Extra chairs had to be put our at the Ex-Servicemen's Club on Monday night when more than 60 people turned up to listen to solicitor Jim Main's presentation on climate change.
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The event was organised under the auspices of the Cootamundra Development Corporation.
Late last year, council declined a motion to invite Mr Main to present his talk to a meeting.
The famous case of an increase in ice cream sales being linked with an increase in shark attacks was cited by Cootamundra solicitor and grandfather Jim Main on Monday night in his presentation, entitled "The A+B=C of Climate Change".
Mr Main said one explanation was that ice cream made swimmers taste better for sharks, but the more likely was that more people were eating ice cream and swimming in summer.
"Of course, there's no causal relationship between ice cream sales and shark attacks, but scientists say there is a causal relationship between hotter temperatures and fossil fuel emissions," he said, quoting the Australian Academy of Science: 'The best available evidence indicates that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause of climate change'.
In his Powerpoint presentation, Mr Main showed a series of graphs from scientific bodies such as the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and several others reinforcing the man-made climate change argument.
He emphasised the importance of looking at trends, rather than picking out isolated figures, pointing out that there were no trends in temperature, prevalence of heatwaves, ocean temperature, winter-spring rainfall, bushfire danger, weather-related insurance claims, and greenhouse gas emissions that were not going up, in most cases dramatically in recent decades.
"People come to me and say 'you keep banging on about climate change but don't you realise it's been hotter in the past than it is in the present?'," he said.
"And, well, they're right. If you go back to between 1910 and 1920 Australia's temperature went above the base line for a while, and it did the same a couple of times more.
"But weather goes up and down all the time, and you can't prove anything by the fact that it's hot today or cold today.
"But if you look at the trend, it's going up, and what's more it's during my lifetime that it's done so.
"When I think of one of my grandsons, Charlie, who's 70 years younger than me, if that's the trend over the 70 years of my lifetime what on earth's going to be the trend over the 70 years of his lifetime?.
"When I first started looking at this I thought maybe it's a short-term trend, but a recent study by Bern University has shown it hasn't been anywhere near as hot as this for at least 2,000 years."
"The temperatures go up and down over a long period, but when we hit our modern times it goes up through the roof."
