Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: africa, climate change, climate change madness, global starving, global warming, world hunger
Eco-Colonialism Degrades Africa
By Paul Dreissen and Willie Soon
Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of Earth’s most impoverished regions. Over 90% of its people still lack electricity, running water, proper sanitation and decent housing. Malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and intestinal diseases kill millions every year. Life expectancy is appalling, and falling. And yet UN officials, European politicians, environmentalist groups and even African authorities insist that global warming is the gravest threat facing the continent. They claim there is no longer any debate over human-caused global warming – but ignore thousands of scientists who say human CO2 emissions are not the primary cause of climate changes, there is no evidence that future warming will be catastrophic, and computer models do not provide valid projections or “scenarios” for the future.
Warming alarmists use the “specter of climate change” to justify inhumane policies and shift the blame for problems that could be solved with the very technologies they oppose. Past colonialism sought to develop mining, forestry and agriculture, and bring better government and healthcare practices to Africa. Eco-colonialism keeps Africans “traditional” and “indigenous”, by insisting that modern technologies are harmful and not “sustainable” in Africa.
Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity could power homes, offices, factories, schools and hospitals, create jobs, bring clean running water, and generate health and prosperity. But Rainforest Action Network and other pressure groups oppose coal and natural gas electricity generation on the grounds of climate change, and hydroelectric and nuclear power for other ideological reasons. They promote wind turbines and solar panels that provide electricity unreliably and in amounts too small to meet any but the most rudimentary needs.
Biotechnology could produce bumper crops that overcome droughts, floods, insects, viruses, and even global warming and cooling. But Greenpeace and Sierra Club oppose this precision hybrid-making technology, and instead promote land and labor-intensive subsistence farming. DDT and insecticides could slash malaria rates that al Gore and other climate alarmists falsely claim are rising because of global warming. But Pesticide Action Network and other activists stridently oppose their use, and the European Parliament recently imposed new pesticide restrictions that will further restrict African access to life-saving chemicals.
So this is where radical climate change alarmism has taken us. When the health of Planet Earth is at stake, human life means little – even if the “disaster” are nothing more than worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models, headline writers, Hollywood, and professional doomsayers like Gore, Hansen and NOAA alarmist-in-chief Susan Solomon.
“Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned,” British arch-environmentalist George Monbiot lectured readers of The Guardian, in a typically hysteria-laced column. One has to wonder if he would apply the same standard to eco-colonialist executives who continue to perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death in the name of preventing “global warming disasters” that fewer and fewer respectable scientists still believe are caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s time to address Africa�s real problems and replace lethal eco-colonialism with fact-based science and humane public policies. Read more here.
Posted by honestclimate in sunspots.
Tags: climate change, global warming, solar, sun, sunspots, wikipedia
Shock, horror as Wikipedia turns Denier!
By the blogowner, honestclimate, February 15, 2009
A climate realist article from Wikipedia on the sun
Here are some excepts:
Energy from the Sun, in the form of sunlight, supports almost all life on Earth via photosynthesis,[10] and drives the Earth’s climate and weather.
and reading further along..
The solar cycle has a great influence on space weather, and is a significant influence on the Earth’s climate since luminosity has a direct relationship with magnetic activity. Solar activity minima tend to be correlated with colder temperatures, and longer than average solar cycles tend to be correlated with hotter temperatures. In the 17th century, the solar cycle appears to have stopped entirely for several decades; very few sunspots were observed during this period. During this era, which is known as the Maunder minimum or Little Ice Age, Europe experienced very cold temperatures.[58] Earlier extended minima have been discovered through analysis of tree rings and also appear to have coincided with lower-than-average global temperatures.
The sun, a major driver of the earth’s climate? Surely not!
Wikipedia, you Climate Heretic/Holocaust Denier/Clearly in the pay of Big Oil!
Read the full article here, but be quick, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it gets changed.
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming
Worse for the model, that is
By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, February 15, 2009
This Daily Telegraph headline isn’t quite worded right:
Climate change ‘worse than predicted’
Check the text:
IT seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist says… “We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected,” said Chris Field, who was a coordinating lead author of the report.
Actually, what’s been “worse than expected” has been not “climate change” but the growth in man-made emissions. But here’s the curious thing: despite that unexpectedly high growth, temperatures have unexpectedly not budged for a decade.
Which suggests that “climate change’’ itself is not worse than expected, but less – if global warming theory is true.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/worse_for_the_model_that_is
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Will Alexander
THE JOSEPH EFFECT
Professor Will Alexander
By Professor Will Alexander
Via email, February 12, 2009
My apologies for burdening you with all these memos in quick succession. It is essential that they be circulated ahead of the Midrand Summit on climate change. Otherwise the South African authorities, particularly the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and the Water Research Commission are going to make fools of themselves if they publicly support climate alarmism during the summit proceedings.
The same applies internationally in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference of the parties in December. The Internet is swarming with anti-global warming material. This climate change bubble must burst for the simple reason that it is based on deeply faulted science as these memos demonstrate.
Please circulate.
PS A man drowned in Alexandra Township on Tuesday after being washed away by another flash flood. Does anybody care?
Memo 11/09
Climate change – the Joseph Effect
Thursday 12 February 2009
Behold, there came seven years of great plenty throughout the land of Egypt – and there shall arise after them seven years of famine. Genesis, 41, 29-30
Empty Beervlei Dam during a drought
The ancient Egyptians were entirely at the mercy of the variable flows in the Nile River. They started measuring the annual maximum water levels some 5000 years ago. By the time the that Joseph arrived on the scene (circa 1400 BC) it must have been clear that there were unusual alternating sequences of above and below average flows in the river. This was the basis of his prophecy that is quoted in both the Old Testament and the Koran.
You would have thought that by now we should be able to quantify these regular above and below average sequences in our rivers. They are critically important for water resource development and operation. This has not happened. Why?
We have to go back to the basics. We all know what a flood is but what about a drought?
Just as a tunnel is not a structure (it is an empty hole) a drought is a non-event (it is the absence of something). There are other difficulties when trying to formulate the definition of a drought.
How can we measure degrees of absence of something? Only by introducing the dimension of time.
If it has been absent for a long time it is more severe than if it has been absent for a short time.
But then it may not have been altogether absent. Is being altogether absent for a short time more severe than been partially absent for a long time? The answer to this question depends on the application, which in turn depends on the storage in the system. Users of water from a storage dam may not to notice a short, severe drought, but a subsistence farmer in the catchment may go bankrupt. A commercial farmer in the catchment may survive because he has stored money in the bank to accommodate such an eventuality.
Therefore the key to surviving a variable process is storage – either storage of water in a dam, or storage of lucerne in a barn, or storage of money in a bank. But how much storage is required to accommodate variable conditions? This depends on the severity-duration relationship of the process.
The analytical methodology required for determining the severity-duration relationship, is three-dimensional time series analysis.
With the above in mind, what do climate change scientists mean when they predict that global-warming will increase the severity of droughts? Most importantly, do they understand how these issues are addressed and solved in South Africa and elsewhere in the world?
How can climate change scientists, who generally have minimal experience in numerical and statistical methods, proclaim that global-warming will result in an increase in the frequency of damaging droughts? The detection of changes, should they occur, will involve the application of complex analytical procedures and additional decades of observations.
Water resource analyses
In the past, the universal approach to water resource development from rivers was along the following lines. If a long record was available at or near the site, and the expected demand for (say) the next 30 years was known, it was a simple exercise.
All that the analyst had to do was to assume that the dam was built at the beginning of the record and determine the minimum storage capacity required to maintain the demand without interruption throughout the period of record.
It worked well. However, as the demands grew relative to the natural flows, the system started failing. Restrictions had to be imposed as the storage in the dams decreased to unexpectedly low levels.
It was soon realised that it was the unusual sequences of below average river flow i.e. droughts that were the cause of the problem. Instead of going back to the drawing board, stochastic hydrologists tried to quantify these sequences mathematically. They failed to appreciate that mathematics is poor exploratory tool. How can you define a drought mathematically?
The Joseph effect
For more than 40 years international hydrologists struggled with this problem. They called this anomaly the Joseph Effect. Unfortunately they did not follow Joseph’s example. They should have searched for regular sequences in the data in the first instance. Only after they had identified them, should they have described them mathematically.
I have struggled with this problem ever since my technical report Long-range prediction of river flow was published by the Department of Water Affairs in 1978. I reported that there was a clear, synchronous relationship between the sunspot cycles and periodic changes in river flow. However, this was not strong enough for practical applications.
Years later, I carried out serial correlation analyses. Surprise, surprise. There was a statistically significant 21-year serial correlation but no 11-year or even a 1-year serial correlation. This meant that there is a stronger relationship between this year’s river flow and the river flow 21 years ago, than the relationship with last year’s river flow! It also confirmed the linkage between river flow and the double sunspot cycle, and not the single sunspot cycle.
I was making progress.
There was still one hurdle to cross. The 21-year periodicity was well-established. But something was missing. For prediction purposes we need to know when the 21-year sequences begin.
My Eureka experience
My inspiration came while attending a performance of the Bach Choir at UNISA. My mind wandered. There was an article in the morning’s newspaper reporting flooding in the Karoo. I recalled earlier floods in Beaufort West and Laingsburg. There was a predictable periodicity in these occurrences.
Back to the flood data. It was all there!
These problems can only be solved by introducing an additional solar-related time unit. It is the solar period of 21 years.
• One day = night plus day.
• One year = winter plus summer.
• One period = wet cycle plus dry cycle, (the Joseph Effect).
It is interesting to note that Joseph based his prophesy on seven-year cycles while modern analyses demonstrate that the cycle lengths are in fact eleven years. Climate alarmists deny their existence.
Much has happened since then. The upper panel of the figure below shows the statistically significant 21-year periodicity in the Vaal River at Vaal Dam. The lower panel illustrates the nature of the alternating wet and dry, 11-year cycles. The two half-periods coincide with solar cycles 23 and 24. We have now entered period year 14. There is much to be learned from this simple diagram.
How can any sane person believe that all these characteristics required for advanced water resource analyses can be determined by applying global climate models? They even deny the periodicity in the data that has been reported ever since biblical times and is clearly illustrated in this figure. Their claims that climate change will ‘intensify the hydrological cycle’ and increase damaging floods and droughts are complete nonsense. How do they get away with it?
When scientists are silenced by colleagues, administrators, editors and funders who think that simply asking certain questions is inappropriate, the process begins to resemble religion rather than science. Under such a regime, we risk losing a generation of desperately needed research.
–Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, The scientific truth must be pursued, Nature, 12 February 2009. [Quoted in CCNet.]
Regards
Will Alexander
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming
GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM SUPPRESSING FREEDOM & PROSPERITY
From NZ Climate Science, February 14, 2009
“I see another big problem in environmentalism and in its currently most aggressive form – global warming alarmism. This ideology has gradually turned into the most efficient vehicle for advocating extensive government intervention into all fields of life and for suppressing human freedom and economic prosperity. I am frustrated that this ideology has not been sufficiently challenged both inside and outside of climatology. We keep hearing one-sided propaganda, but do not hear serious counter-arguments. “ Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, speaking in Paris.
Read more…
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: al gore, ask Al Gore, climate change, climate change madness, global starving, global warming, world hunger
Hunger Activists Want Al Gore to Make Another Movie, but there isn’t any money to be made out of Global Starving
I'm way too busy making millions from my carbon offset business to care about those who are starving to death in Africa. I need the money to buy more carbon emitting boats and cars. I can't make money out of "hunger offsets"
By the blogowner, honestclimate, February 14, 2009
An interesting article caught my eye today, from YahooNews, titled:
“Hunger Activists Want Al Gore to Make Another Movie”.
Here’s an excerpt from the article
From a distance, it looks like an ordinary movie poster. Pasted to a bus shelter wall along Madrid’s central Calle Segovia, it depicts a thin child, looking upward toward credits printed in that look-at-me font that film publicity posters always seem to use. It’s only when you get close enough to read the title credits that you realize something is amiss. “‘Ask Al Gore,”" one passerby queried his companion. “That’s the name of a movie?”
Not exactly. It’s the name of an advertising campaign designed to get Al Gore to make a movie – only not about what you think. By collecting enough signatures through their website www.askalgore.org , an international NGO, called Action Against Hunger, hopes to persuade the former-vice-president-turned-climate-change-activist to take on the issue of acute malnutrition, a remediable problem, the organization says, that each year kills 5 million children in the developing world.
Reading further, note the response from Gore’s office..
Gore has yet to respond according to Action Against Hunger. “We hope that when we launch the U.S. campaign, he’ll invite us for a meeting,” says Nonzioli. “That would be great.” But at his office in Nashville, Tennessee, a spokesperson for Mr. Gore said the former vice president was currently busy with the stimulus package. “They want him to put aside climate change and switch to world hunger?” she asked, somewhat incredulously. Informed that the organizers hoped that he would add the issue to his list of concerns, she conceded a bit. “It’s quirky, but I have to admit it’s a good idea.”
Let me translate the response of Gore’s office above:-
Sorry, there’s no money to be made out of Global Starving. Also, it’s not like Al Gore actually takes man-made global warming seriously. If he did, he wouldn’t have a carbon footprint the size of Africa. Let them eat cake!
Read the full article here
Click here for the Ask Al Gore campaign website
Click here to read how Africans are starving to death to “prevent climate change”
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming, greenies
Green ideas must take blame for deaths
From The Sydney Morning Herald, February 12, 2009
It wasn’t climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn’t arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.
So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.
Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of “prescribed burning”. Also known as “hazard reduction”, it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.
In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.
“Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire … since … about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic.” God help him, he was right.
Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake – at the epicentre of Saturday’s disaster, where at least 147 people died – during a smaller fire there in 2007.
“The contractors were out working on the fire lines. They put in containment lines and cleared off some of the fire trails. Two weeks later that fire broke out, but unfortunately those trails had been blocked up again [by greens] to turn it back to its natural state … Instances like that are just too numerous to mention. Governments … have been in too much of a rush to appease green idealism … This thing about locking up forests is just not working.”
Read the rest here
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming
Greenies blamed for Victoria bushfires’ scale
From The Australian, February 12, 2009
THE green movement was yesterday blamed for the severity of the Victorian fires that cost so many lives and ruined so much property.
David Packham, a former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology, said environmentalists’ politically successful campaign to stop controlled vegetation burning off allowed the Black Saturday fires to rage uncontrollably. “The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning,” Mr Packham said.
“Elements of the movement are behaving like eco-terrorists waging jihad against prescribed burning and fuel management. They believe fundamentally that if we keep all fire out of Australia’s forests, the trees will grow, the canopies will close up, the ground will become moist and there will be no fires. This is absolute and total nonsense.”
The ending of the practice of controlled burning left vegetation at unprecedented levels, he said.
“The fuel levels were the highest in Victoria for 30,000 years. This led to the intensity of the fire that led to the deaths of these people and destroyed their homes,” Mr Packham said.
Greens senator Bob Brown said his party was not opposed to prescribed burning. “Everyone in Australia has been deeply affected by Victoria’s devastating bushfires and it reminds us again of the danger inherent in Australia’s beautiful bush,” he said. “Greens’ policy supports the ecologically appropriate use of fire. Scientifically based controlled and careful burning is an important tool in protecting lives and property, as well as being a natural part of the bush life cycle.”
The Wilderness Society’s Victorian campaign manager, Gavan McFadzean, said his organisation was preparing a report on the bushfires. He would not comment on Mr Packham’s allegation.
“Frankly, it is inappropriate, opportunistic and grossly insensitive to bushfire victims for Mr Packham or anyone else from the anti-parks, pro-logging lobby to push their agenda while the deceased are being found and the CFA are still risking their lives trying to put out these bushfires,” Mr McFadzean said.
In its winter 2008 newsletter, the Wilderness Society mapped out its response to bushfire management, noting “a massive increase in hazard reduction burning and firebreaks is destroying nature, pushing wildlife closer to extinction and in many cases increasing the risk to people and properties by making areas more fire-prone”. But its response accepts the need for fuel reduction burning.
Mr Packham said he wrote an email early last Thursday expressing concerns about the looming weather conditions, encouraging it to be widely circulated. “I doubt if the state has ever before faced such extreme conditions with fuel levels higher than ever, the prospects for Saturday are horrible,” he wrote. That afternoon CFA chief Russell Rees issued his grim warning about the weekend’s fire danger, saying the “forecast is worse than in 1983 for Ash Wednesday”.
Mr Packham said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the CFA was spurred into action after the concerns raised by his email.
CFA spokeswoman Adele Buhagiar said it had received the grim predictions from the Bureau of Meteorology on Wednesday and acted quickly to disseminate the advice to the public.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25042637-5006785,00.html
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.
Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Will Alexander
THE NOAH EFFECT
Professor Will Alexander
By Professor Will Alexander
Via email, February 10, 2009
Most of the affluent nations of the world have a slow population growth. Their citizens enjoy the amenities of life. Now consider the plight of the African countries. They have fast-growing populations. Many of their citizens do not have access to even the basic amenities of life — treated water, sanitation and electricity. Surely action should be directed towards their upliftment and not in the opposite direction.
With the South African general election within months, the parties have all distributed their election manifestoes. They all stressed the need to overcome joblessness and poverty. Not one of them includes climate change in its manifesto.
What then is the purpose of the Midrand Summit on Climate Change? There will be no benefits to the citizens of our country — only penalties.
Will the Minister pursue his doomsday scenario when many thousands of South Africans are already exposed to joblessness, poverty, malnutrition and disease?
The only beneficial motive that he can possibly have is to entice affluent nations to part with substantial sums of money so that we can adapt to the inevitable.
That also poses problems. How can we adapt to something if we cannot measure it? This is the crux of the matter. Measurement involves the application of observation theory based on the huge wealth of observations world-wide.
As I demonstrate in this series of memos, climate alarmists have chosen to ignore observation theory and to rely on abstract process theory. It is simply impossible for them to quantify the well-documented anomalies in the world’s climate that have been known since biblical times.
This memo on the Noah Effect is the first of three memos that describe the well-known climate anomalies that are described in the hydrological literature, but are completely ignored in the climatalogical literature.
Please distribute.
Memo 10/09
Climate change – the Noah Effect
Tuesday 10 February 2009
— were all the fountains of the deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth for 40 days and 40 nights. Genesis, 6, 11-12.
The Noah Effect is well documented in the hydrological literature of the 1960s and 1970s.
In April 1856 floodwaters from the Mgeni River crossed its banks and flowed across Durban and into the harbour.
Background
The oldest known remains of the human race Homo sapiens were discovered within 100 km of my home. The site is now a national monument named The cradle of humankind. The earliest civilisations on this planet developed at the other end of Africa. This has an arid climate. The people were directly dependent on the annual inundation of the floodplains for their existence. Three of the Earth’s major religions developed in this arid region — Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The first reference to a major flood (called outlier floods these days), was Noah’s experience recorded in the Old Testament.
Coming south again, South Africa’s Noah flood occurred in April 1856, when the Mgeni River overflowed its banks and flowed through Durban into the harbour. This has never happened again since then. There is a lot of evidence that shows that the floods of the mid-1800s were the worst on record in South Africa.
The next area of interest is Europe. Many years ago my wife and I started our travels through Europe based on the guidebook Europe on five dollars a day. You can guess when that was. We travelled on the Rhine cruise (strongly recommended) from Rotterdam in Holland to Strasbourg in France. We moved on to Paris but could not find any five dollars a day accommodation. So we took a train to Orleans on the Loire River. This was Joan of Arc’s home town.
Bridge across the Loire River in Orleans.
Next morning we walked down to the river. I noticed an old, well constructed stone bridge across the river. I was curious. Historical flood lines were engraved on the side of the bridge. The highest was dated 9 June 1856.
Now we have two major floods, continents apart, with maximum recorded floods within months of each other. Was this a coincidence? The answer is no. Our studies show an undeniable, synchronous linkage between the double sunspot cycle and river flow. Our studies also showed that high floods are associated with the sunspot minima, not the sunspot maxima as many scientists assume. They are clearly related to the reversal of the sun’s magnetic polarity.
The solar minimum occurred in December 1855. Note the close synchronous occurrence of these three events. It cannot be coincidental.
In our joint paper Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource development, we demonstrated a causal linkage between variations in solar activity and corresponding variations in the hydro-climatological processes. We also stated that there were no detectable changes in the data that could be attributed to climate change. I have shelves full of calculations, figures, tables, photographs, reports and PowerPoint presentations to support this linkage. It is undeniable.
Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence extending over more than 100 years, that confirms the solar linkage, the climate alarmists continue to refuse to acknowledge its existence! This is what the IPCC had to say in its Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report that was distributed at Bali 15 months ago. The emphases are mine.
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal —–,
and later,
During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would likely have produced cooling. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic forcings. Difficulties remain in simulating and attributing observed temperature changes at smaller than continental scales.
Note that solar forcings are not included in the models. Note also the references to model simulations for their conclusions and complete absence of references to studies published in the South African hydrological literature from 1978 through to the present.
This is all that the IPCC had to say on a subject that is critical to its whole climate change philosophy. Why did they not follow the simple route of examining the hydro-meteorological data or consulting expert solar physicists? Once again the answer is obvious. They were not prepared to acknowledge studies that challenged their claim of exclusive human influence on climate change.
Studies of flood-producing rainfall
For a number of years my colleague Prof Johan van Heerden occupied the chair of meteorology in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria. His office was on the other side of the passage from mine. We conducted a number of commissioned studies. One was for the Department of Transport titled Determination of the risk of widespread interruption of communications due to floods. The report included 1620 monthly rainfall maps and monthly rainfall probability maps of South Africa based on district rainfall records from October 1921 to September 1989.
Part of the study was Johan’s examination of four-day, flood-producing rainfalls for the period 1956 to 1989. He divided South Africa into 15 regions and classified the rainfalls into six categories from zero to five. The numbers of flood-producing rainfall events are shown in the bottom panel of the figure below. The other two panels show concurrent sunspot numbers and air temperatures at Cape Agulhas at the southernmost point of Africa.
What do you see?
Figure 1. Concurrent increases in solar activity, air temperatures and rainfall.
During the past century sunspot activity increased, temperature increased and rainfall increased. The increase in rainfall is consistent with increases in temperature that increase evaporation and thereby increase rainfall.
What more evidence is needed to demonstrate the presence of a solid linkage between increasing solar activity, rising temperatures and increasing rainfall? There is a huge wealth of information in the hydro-climatological data demonstrating the linkage.
PLEASE study the three processes during the first 25 years of the last century, and compare them with the last 25 years. Now consider the position if the next 25 years are similar to the first 25 years of the last century. There are many indications that this may well happen. We can expect global temperatures to decrease as well as the number of dam-filling rainfall events.
Is this possibility not much more important than all those hypothetical, computer-based simulations on which climate alarmists rely for their nonsensical claims?
Floods are beneficial
Now the alarmists have to be careful. There are many reports expressing concern that the sun has entered an unusually quiet phase.
Table 1 from our report shows the numbers of events in each category of severity as the sums of the regional values. Just as in the case of the floods in ancient Egypt, in arid and semi-arid climates all floods are beneficial in that they fill dams and restore water supplies. It is only the Class 3, 4 and 5 floods that are more damaging than beneficial. They only constituted 2% of the widespread, severe rainfall events during the 70-year record. Increases in floods will therefore be more beneficial than damaging.
|
Table 1. Widespread severe rainfall events
|
|
Class
|
Number of events
|
Damage potential
|
|
0
|
4061
|
Negligible
|
|
1
|
1761
|
Minor
|
|
2
|
222
|
Moderate
|
|
3
|
99
|
Serious
|
|
4
|
24
|
Extreme
|
|
5
|
4
|
Disastrous
|
|
Total
|
6171
|
|
This table together with Figure 1 is yet further confirmation that floods along the whole Class range are likely to decrease as solar activity decreases during the rest of the solar cycle that ends in 2016.
The claim that climate change will result in increases in undesirable floods, while omitting references to the beneficial effects, is completely unscientific, misleading and unethical. It is unsupported by observations or by hydrological theory. This whole climate change fiasco would not survive scrutiny by an independent, multidisciplinary panel of experts.
Regards
Will Alexander
