Global Warming in a Flat-Earth

Their solution is for everything to cost more so we’ll use less. Big business loves that idea too, which is why corporates love Greens. Politicians say it because it’s an easy way to do nothing whilst looking like they are looking after your best interests. Scientists say it because they need funding. The media says it because they have discovered fear sells papers. Educators say it because it is intellectually trendy. Activists say it because it provides a framework for promoting social issues. Religious Leaders say it because it too is a religion, with heaven/nature, sinners/corporations, judgment day/predictions, prophets and gullible followers who march and offer money. Joe Blow says it because everyone else does. Whenever talk happens money changes hands. Truth is the only casualty.

What we now have is designer climate change. According to sales-hungry media, you are perpetually heading for (and almost at) your country’s very own particular worst nightmare. Australia is warm already, therefore because extra warmth gains little traction, so drought is the scare. NZ, hydropower and tourist dependant , despises lakes getting lower and farm animals poisoning the clean green air. Other countries dread more rainfall - like stronger hurricanes for Florida. Canadians, Russians and northern Europeans worry about cooling from a slower Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream was weakening there would be an expansion of Arctic sea ice into the high North which is inconsistent with warmer oceans and melting Poles. But consistency never was one of the industry’s strong points. Water tables sink lower in Marlborough and Australia, while coastal communities fear rising sea-levels, even though not one ocean can be pointed to currently on the rise. Populations of inland lowlands close to rivers, like the India Ganges basin, worry that the Himalayan glaciers will melt and floods consume all. No one gets left out. Oops - I nearly forgot malaria soon to spread from the tropics. Just how and why malaria would want to spread itself across expanded deserts due to global warming is not explained. A fly in the works is that CO2 enhances agriculture, and any CO2 increase multiplies plant growth. But rest assured a research team is hard on the case and will soon comfort us with how to view CO2 as an agricultural curse.

It is a fundamental scientific error to identify individual weather events like heat waves and droughts as being indicators of global warming. Events as diverse as UK floods, Australian bush fires, the European 2003 heat wave, Atlantic hurricanes, tornados, Australia drought and Asian tsunami have been blamed by top government scientists, including those in NZ, on `global warming'. They even claim that the climate models predict such events. What are these climate models?

So they can’t be blamed for failing to warn, climate models are by definition not weather models. We are talking about tools that even when run backwards cannot predict what weather has been. Nor could the models 20 years ago predict our weather now. Yet every extreme weather event now finds itself incorporated into the climate model of global warming theory, such as the extreme cold of two years ago that swept North America, south-east Europe and Turkey. Cold and warmth, wet and dry, winds and calm, more snow or a humid day, an afternoon breeze or an unusually shaped cloud are all attributed to some imagined warming of the global climate.

Perhaps surprisingly there was no notion of ‘global climate’ before global warming came along. The widespread droughts of 1987/8 gave rise to the Intergovernmental Climate Change Conference in Toronto, out of which came the IPCC. Governments pledged research money to investigate their cause and the gravy train began. Global climate became a concept that could be useful describing global temperature change which needed surveillance. Penalty systems in the form of taxes began to take shape. No one bothered to find out if temperature averages, which are an amalgam of both higher and lower figures, were higher because minimums were not as low, or because maximums were greater. No one bothered to find out if it had all happened before.

No one noticed that 1992 ushered in a cooler year or that November 1931 was extremely hot for North Otago, as was December and the east coast. In that year New South Wales was called the hottest for 51 years. January 1932 saw that drought continuing. In 1933 Dunedin had a heat wave with temperatures of 37degC and Sydney sweltered at 43degC. In December 1934 some NZ districts had temperatures 4degC above the average. January 1935 was called the hottest January ever experienced, as was February and March, with Hawkes Bay the exception. Was this an earlier “greenhouse effect”? There were less cars around then, and less people to burn fossil fuels. And what about other warm years like 1952, and 1971, the latter labelled by Metservice “one of the warmest years on record for NZ”  And how come we have had cooler years since 1998?

Whilst the taxpaying public are underwriting both the research and the remedies, it should not be unreasonable to request that ‘global climate’ is clarified.  What exactly is this global climate that is undergoing, according to some, a temperature rise of 2deg per century? Language rules are set by dictionaries, without which there would be linguistic anarchy. It is perfectly legitimate to refer to one when a word is used as a reason to levy a tax on us.

We know what globe means.

‘Climate’, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Etymylogy derives from klei (to lean) and refers to specific latitude, the lean or curvature of the earth. Klima came to mean region or zone, and then by c.1600 it became “weather associated with that region”. The position on the curve of the Earth dictates the general weather there. Climate is only the specific weather pattern at any particular latitude. No problem there. The climate of Tasmania is similar to that of the South Island’s West Coast, being at the same latitude. The climate at the equator is similar all the way around the earth, and different from that of Alaska.

Because countries sit on different latitudes it is rather difficult to see how planet Earth, otherwise known as the Globe, can have only one describable temperature climate, just so that scientists can justify global warming. A look at the daily newspapers of the world will reveal that on any day some locations are warming and some are cooling, depending on position, season, geological variations and a zillion other reasons, including, if anyone wants to check it out, varying angles at different times to Sun, Moon and planets.

There is a constant amount of water in the world, both in the sea and in the water vapour of the air. A high tide at your beach causes a low tide somewhere else, some places get less rainfall and other places get more. The sea-levels in the Pacific have been dropping for the past 26-years, which includes Tuvalu and which explains why for the past 15-years the tiny island is still there the same as it ever was. The Scottish Highlands are rising due to rebound from the last glaciation - so Scottish tides are receding, whilst sea-levels are rising in south England. In NZ the South Island is going under the waves whilst the North Island is emerging out of them. According to NIWA our glaciers have been advancing since 2003, but elsewhere some are retreating. For a fair picture, Google 'advancing glaciers' and then 'retreating glaciers'.

There is simply no one global climate. Neither do people have one global personality, nor is there global health, global wealth or global happiness. A computer model might just as well speculate that global happiness will rise by a factor of 2 over the next century. Without global climate, there can be no warming of it. By definition, a global climate is only possible if all countries are at the same latitude, meaning Earth would be not a sphere but a plate. Those who subscribe to global warming may not realise they could be the last of the Flat-Earthers.

Ken Ring

www.predictweather.com