Blog Posts

Memories of Winter

11/11/2019

It's still raining in Wellington, so here some of my good-weather-shots from last winter...

Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere, and its short-term variation in minutes to weeks. People generally think of weather as the combination of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, visibility, and wind.
Climate, on the other hand, is the weather and its patterns averaged over a period of time, often 30 years or more.
Our climate is changing, more rapidly than ever before in Earth’s history, causing the weather to play up perceptibly.
I saw weather patterns change here in NZ within a decade, which should have taken one or more generations. Warmer winters, wet summers like now, more frequent and more violent storms, even tornadoes, which weren’t really a thing 20 years ago.
I saw the same happening in Europe, with winter weather shifting towards spring and generally being 5 degrees warmer in average, summers getting shorter and hotter and water supply running short, storms becoming more frequently and more violent, hailstones the size of chicken eggs at times. The Golf stream cooling down as it shifts its course due to the Humboldt Stream warming up and causing food shortage for life in the southern Oceans… and so forth…
Yes, climate changes are natural, but they occur in time-frames of one or more generations, as we can see in earth’s history (yeah, you can see climate patterns hundreds of thousands of years backwards in rock and ice cores, like you can see the year rings of a tree). What we see right now is different, the speed of it is different.
I could provide some graphs, but there will be comments stating other graphs – it’s not that hard to draw a line into a diagram and claim it’s true. Some will say NASA is conspiring (reading this on some rather dodgy websites), but hey, NASA also says earth is a globe, the so called flat earth community says that’s also a NASA conspiracy… So, flat or round? If you say “flat”, read no further!
I know, there are some who still believe burning hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal and oil per day, worldwide, has no impact whatsoever – well, go to a populated area, any big city in Europe, and experience some smog first hand, that might change your mind.
Some say, it’s actually volcanoes and other natural phenomena which affect our global climate – Well yes, they do their part. But adding some billions of tonnes of our own CO, CO2, Methane and waste, doesn’t make it any easier for nature to cope, right?
NZ is roughly the size of Italy, but Italy has a population of roughly 60 million, that’s about 55 million people more than NZ. NZ, as the pollution levels in our rivers and lakes clearly show, is no longer this “green clean” country shown in tour guides. In fact, it was never really that green clean, we only were not enough people to mess it up as much as denser populated countries like Italy did.
You don’t need to believe that climate changes, on such frightening levels, are due to us humans polluting our environment happily without thinking of any consequences. But everyone can surely see the landfills grow and smell the traffic in town on a calm warm day. And everyone knows that car exhaust is toxic – it doesn’t get less toxic by floating away on the wind, btw, it just goes somewhere else.
Just think about it, logically and neutrally, who is the one really losing something by people using less petrol? – Right, the fossil fuel industry, nobody else. Actually hundreds of millions on every single day an oil field doesn’t make profit.
And who is the one winning something in that case? – No, not a mysterious “anti-oil-and-pro-climate-hoax-lobby”. It’s us, we are the ones winning! Our local environment, and in the long run the global environment.
Well, the fossil fuel lobby spends a huge amount of money on propaganda. The other side needs propaganda too, and gets some money as well, but only a tiny fraction of what the fossil fuel industry spends. The fossil fuel lobby also retrieves a lot of this money via tax returns from their respective governments (as they actually sell something, they can do this, it's called advertising costs). The other side does not sell anything, so potential donors can only claim a much smaller amount of tax return for donations.
You can’t even begin to compare the moneys each side is actually spending on their propaganda, unless you really believe oil companies actually live on peanuts.
Contrary to common belief (and common propaganda), this climate change movement does not sell anything. So there is no financial gain in it, and most certainly not the amount of gain the fossil fuel industry gains by slowing the development of alternatives down - And when the oil eventually does run out, we still have to find those alternatives. It's not a question of "if", but "when"!
The climate change movement doesn’t sell stuff, they only try to get people to use less petrol and plastics etc. I’ve not once heard something like “ditch your petrol car and buy an electric one”. What I actually hear is “try to drive less” – So I ask you, do you really believe that this climate change movement is an actual business? With not even a fraction of the oil money as a possible profit prospect within the next few decades? Or might there actually be something to it?

Even if we leave the whole climate change thing aside, having a look at the landfills growing visibly, rivers being off limits and air stinking of traffic, shouldn’t that alone make us stop and think and maybe starting to do something about it? Just to have some cleaner, better environment? What would be the harm in that? It doesn’t even cost a cent, actually it saves you money.

Oh, and for all those who still believe everything is sweet. This is a link of an official US government agency, founded in 1970 by Richard Nixon… Well even the Americans start to wonder, obviously, and that means something - Yeah, of course, it’s just one of those thousands of conspiracies, right?

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/weather-climate

Update:
Something I stumbled over just now, have a read through the Stuff article below.
Interesting, a politician first obscuring their level of expertise, “doing a Masters in Science”, 2 years, vs “doing a Master's in Climate Change Science and Policy”, 1 year. True, he mentions both, but why the higher level at all if he isn't really doing that one? The way how this is written is misleading.
He also admits to this being “a hurried effort”, which means, actually he didn't do a proper research, used wrong and outdated figures, and, with that, he distorted the subject quite considerably (some of which he admitted in this article).

Personally, I’m frightened by the expression “a hurried effort”… What else gets done by hurried efforts? Would you like your doctor to do a hurried effort in treating you?

Essentially, at the end of the article:
“His studies were an "earnest attempt" to understand the complex science, he said”, does that mean he actually has not much of a clue of what he was talking about? Also, having a background with the oil industry and running a Law firm around such subjects, seems a conflict of interest in my personal view.

Climate scientist rubbishes his student - Wellington Councillor Sean Rush

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