Thoughts on current political and financial developments, travel, climate and the environment with a humorous twist where possible
The drought situation has eased greatly over the last three weeks although restoring ground water and dam levels is inevitably a long process after such a prolonged drought. The following table illustrates the three week improvement and, even more significantly, the favourable comparison with last year. Figure 1. Dam Levels in the Western Cape as… Continue reading Western Cape Drought Eases
The drought in the Western Cape has caused thought to be given to how the water supply can be increased. With available surface water being a finite resource there are basically only two possible solutions to effectively augmenting that supply, the repeated recycling of waste water or desalination. To these two can almost be added… Continue reading Desalination for South Africa
The asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs is very relevant to current global warming predictions because it was an event that resulted in an extremely rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, in particular because the impact zone had high levels of carbonates in the rocks. The widespread bush fires had a similar short-term effect. Investigation… Continue reading Climate Change Evaluation
My previous blogs on this subject have relied heavily on the University of Cape Town's Climate System Analysis Group's 40 year rainfall figures for Cape Town airport, to highlight the severity of the drought. Hence my disappointment to see that the Group had discontinued using the airport figures due to rainfall events 'not reported or… Continue reading Cape Drought May 2018
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Frozen British Pensions met on 18 April 2018. The minutes of the meeting record three main inputs. APPG chair Sir Roger Gale referred to correspondence he had had with both Malcolm Turnbull and Justin Trudeau and the confirmation he had received that they were committed to pension parity… Continue reading Frozen British Pensions May 2018
The plume of predictions in the chart below, produced by the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society of Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York, indicates an actual starting point for the sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly in the tropical Pacific Niño 3.4block just within the neutral band of normal ±0.5°C, indicating neither an El… Continue reading Global Climate Watch / Methodology May 2018
A year or two ago I wrote of my scepticism relating to the Paris Agreement on climate change, possibly due to my lack of knowledge on international negotiations. What came out of that meeting seemed to be a hodgepodge of commitments which in the unlikely event of being met were unlikely to be sufficient to… Continue reading Bonn Climate Talks
