Sunday 6th December

Another hot humid sweltering weekend. The rains keep trying to arrive, we had a great downpour on Friday, and into Saturday morning, but then it all dried up and we are back to the steamy sauna feeling again.

It’s been a fun week in Honiara. On Wednesday the land owners where SIWA draw the town water supply from decided they needed a SBD$18 million advance on their land fees, well, they did apply for it some time back, and as it hasn’t been forthcoming, they pulled the plug on the water pumps. So Honiara was without water for all of Wednesday, and most of Thursday. It took till Friday for it to reach my house, I was quite pleased it rained Friday evening, I was standing outside in it for a while, getting thoroughly soaked. I get the feeling my neighbours think they have a mad palangi staying next door. The land owners accepted SBD$4,000 on Thursday morning.

Tiff and I have an invite to put a display stand up at the Solomon Island Education Forum on Wednesday, at Heritage Hotel. I’ve got a lot of photos of the last lot of students, Tiff has discs full of photos as well, so we will be able to get them printed up, with a handout to give to anyone interested in training next year. I’ve got the handout written up, it will need to be edited a bit, I sat and just wrote it yesterday, so it is a bit of a mouthful to bite on. I’ll try and get it down to 3 pages, with lots of big headings, and just enough information.

I found that my system isn’t as immune to the bugs here as I’ve been thinking. With the water being flushed through the pipes last week, it obviously disturbed a few things, and I’ve had one of those weekends when I haven’t been far away from the white porcelain telephone. Breakfast this morning came up faster than it went down, same with dinner last night, it’s been fruit juice and boiled water all day today. All that’s left is a bit of a headache now, but it was interesting.

I’d like to give a medal to whoever released all the emails from East Anglia Research Unit. Finally some proof that the data they keep pushing through the IPCC has been altered so much it is worthless. Plus losing all the original data so it is impossible to see where or how they got the results they publish. And Phil Jones resigned. The loony left wing lentil munchers are in damage control saying he was only a minor player, hello? Phil Jones is one of the group of 10 who decide on what goes into the IPCC reports, that isn’t a minor position.

Along with that good news, the big panic over Antarctica melting because there are icebergs drifting up to New Zealand again, the second time in a couple of years. I wish people would put their brains in gear first. If the ice was melting you wouldn’t have icebergs, the ice sheet is growing and calving, which is normal, it can’t sustain the size once it reaches a breaking point, so the edges break off, and go visiting. Beautiful things though, from the pictures in the NZ Herald last week. I wonder how that is going to be addressed at Copenhagen, and if it will be used to rush through more stupid CO2 is poison legislation. You really have to wonder where people went to school, and what they were taught. No CO2, no plants, no plants, no food, no food, hello, where does that leave us?

I’d be happy with CO2 at about 600ppm, plants grow better and faster, and don’t need as much water, and can grow in hotter temperatures.

We’ve got a couple of really busy weeks between now and Christmas, the Post Office job starts next week, the gardens through town need a good trim to cover us for a few weeks over the holidays while the crew have a fortnight away. Thankfully the Commonwealth Avenue job won’t start till next year, we can have everything ready for that though, so it should go smoothly. I’m looking forward to it, a bit of paving work again, more than a bit actually, close to 80 sq metres down the centre. I’ll resize the concept drawing and post it in there next week.

Zoe and Murph, you have snail mail on its way, hopefully it will arrive in the next month. As soon as I can get some scrap cardboard I’ll send the presents to NZ for everyone. Not that anyone is getting much, I’m turning into a miser here, I don’t have much choice, it costs too much for anything other than basic food.

Dave, if you send me US$25, I’ll send you SBD$200 in good notes and coins for your collection if you’re interested, that’s my food money for a week, and cigarettes as well in there. Unless I decide to splurge and get a carton of chocolate milk or a bottle of coke.

Here is the article I managed to have printed in the Solomon Star a couple of weeks back

Climate Change and Hysteria.

The Earth is getting warmer. That is not in dispute. For the last 150 – 200 years since the end of the Little Ice Age approximately 1850 – 1900 the global temperature has risen at 0.7*C per century. This rise has not altered in the long term, there have been fluctuating periods when it has risen faster, and also periods when it has stopped or decreased. These periods follow a 30 year cycle of alternate cooling followed by an equal period of warming.

The first global warming panic was in 1912 when the Washington Post posed these questions: "Is the climate of the world changing? Is it becoming warmer in the polar regions?" On November 2, 1922, the Associated Press reported that "the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the waters too hot." On February 25, 1923, the New York Times concluded that "the Arctic appears to be warming up." On December 21, 1930, the Times noted that "Alpine glaciers are in full retreat." A few months later the New York Times concluded that there was "a radical change in climatic conditions and hitherto unheard of warmth" in Greenland.

After the warm weather of the 1930s gave way to a cooling trend beginning in 1940, the media began speculating on the imminent arrival of a new Ice Age. This culminated in the Global Cooling Ice Age predictions in the 1970’s by the same scientists that are now predicting an overheated world.

The IPCC hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and/or Climate Change is based on a small increase in CO2, and a theoretical amplification of the infra-red spectrum that CO2 absorbs into a runaway global heating effect. So far this remains a hypothesis, the predictions that the IPCC made based on this hypothesis have not eventuated, nor have they been found in the real world outside the computer models that the IPCC base their predictions on.

CO2 is a trace element, it is also one of the most important gases on Earth. Without CO2 plant life would not exist, taken to the natural conclusion, no plant life, no people. Life on Earth is carbon based, we need carbon to make plants grow, they breathe in the atmospheric CO2, utilise the carbon molecule, and breathe out the oxygen into the atmosphere. At present levels of CO2, estimated to be 380 (+/- 5) ppm, plants are still starved of carbon. As a horticulturist I am quite happy working in propagating facilities using 2,400 ppm – 3,000 ppm CO2, which is a common practice in nurseries and propagating facilities worldwide, as plants respond quicker, make faster growth, and require less water at those levels.

Trials have been conducted over many years using CO2 enrichment in food crops, timber crops, pasture, and it has been shown and accepted in peer reviewed trials that minimum levels of CO2 for optimum plant growth and productivity are 600ppm, a level that is slowly being attained.

CO2 as a heat absorber/transmitter. CO2 absorbs infra-red light in 3 very narrow and specific wavelengths, all towards the narrower end of the IR spectrum, taken together they total less than 8% of the total IR wavelength. Adding more CO2 to the existing levels does nothing, there is only so much IR radiation available, and what there is now is being fully absorbed. Water vapour (H2O) absorbs 92% of the remaining IR spectrum and also absorbs IR radiation in the same wavelengths as CO2. Remember that CO2 is less than 0.018% of the atmosphere. The IPCC computer models are designed to treat CO2 as a major multiplier, fortunately their predictions have not proven correct. For every 100,000 molecules in the air, only 38 are CO2.

The North Pole ice sheet will melt and flood the world. The people who came up with this scenario obviously missed school a bit. The Arctic Ice sheet floats in the Arctic Ocean. It is not land based as is Antarctica. We know it floats there because during the height of the Cold War America sent a nuclear submarine under the ice to the North Pole to show Russia that America controlled all the seaways that Russia might consider using. Knowing that all the ice is floating in the sea then leads us to a basic fact of science that has been known for 3,000 years. When an object is placed in water, it displaces a volume of water equal to the density of the object. If all the Artic ice melted, it would not affect sea level anywhere as it is already displacing a volume of water equal to its size now.

If you doubt this, put a large block of ice in a bowl, then fill the bowl to the brim with water and wait for the ice to melt.

But the Antarctic Ice sheet is breaking off. I’d be more concerned if it was shrinking, rather than growing to the extent that it breaks due to the size it reaches. The parts that have broken off the ice sheet are over the sea, and once a certain size is reached the weight of the ice becomes more than the frozen mass can hold, and the sheet breaks. Yes it does cause a large hole, or gap, but this fills as the sheet continues to grow out from Antarctica.

Sea levels are rising and flooding the Pacific Islands. Sea level measurements are not entirely accurate, or rather they have not been reliable for a long time. They can be altered by building subsidence, earthquakes, land subsidence, any number of factors. Since satellite data has been available for the past 20 – 30 years, sea levels have shown a slow rise associated with the gradual return to a warmer Earth from the Little Ice Age. The average sea level rise is 0.07 mm – 3 mm per year, although this also drops an equal amount depending on the effects caused by the ENSO weather pattern.

But Tuvalu is being flooded. A tidal gauge has been used on Tuvalu since 1977, this was replaced in 1999, by a more accurate one. So far the record from Tuvalu is that it is not the tide rising that is causing the damage as sea levels have not risen, and for a considerable period, levels actually fell. Tidal measurements from Tuvalu are now subjected to “smoothing” by the IPCC, and adjusted to match tidal measurements obtained from Hawaii.

Funafuti atoll is made up of 30 islands, islets, and barely above sea level atolls, the main island is 1/3 – ½ covered by a runway, paving, road and housing. When the runway was built during WW2, most of the centre of the island was scooped out for building material, vegetation was removed, and is still being removed as people build houses, the coral reef surrounding Funafuti is slowly being destroyed by sewage, rubbish, leachate from the “borrowpits” and the freshwater under the island is being depleted faster than it can replenish now that the island is paved over. This is not to say that the people of Tuvalu should not receive help, but perhaps it is time to actually consider the actual problems, and fix those, rather than call it global warming.

The Cartarets are another group of islands frequently put into centre stage as being affected by AGW. The Cartaret Group consist of a coral circle which is based on an undersea volcano. The part of the tectonic plate that this volcano sits on is slowly being subsumed by the Pacific plate as it slides over the Indo-Asian plate, we know about the effect this has on the surrounding islands, the Solomons are affected by the earthquakes caused by this movement. The volcano that the Cartarets are on is slowly but surely sinking, and in time will be swallowed back into the earth as the Pacific Plate continues its movement westward. Again, the inhabitants of the Carterets need assistance, but lets acknowledge the true cause of their plight, not some unproven hypothesis.

But the coast is being eroded. Coastal erosion can be caused by many things, not just sea level changes. Clear felling of forests as happens in the Solomons due to short sighted and corrupt business deals will devastate the coral reef around the island from soil, leachate, an increase in freshwater runoff as the forest is no longer slowing and retaining the water, once the coral is dead or dying, it breaks off removing the protection for the island or atoll. Again, consider what is causing the problem, an effect does not mean correlation, removing vegetation as happens with clear felling will slowly but surely deplete the water reservoir under the island by allowing the water to run off the soil instead of soaking through and replenishing the underground storage.

It’s getting hotter. As I stated at the beginning, yes the Earth is getting warmer. For the past 3,000 years (+/- 1,000) the Earth has fluctuated in temperature in a narrow 3*C band. As we recover from the Little Ice Age, we are going to warm up again. It is perfectly natural, and if we take into account the effects caused by ENSO and the Atlantic Mulitidecadal Oscillation we will experience a slow warming up to what the Earth considers to be the right temperature, not what the IPCC considers to be the “right” temperature. Remember that the IPCC decided that 15*C was the “right” temperature, with no scientific or peer accepted basis for this number. If they had chosen 16*C as the “right” figure, we would be trying to heat the earth up, it is just an arbitrary figure, the Earth will continue to do what it wants when it wants.

How much hotter will it get? I can’t say with certainty, but if the past is anything to go by, eventually the Earth will be about 1*C warmer than now. At the present rate of increase of 0.7*C per century, by 2200 it will stabilise, unless there is another ice age. Remember that between 1400 and 1900 the Earth was only 1*C/1.5*C cooler than now, and that was enough difference to create the coldest period in 12,000 years.

If it isn’t CO2, then what is warming the Earth? Go outside in the daytime and look up. All the warmth and light on Earth comes from the Sun. Some of the heat is trapped by what have now been called “Greenhouse” gases, of which water vapour is 97%. Without those gases, Earth would be frozen over. The Sun fluctuates and goes through a series of cycles, of which sunspot occurrence is proving to be of major interest. Lack of sunspots is directly related to periods of cooling as evidenced during the Maunder and Dalton Minimums from 1400 – 1900. It appears that the Sun is now going into a cool phase again, Sunspot Cycle 24 is now 3 years late in starting, and this is showing up as a decline in temperature as measured by the radar satellites now used to measure Earth Temperature.

Since the 1998 Super El Nino which caused a massive increase in global temperature, global temperatures have shown a slow but steady decline, and any increase up to the 1998 event has now been negated by the drop in measured temperature. It is being accepted that the Earth may be entering into another 30 year cooling cycle, which will be more severe than the last 1940 – 1970 period due to the slow start of Sunspot Cycle 24. Should this happen and it is becoming more likely as more and more data is collected and reviewed, the Solomons may become a haven for people escaping the winters in the north and south hemispheres.

What will be the effect of the proposed “cap and trade” and other legislation aimed at curbing CO2 emissions. The first thing that it will do is make Al Gore the richest man in Earths history. The companies set up to manage carbon offsets, trade and emissions are owned by him in partnership with Goldman Sachs and others. But while it may make him rich, it will be of no value as it will destroy the entire western industrial nations. It will be of no help to the Solomon Islands, if anything it will push the Solomon Islands further backward due to the cost of fuel for the existing generators, if we are still able to have them. Solar power and wind generators are fine for small scale village/house use, but for industry or any modern functioning city or country there is not enough ability in both of those methods to provide sufficient constant power.

And all for what in a few years will be recognised as a period of collective hysteria based on faulty computer models that cannot predict the weather in 2 weeks time, let alone predict accurately 100 or 200 years into the future.

I fully support cleaning up our environment, stopping pollution, improving living conditions for people, but doing the right things for the wrong reasons does not make the reasons correct.