's why the snakes and crocodiles and other cold-blooded reptiles were growing forty or fifty feet long, or more. The extra heat provided them with the energy to grow massive. Why do you think Britain has one snake six inches long and all the hot countries have things ten, twenty and thirty feet long? Even your scientist friends will tell you that. It's all about heat and the energy they get from it. They dug up bones in Columbia from a snake they named 'Titanaboa' that was around 45 feet long, weighed a ton and they reckon some may have grown even larger than that. Imagine how much heat/energy those giants must have needed."

 

"So man is not to blame for climate change, then?" I asked.

 

"Of course not!" The oak exclaimed. "They just use it as an excuse to chop down my friends, turn them into paper and use that to send you bills for CO2 reduction. I know you're only a human, but I would have thought even you would have realised that. This is a planet. The climate changes. Get the hell over it. You humans do make a terrible mess of everything, but on this count, not guilty."

 

Well, that told me. Tomorrow, I am going to strike up a conversation with a patch of nettles. I'm sure I'll get more sense and honesty out of them than I will our lying politicians and assorted other climate change fraudsters.