Long-range weather forecaster Piers Corbyn explains that in order to predict world temperature we need to better understand solar activity, magnetic connections and lunar modulation of the same.
Interestingly, towards the end of this presentation Mr Corbyn, who has a first-class honours degree in physics from Imperial College, London, states that it was as hot in the 1930s and 1940s as it is now. Indeed, this is also what the unadjusted raw temperature data for many places in Australia shows.
A farmer near Orange in New South Wales emailed me last month lamenting the lack of interest shown by the national media in SAM – the Southern Annular Mode. He explained that SAM was a key driver of rainfall over southern Australia and changes in the extent of Antarctic sea ice. Rather than report on this real weather phenomenon he wrote, the media carried on about carbon dioxide and global warming.
In fact the national media have today been talking about SAM, but not naming it as such. There has been comment about a new paper in the journal Nature by Australian researchers, Nerillie J. Abram and colleagues that describes how changing wind patterns have affected rainfall across Southern Australia and how these same winds, by contracting around the Antarctic, have caused a reduction in the rate of polar ice melt.
The paper is entitled ‘Evolution of the Southern Annular Mode during the past millennium’ and it attributes changes in the phenomenon to global warming.[1]
So SAM finally gets a mention, but in a story to promote global warming. According to Abram et al., SAM is the highest it has been for at least 1,000 years. SAM, driven by carbon dioxide is causing the main Antarctic continent to cool, and is now displacing ozone depletion as a cause of future ruin.
Yet not so long ago it was published in Nature, and reported by the same media, that global warming would cause Antarctica to melt.
There are alternative explanations.
Kevin Long from Bendigo, Victoria, explains the growth in Antarctic sea ice and the changing position of the westerly wind belt in terms of changes in the 18.6-year Lunar Declination Cycle.
In particular, Mr Long explains that as we approach the next Lunar Minimum Standstill, which will occur in October 2015, there will be weaker lunar air tides, because the moon is not travelling as far south or north as it orbits the earth. This, according to Mr Long, has result in the accelerated growth of ice at the Antarctic.[2]
While it is fashionable to scoff at the possibility that the moon has a major affect on climate, we can see the affect of the gravitational-pull of the moon in the ocean tides. In the same way, the moon’s gravitational-pull creates atmospheric tides that modulate high-altitude winds including the westerly winds.
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Links/Notes
1. Nature Climate Change (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2235
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2235.html
2. Rapid Global Cooling Forecast for 2017
http://www.thelongview.com.au/documents/RAPID-GLOBAL-COOLING-FORECAST-IN-2017-Kevin-Long.pdf
For more information on variations in lunar declination and lunar standstills you can always visit Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_standstill . But if you want to be able to relate this information to the weather consider reading Ken Ring http://www.predictweather.co.nz/ShopProducts.aspx?ID=1
I’ve been invited to speak at the 9th International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute. Its in Las Vegas in July. The speakers list is now available and also a draft schedule. It looks like I will be speaking in a session with Dr Nils-Axel Morner from Stockholm University. I followed a link to his presentation on sea-level rise and fall given at the conference last year in Munich. It’s informative and entertaining…
INNOVATION is critical to staying competitive.
Government-funded science and technology have played an important role in the past, but key institutions like the CSIRO have increasingly lost their way. 
Indeed the CSIRO, probably more than any other organisation, deserve the big funding cut that I hope is coming their way in the May Budget.
Australian agriculture has a bad reputation in many quarters. To a large extent this can be blamed on the many pronouncements by the CSIRO in their rush to corner funding first for salinity, then for biodiversity and water quality and more recently climate change research.
Between the 1950s and 1970s Australia built an outstanding national capability in real science.
At the time leadership did come from CSIRO, university researchers and also many state and federal government agencies.
With the 1980s, however, came a restructuring of the way things were done and how agencies and individuals were funded.
There was a move to project-based funding of a limited duration. So scientists had to identify problems and promote these problems if they were to secure funding – if they were to keep their jobs.
The Native Vegetation Act 2003 and the Murray Darling Basin Plan are direct consequences of the many CSIRO reports that have suggested Australia’s environment is ruin: give us more money to solve the problem.
These reports pronounce catastrophe, subtly paint the farmer as villain and have provided fodder for politicians ever keen to announce a funding allocation to solve a problem, and of course green-groups who’s very existence depends on saving an environment.
Dr Bill Johnston worked within the NSW departments concerned with natural resource management for 30 years. He recently sent me a note explaining that:
“A keystone report relating to the Murray Darling was ‘The Assessment of River Condition’ report published by CSIRO Land and Water in 2001. A snapshot of the Murray Darling’s health was modelled against a pre-European (1750) pristine baseline, for which there was no data.
“Unsurprisingly it found that by its definitions, most rivers were stuffed. Despite very thin data; supported by second and third tier modelling and a huge leap of baseline-faith, it was used relentlessly to on-market Murray Darling Basin facts for all that followed.”
Dr Johnston laments the disbanding of the NSW government’s research capability. He claims the Centre for Natural Resources (CNR) was the most active field-based Murray Darling Basin-focussed research group. He says, “CNR was disbanded, staff were moved so they were under the umbrella of CSIRO or an allied university institute.
“These and other changes left CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology dominant providers of natural-resource information and policy advice; modelling, as the preferred methodology; bell-ringing as the preferred communication strategy; and public discourse by scientists, especially about organisational policies and direction muzzled.”
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The image is of CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Megan Clarke.
This article was first published by The Land newspaper on May 1, 2014. A reader of The Land tells me the trouble started at CSIRO in about 1986 when management arrangements at the CSIRO changed, with the appointment of a Board headed by the politician Neville Kenneth Wran.
GEORGE Brandis says it is “deplorable” deniers are being excluded from the climate change debate and people who say the science is settled are ignorant and medieval.
The attorney general called the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong, the “high priestess of political correctness” and said he did not regret his comment that everyone has the right to be a bigot in an interview with the online magazine Spiked.
He said one of the main motivators for his passionate defence of free speech has been the “deplorable” way climate change has been debated and he was “really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers”.
“One side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong,” he said…
“The moment you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be said, you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be thought, and you are right in the territory that George Orwell foreshadowed.”
And I’m quoting from Bridie Jabour writing in the The Guardian!
EASTER is about religion, which is about culture, which is about myth. I was raised on the myths of the Australian Outback, on the poems of Banjo Paterson where the heroes could be “hard and tough and wiry – just the sought that won’t say die”. The landscape was also tough, harsh, and certainly ready to break the individual who was not resilient and innovative. 
Modern Australia still likes a hero, but our relationship with the landscape has changed. The idea now is that we have broken the landscape, that collectively we have changed the environment and not for the better.
It’s generally acknowledged that all religions attempt two things: to explain existence and to regulate behavior. More than ever, Australians congregate in cities, carry on about greed destroying the environment, and campaign for more wildlife, wilderness and against climate change. Rural Australia receives much of this new culture through the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – through television and radio.
It’s interesting to reflect that in aboriginal culture, wilderness was not a cause for fond nostalgia, but rather a landscape without a custodian. Indeed for the first Australians the health of a landscape was measured less by how much water was in a river, and more by how many kangaroos it could support.
The new culture, however, is generally against the active management of “nature” – mankind’s role, and especially that of industry, is always portrayed in the negative. There is now a regime of legislation and regulation in place, supposedly promoting sustainability, but in reality it hampers good land management and would make no sense to either Clancy of the Overflow or the Dreamtime hunter, Ngurunderi.
Perhaps its time those with a real connection to the Australian landscape, with a real love of country, got together to talk about a new vision for the Outback. If you don’t have your own plan, chances are you will be implementing someone else’s.
Indeed it is possible that in embracing some of the Dreamtime myths rather than those of the environmentalists who feature so prominently as heroes on the ABC, we could all come to a more balanced understanding of the Australian landscape and its needs. Consider, for example, that in one Dreamtime story when Ngurunderi visited the River Murray’s mouth it was not brimming with freshwater as environmentalists insist was the case before irrigation, but had actually closed over. So Ngurunderi was able to walked across the Murray’s mouth from Tapawal into Ramindjeri country. That’s right, back in the Dreamtime, before irrigated agriculture, the Murray’s mouth had closed over.
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The above article was first published as a column by Jennifer Marohasy in The Land newspaper. The Land is available in good news agencies across Australia.
The dreamtime story of Ngurunderi walking across the Murray’ mouth as told by Albert Karloan, one of the last three youths to undergo full initiation rites in the Lower Murray region is explained at the ‘Myth and the Murray’ website, http://www.mythandthemurray.org/when-ngurunderi-walked-across-the-murrays-mouth/ .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
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