South African Highveld 2020 Weather, Eight Year Trend and Descriptive Methodology

One of the problems in displaying various sets of data on one chart can be the different units involved in each one. For example in weather recordings, to mention just a few, it could be temperature in degrees, relative humidity as a percent, atmospheric pressure as inches of mercury or millibars, vapour pressure deficit as…

Frozen British Pensions. The APPG 2020 Inquiry

I'm not certain what was the main aim of this survey by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Frozen British Pensions. The fact that it is such a well worn topic tends to preclude any startling or even new revelations. Contributions came from two rather different sources. The largest input was from 2,567 pensioners living in…

General Relativity – A Layman’s Guide

In my two special relativity posts, which like this one were based on lectures by Prof Richard Wolfson, I tried to explain this concept which deals with how the laws of physics are the same in all frames of reference in uniform motion. We saw that the principle is simply stated but the consequences are…

COP 26 Diary Part 5

There are so many developments on this that multiple updates could be sent out every day. These posts are just an attempt to highlight some of the more important issues or those that might interest my reader profile. Writing these days I have to double check whether some pronouncement from London actually includes Scotland and…

Seasonal Climate Forecast November 2020

Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific are around 1°C below average, indicative of La Niña conditions which are expected to persist through the southern hemisphere summer. Averages of predictions from various international bodies for SST anomalies in El Niño Southern Oscillation Pacific region 3.4 in Figure 1 show an initial decline to 1.5°C…

Global Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Increases

The term greenhouse effect is still commonly used in relation to global warming even in scientific articles despite the two process being different. A greenhouse prevents heat loss by restricting convection. In the case of global warming 54% or so of the short wave radiation from the very hot sun is absorbed by the Earth…

Highveld 2020 Summer Rainfall Onset

Spring can be short-lived on the Highveld. Winter can change to summer as afternoon temperatures escalate rapidly or the long winter drought ends with a bang. This post deals with the onset of summer rains which have shown a trend towards starting later at this location -26.14S, 28.34E. To avoid taking the onset as being…

Special Relativity – a Layman’s Guide Part 2

Part 1 took us a large part of the way from the first theories of motion almost to the time at which Einstein was able to absorb the existing knowledge and extend it, largely through thought processes rather than experiments. Maxwell’s discoveries (Part 1) engendered a good deal of thought as to how electromagnetic waves…

Special Relativity – a Layman’s Guide Part 1

To be clear from the start this is a guide for the layman by a non-scientist. For long I had thought I should have at least some understanding of it but any article by some authority quickly lost me. One vaguely knew of the twins where one set off in a spaceship and came back…

Southern Africa Drought, Dam Levels, Outlook September 2020

In a country obsessed by water supply issues in the Western Cape and in the high population density area of Gauteng in the north it may seem surprising to be mentioning drought at this time but it remains a desperate reality for many areas of the country, apparently only warranting the attention of other areas…