The expression ‘fighting like rats in a sack’ barely covers how weather actually WORKS. Expand that thought for a minute, and try to imagine one half of a zoo full of starved animals chasing around trying to eat the other half, all encased in a big elastic balloon. That’s how the Earth’s climate works. A chaos theory.
Now imagine you’ve just paid a whole lot of money to a zoo keeper to tell you where that nice fluffy animal your daughter always likes going to see will be, a week next Thursday, in this big manic bag. The keeper solemnly says he has run his animal management model, and the fluffy one will be inside one of the bigger animals with the nastier teeth, unless…
You clutch your throat. How to explain to the little one? Unless what? Unless you support, with money, and immediately, no time to waste – in fact, it might already be too late – the keeper’s patented new animal feed which is, of course, vegan; and is so beneficial and delicious to the animal kingdom that they will renounce being carnivores ALMOST immediately and fluffy will live to a ripe old age. And he can administer the first of the new feeds to that pesky salivating lion the day before he is due to eat Fluffy. In the model.
You know the deep do-do you will be in with your daughter if she learns you had the chance to save Fluffy, but balked at the idea because it’s expensive, and you don’t quite understand how the keeper will get to the lion in this giant African game-park sized bag full of fighting animals rushing around chaotically. So you ask the keeper.
“Ah!”
He is glad you asked.
“Do you fully understand the chaos theory?”
Well, he can run his mathematical model for you (ker-ching) again, and everything else being equal, if the lion stays over in the far northwest corner of the bag, and Fluffy ignores the surrounding bloodshed and mayhem for a few days then his model can predict exactly where they will both be on Tuesday and the feeding can take place. All will be sweetness and light after that.
There is hope for Fluffy, but you are a bit worried that with all the thousands of animals running around trying to eat each other or trying just as hard not to be eaten, then how can the keeper be sure where things will be on Tuesday?
The keeper stiffens, slightly.
“I’ve carefully modelled the movements of the Lion and Fluffy (where’s Stanley Holloway when you need him?) and can assure you within a certainty of 87.42% that they will be as predicted. Who do I send my invoice to?”
“But what if that large herd of elephants over there, currently smashing their way to the side of the balloon before being bounced back into the melée and treading on several fast-moving creatures on the way, treads on fluffy?”
“I can model that for you too, but it will cost you another computer run.”
“Thanks, but I’m starting to smell a rat – like that one over there being eaten by the hyena. I think I’ll give your predictions a swerve.”
Shrugs.
“Your choice, but I’ve sent my results to your daughter’s school, and she is having Fluffy’s certain fate explained to her as we speak by Mz. Stroppy. I shall have to report that you’re a salvation-denier if you don’t buy my solution.”
“Ok – I don’t need all the grief at the moment what with all the extra taxes to pay for the special vegan animal food – Soylent Green you call it? Made in China?”
“Good choice. If things change I’ll be back with another update offer.”
But back in the REAL world, if this currently insane one can be described as real, how does the above scenario translate to what we see around us and what we are threatened with?
First we must lay to rest the difference between ’weather’ and ‘climate’.
Weather is what we see and feel every day. What we dress to go out in, and what misbehaves when we least need it to.
Climate is weather in a particular area of the globe averaged out over a long period of time. I’m talking hundreds or thousands of years. Currently we have vaguely reliable figures for under 200 years but historical and anecdotal evidence for millennia. Not good enough statistical evidence you would need for a meaningful extrapolation of what has gone before translating into what is coming.
Weather is the animals above fighting in the sack. Some basic rules (big eats smaller), some animals only live in part of the sack. You only get frontal weather à la U.K. away from the equator where the spinning earth brings the Coriolis effect into play. The animals circle each other before attacking along a curving path. Buys Ballot law describes the circling in north and south hemispheres.
The thousands of animals are the atmospheric parameters that interact with each other and end up as being weather. See my previous piece concerning clear air turbulence being caused by air masses rubbing up against each other. Like tectonic plates rubbing and causing earthquakes.
The elastic bag that all the chaotic animals are contained within is called gravity.
According to some, including the film director Christopher Nolan in Interstellar, gravity is the key to everything in the universe. It’s not much talked about in relation to weather/climate, but let’s take a couple of examples. The gravity on Mars is much less than that on Earth. Mars once had a functioning atmosphere with functioning weather but gradually over the eons much of the Mars atmosphere ’leaked’ into space. Not enough gravity to keep it in. The weather on Mars is limited to dust storms probably caused by gravitational influences from its own moons. Our moon has very little gravity and no atmosphere.
So the earth has gravity and fully functioning weather systems. Mars has some gravity but limited ‘weather’. Our moon has little gravity and no weather. This is in effect what the Climate Change activists want. No change in weather. No evolution in climate. A dead planet. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a little bit pregnant.
We have a living, breathing, eco-system which is constantly changing, but is, as a whole, held in check by the forces of gravity and the dynamic forces of the rotation of the earth. The whole thing is powered by the sun. Everything that lives or moves on Earth does so because of the power from the sun. That’s all there is. El Niño is a major contributor to climatic variations. Big ocean current disturbance off the coast of South America. Probably caused by the sun. An unbalance on that side of the world causing medium term weather changes that have to be balanced elsewhere in the world otherwise our balloon would be permanently lopsided, and the forces of gravity make sure that there is a balance after a bit of pushing and tugging of somebody else’s weather systems. And our so-called fossil fuels are just natural batteries containing power generated by the sun over millions of years, absorbed by the plants of the day, and laid down to be used millions of years later. Why create coal, gas and oil otherwise? You can’t destroy energy. You can only change it. Fossil fuels are the stored energy of the sun. That power has already been unleashed on the earth before man was a dodgy idea in the head of ‘creation’, for want of a more acceptable word. Using them doesn’t create ‘extra’ climate changing energy any more than using battery power creates new electrical energy.
Back to Fluffy & the Lion, barrelling around in their balloon, trying to be the fed and not the food. Bouncing off the sides, avoiding all the other thousands of animals taking part in similar interactions. Ask a modeller to include the instantaneously changing fates of all the animals in their interactions with our pair and then ask said modeller what the state of play will be in two hours time, or two weeks time, or two decades time. THAT’S what a climate change forecast would have to do to be even a bit credible.
The Met Office used to boast about having the biggest Cray supercomputer in the U.K. Every Cray in the world, joined in parallel, couldn’t do that forecast. That’s even if you could agree on parameter design in the first place. Yet every tinpot junk scientist on the BBC approved list can do this, apparently, and wants you to bin your family’s standard of living, not just a bit, but drastically. If you pay them money via the Government, they may be able to help with this transition to misery. Or, when it comes to it, the Government will help with your plight. As long as you do as you’re told.
Watch out for that last bit. It may be the key.
James Leary is the pseudonym of a retired passenger jet Captain.
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