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!   

                                           ---oooOOOooo---

 

( Lord Monckton will in Dunedin the 23rd April, Gore the 24th and Invercargill the 26th. )