Frozen British Pensions – Brexit

Previous blogs have speculated about the impact of Brexit on frozen pensions, specifically whether the treatment of the pensions of expats in the EU, be it a hard or soft exit, will cause parallels to be drawn with current frozen pensions. Some light was thrown on this on 1 September when the Dept of Work…

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Highveld August 2019 Weather

Temperatures. The box and whisker chart below presents figures for Rynfield, Benoni, Gauteng S26 08 411 E028 20 609 Elevation 1644m. For details on how these charts are to be interpreted please see the Highveld Winter Temperatures 2019 blog. The trend is clearly not consistent. 2014 was particularly cool with night temperatures down to -3°…

Climate Change Science Part 9 Future Projections

This is the final part of the current series In 2008 David Archer, in Chicago, wrote a series of papers on what we could expect in future of the carbon cycle. He based these on two widely differing assumptions, one where all future anthropogenic emissions were restricted to 1000 GtC (cumulative), if by some miracle…

Southern Africa Dam Levels

Dam levels have shown a general decline over the last 12 months with the fortunate exception of the Western Cape which was the area most in need of rain. The summary for the whole region is shown in Figure 1 Figure 1. Southern Africa Dams August 2018 With Theewaterskloof having more than 50% of the…

Highveld Temperatures 2018/19

There is a significant difference in the patterns of minimum and maximum temperatures for 2018/19 as shown in the following box and whisker chart (an explanation of this type of chart was included in the recent Highveld Winter Temperatures 2019 blog). The second graph is included here to line up with that for temperatures and…

Climate Change Science Part 8 The Snowball Earth

This is almost by way of light relief from the earlier blogs but covers a scenario that is superficially quite plausible. In the 1960s Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko was advising the military on the possible effects of a major nuclear war throwing so much dust into the atmosphere that severe cooling would occur. He argued…

Climate Change Science Part 7 The Carbon Cycle

Small changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations can readily occur due to changes in the partitioning between air and ocean. In particular the colder the water the more carbon dioxide it is able to hold. Going further back in time though the total carbon in the ocean-atmosphere system appears to change. The current total is…