Long Range Forecasts. Is it Weather or Climate?
by Ken Calvert
25 March 2013
Are our drought conditions getting more extreme? Farmers have experienced this sort of thing before. It is not pleasant to watch livestock lose condition at the same time as the local market prices plunge and one's equity gets closer and closer to the mortgage. The climate change fraternity would have us believe that our weather will swing to even more extremes. But they are not sure whether it is going to get hotter or colder, wetter or drier, probably the lot!
What does worry us at the moment is when will we get a good slow soaking rain? This week or next week? I am going to stick my neck out and say yes the drought will break, it always has, but too late to get our pastures growing again before winter. And winter feed will be very expensive. Furthermore, over the next 2-10 years our climate is going to get colder and colder, but it's nothing to do with carbon dioxide . Why? Bear with me for a little background on my methods, and I will reveal all!
For close to ten years I kept the rainfall records for a remote pacific island
in what is now known as Vanuatu. The year's record, on one page , had a very obvious pattern which when I showed it to the old men in the village, they were very quick to tell me, “ When the moon tips over that is when it rains.” And of course they were right. Between the first and second quarter, when the thin slice of new moon fattened out to a semi circle, that was it, as far as the island of Tanna was concerned. That experience makes me believe in Ken Ring, even though he cops a fair bit of flack. I just wish that he didn’t include earthquakes in the mix, even though there are all sorts of good reasons why he should. That's too too close to the bone.
However, I justified myself with the village oldies by saying ah yes it does rain with the moon, but I can tell you how much it will rain. Whether it's going to be a wet year or a dry year. Our island was just inside the tropic of Capricorn, on a latitude level with Townsville , up the east coast of Oz. And we knew that if Townsville was wet then we would be wet, but if it was Cairns, about 500ks up the coast that was wet then Townsville, and us, would be dry. What it was that moved those weather patterns north and south up and down the east coast of Australia, as they tracked around the globe I could never work out. Maybe that is something which the climate change folks could tell us?
However, I had one extra card up my sleeve. I had a Ham radio licence, and 30 odd years ago, no satellites or computers; short wave radio was it.
That meant that I had to keep a close check on the sunspots as the bands opened and closed on that roughly eleven year cycle, and particularly when we got strong magnetic disturbance on the sun. Even even though we were too far north to see the Southern lights in the sky, one could talk to Wellington on a handheld CB set. It wasn’t only just with the short wave bands, the weather was also affected. So as well as the Moon I am a strong believer in the power of the Sun to control our climate and as far as I am concerned CO2 is a long way second when it comes to our climate.
All that will receive plenty of publicity this month as Viscount Monckton comes to do a speaking tour of N.Z. after finishing his tour of Australia. Christopher Monckton is one of the leading climate speakers, and one who is skeptical of the whole Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their interpretation of the present trends. I would that he was indeed sponsored by Big Oil, then we might have got to hear him for free.
But no such luck. It will cost you $20.00 to get in the door when he comes to your town.
Fortunately, I did not get to stay long enough in our little Island paradise to witness any of the longer term effects of Solar cycles. Solar Cycle 24 which is with us at present, is very definitely slowing down and every indication is that we are not heading for another warm period but more likely another little ice age, like the Maunder Minimum, as when the river Thames and the Hudson river in New York froze over every winter. Our weather monitoring satellites are telling us that there has been no substantial warming for the last 15 years and our farming world would be wise to start a bit of belt tightening. So there you have it. Global warming is out and the Sun and the Moon, which do control our weather, are telling us that global cooling is in!
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( Lord Monckton will in Dunedin the 23rd April, Gore the 24th and Invercargill the 26th. )