This morning I awoke to rain trickling down the bedroom window. By rain, I mean real heavy rain, not the two occasions of light sprinklings we had in the last thirty days.
Mrs. Green Fingers keeps an eye on the weather in this house due to her flowering plants and the lawn. As such, I get regular updates on the weather in the short, medium and long term. Already this year the hose has been out several times because the ground is so dry.
When you are in your sixties, you don't so much have memories as much as flashbacks and disjointed recollections. I can remember events or particular things that stood out and may even have a clear image of some of them in my mind. What is harder to be accurate about though is trends in the past, specifically the weather in days gone by.
When it comes to weather I have impressions rather than statistical facts. For example, in summer, rain rarely stopped play, as it were. One summer in particular, I did a lot of work on the outside of my Mother's house and when I think back to that period now it was blue skies, heat and a lot of manual labour. The dark winter months were predominantly about rain, rain and more rain. The smell of wet coats was a feature of the time and it was normal to sit through the first two classes in school in the mornings with hair drip-drying slowly.
There were four clear seasons and the leaves tended to fall when the leaves were supposed to fall and rain was expected and didn't disappoint during certain months. The exception in Ireland was snow that stuck. Growing up and living in Cork I can only remember that happening four times in my lifetime, the last one being just four years ago.
So I have come to the conclusion that the weather is changing. The last twenty years have been mostly mixed and without clear seasons like before. But I am being urged to believe that the climate is changing and there's a big difference between weather and climate changes. The supporting date for the climate changing is collected by weather stations over many years all over the world and that makes sense. The problem is though that there are less and less of these stations and for convenience sake, most have moved to urban areas where the climate is always a degree or two above average. Most worrying also is that up to 80 per cent or more of the Earth’s surface is not reliably covered at all by weather stations. The Telegraph ran an article on this recently and it is worth reading.
Journalist Christopher Booker points out that, "To fill in the huge gaps, (80 per cent or more of the Earth’s surface), those compiling the records have resorted to computerised infilling whereby the higher temperatures recorded by the remaining stations are projected out to vast surrounding areas (Giss allows single stations to give a reading covering 1.6 million square miles). This alone contributed to the sharp temperature rise shown in the years after 1990."
According to this article, "Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Paul Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay."
"Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century."
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline."
"Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming."
The IPCC has amassed huge money and great power & influence through the use of this computer generated data and it is worrying in the extreme if it should turn out to be inaccurate. It would be worse again if we discover it is purposely inaccurate, something the article above appears to point to. I must say the greatest annoyance of all is that your are not allowed to even question their findings. The last time I heard a line like that was from the Catholic Church and it makes me wonder if climate change and its trapping have switched from being a science to a religion?