Mandurah 2003 © P J Croft 2014 Which weather would you prefer, sir? This is a scan of a 6 x 9cm film transparency. It was from a Fuji 6x9 camera I had at the time, a lovely camera but BIG. So is this file, 55MB before I resized it for posting here.
Ooops, that can’t be a transparency, a slide. Know why? See the dirt specks in the clouds on the right? They’re white. If it was slide film they would be black.
Well, well. A little speech box was flashing at me on the header bar and when I clicked on it to see what it meant, it told me “Congratulations, your stats are booming. Looks like your blog is attracting lots of views.” So I’m not talking to myself after all.
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Phew, week after week of hot weather, I mean maxs of 34-37C every day. Thank goodness this house has full ducted aircon and is beautifully cool. I came across this graph yesterday:
It’s a bit hard to read but the bars are the number of heatwave days per year from 1950 to 2010 averaged across Australia. I emphasise the averaged bit because it pays little attention to WA, where we have our own weather. I’m not kidding about that – WA is totally influenced by the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean, whereas the eastern states are influenced by the interior and the Pacific Ocean currents. I would bet my boots that WA would show a more extreme trend than that.
This tallies with this graph of global temperatures over the same period:
(Sorry, I don’t know where I copied it from.) This is not the same data – this is worldwide global mean temperatures over a similar period, but it shows the same trend to me. Mr Abbott BA Boxing Oxon., you can tell us it’s just normal variation all you like, but tell that to the firefighters, foresters, farmers, fishermen, forecasters, flora and fauna scientists and other people who see the effects every day. They’ll tell you to f-off.
I saw a major article the other day where an economist said we should just accept that global warming is occurring and just make efforts to adapt to it rather than wasting money on trying to stop it. Stop fighting a possibly losing battle to get industries and major polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spend money instead on adapting ourselves in our housing and lifestyles. He was a northern hemisphere guy, btw.
Oh yeah? That’s fine for we humans, but what about the rest of the flora and fauna of this earth? What about the food chain of animal life that we depend on? Especially bees! What about the eco-balance of the land and forests and seas? I could go on in this vein, but how typical of an economist to see it only in money terms!
The other point is – it’s conservatives who are most likely to deny that climate change is happening, despite the clear evidence. Vide* Mr Abbott, Mr Murdoch, Mr Howard, News Corp columnist Miranda Devine, Lord “Haw Haw” Monckton, Lord Matt Ridley and so on and on.
They don’t see any need to present their own scientific research, they just know it’s all wrong. No scientific qualifications required. They’ll be the death of us, quite literally. People will die of increased heat related effects, bush fires and floods in this country and rising sea levels and spreading diseases in third world countries. It’s actually, measurably happening. Nice going guys. Sleep well.
[* I was a bit unsure of my use of this Latin word, but from Wiktionary:
Verb vide (singular imperative verb; plural videte)
See; consult; refer to! A remark directing the reader to look to the specified place for epexegesis.]
Here’s another great graphic – deniers’ arguments vs the facts:
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Yesterday I was feeling a bit out of sorts and for a few hours I convinced myself that I wasn’t going to have the gastric sleeve operation after all. I’d have the band removed, but no, the sleeve is too extreme and I’d rather enjoy the rest of my life eating and drinking normally. The $5,000 for the operation is too much and I could spend that on travel or something.
Then I snapped out of it. Enjoy the rest of my life?! I’m already getting a taste of how bad diabetic effects can be, and my left leg is giving me trouble and a bit of pain again. If I don’t do anything, I’ll be on increasing doses of insulin and possibly lose a leg. So much for enjoying the rest of my life. Shortening it, more likely.
It’s interesting that the medical articles call gastric sleeve/bypass a “Cure for diabetes” first, and a method of losing weight second. They say it should be the first line of treatment rather than wasting time on a losing battle with medication alone.
I have no choice. It has to be done if I don’t want to die a painful, messy, lonely and premature death.
Bull's Roar 