It is important to remember that from the time of the “baby boomers” to beyond the epoch of the millennials, these generations have not been called to war. We won’t mention the Vietnam War which was one of the last conscription-war for the West, because it was area-limited, despite having dropped more bombs on Indochina than all the bombs used during WW2 by the allies…

 

 

So the youth of today may have too much time on their hands to think about “problems"… Global warming aside.

Since the Roman Empire, despite the Pax Romana — a settled illusion running for about 500 years — every generation before1946 had to be prepared to go to war. This is why we need to revisit history very carefully and understand the dynamics that have placed the pieces of the war “game” on hold where they are on the board. 

At present, young people would not have a clue about the reasons for war. Professional soldiers and brassy generals follow orders from the masterminds of the Pentagon, including the president Who does not have a clue either about the potential of death and mangle that modern wars can unleash, even using the best of moral pretexts.

So, war has been forgotten in the mind of the youth for good reasons. No point being called to defend your country when there is nothing left to defend but a desolate nuclear landscape… This is the boomers’ territory. Most of today's youth don’t even know this. They have been raised in the cocoon of a peaceful word for most of last 75 years, where now the most catastrophic event is the loss of home WiFi for five minutes. 
We live in a secure dumb era, in which one can elect a stupid Trump or a devious Biden/Hillary (yes I know, it's the wrong team), and whatever choice is made, it won’t interfere with the climb of China — though it might annoy its leaders for a while. China does not want war nor conquests apart from “rightfully” owning Hong Kong in full, for which the West is humming dangerous tunes of freedom to please ourselves — and Taiwan (Formosa) in which the China Sea plays a vital role. We blame China for our own sabre-rattling like we have blamed the USSR for the cold war — despite the USSR awarding the win of this “cold war” to the USA in 1959. But "we" wanted more than an admission of capitulation. We wanted to rape that country for its richnesses and destroy it, because this is what we do and we hate socialism. 

Despite, or possibly because of, the biggest arsenal the human species ever saw, the idea of war has somehow become extinct. It is at least moribund...

A few skirmishes like those in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, still make us sharpen our deluded moral compass, based on liberty, freedom and the American flushing toilets called crappers…

Don’t laugh. This is serious. We, the peaceful plebs, have forgotten the concept of warfare — despite having profited from it — because whether we do or not, we think we own the planet. Simple. We don’t. The planet owns us. We can't escape en masse. A few astronauts here and there is not an escape plan — and we are reminded of this, daily, including by us, here on this site and on the ABC, by programs leading us to cherish Planet A — the only one we have.

Meanwhile the weather and the climate are a-changing. Our industrialisation of our activities including the industry of armaments have influenced the climate. We know that cities are warmer than the countryside around them... The signs of change are observable, but most of our farting-about baby-booming-pollies and some “libertine” websites tend to still push for the burning business as usual, because this has worked since 1946, to make us comfortable. Thus "man-made global warming is crap"...

According to serious surveys, the island of Manhattan is starting to get “regularly flooded” in places… The measurable rise of sea level, is having an “under-reported” impact. Combined with tidal surge this can become slightly catastrophic, like during the Sandy Storm, which flooded a lot of subterranean New York… But we pumped and improved our defences until next time when things can get slightly more annoying. The recent Laura hurricane brought a few home truths to the people living on the southern coast. 

Sure weather has always had extremes.

But because there were catastrophic weather events before, we tend to dismiss the general increase of temperature of the planet in which Antarctica and the Arctic are melting away, so far without much fanfare apart from a few of us, nutcases like committed scientists, Greta and Gus, clarioning that the climate is going to get a massive make-over… 

It’s like your index finger touching your nose or not. Even very close, you do not feel your finger. Your finger has to touch your nose to be felt. There is not much leeway in between, but we can measure how far away our finger is from our nose, as it’s coming closer and closer… 

We would live in a cave or be a starved kid in a third world country trying to get out of poverty not to have heard about the “climate change” issue. Trying to feed ourselves and have a decent life is paramount first. Meanwhile people like Elon Musk work hard at saving the planet by selling us electric cars to be fed from the “renewable grid” to be really green, while at the same time, he's burning vast amount of carbon-based fuels to send rockets to Mars where we might have to live one day because of our burning too much of the said-carbon…

We are in a bind if we understand the problem. If we don’t, our arse will be slowly cooked on the altar of the carbon equation. Is this true?

What does this mean? 

We have explained many times on this site what global warming is about, till we went blue in the face. We also have exposed the strong possibility of fast climatic deterioration passed a certain point of warming. Are we wrong? is burning fossil fuel a sustainable option? 

Then the climate sceptic politicians arrived… 

On the first day of the new Abbott government, Australia’s climate scientists got a pretty clear message. It was September 18, 2013, and within 24 hours of the swearing-in ceremony at Government House in Yarralumla, the new environment minister, Greg Hunt, had called the head of the Climate Commission and sacked him.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/you-bastards-sacked-me-when-the-climate-sceptics-arrived-20200626-p556nn.html


The major question is how does one becomes such a sceptic in front of hard scientific evidence? Is the scientific evidence strong enough? How do we link carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning to the notion of global warming? This is the major question that we need to investigate and it started way before the BB (baby boomers). It started even before the first railway was ever built — then the railway was transcribed into an amazing 176 year old musical piece that should send amazing shivers down your spine…

So, how can we make an irrefutable case to show that global warming is coming? Or is already here? We can’t? Why not? Because it demands a computation that is beyond a one person observation. Or it demands the acceptance that we can be poisoned by 0.05 milligrams of Novichok. We accept that taking a small dose of aspirin or such will eliminate our headache — even knowing that 90 per cent of this medicine will go straight to the pee-house. A funnel-web spider bite will kill us. Yet the amount of poison is tiny compared to our size… Global warming is far more possible in these proportions of cause to effect. 

As Bertolt Brecht indicated science is not there to give us infinite wisdom but to make sure we avoid making an infinite error. What are sciences? Good question… Sciences are our ways to interpret observations with a certain degree of repeatable precision. Sciences are in complete opposition to metaphysics which use infinite error as a way to explain what we don’t know. 

And sciences tell us that ignoring global warming would be making an infinite error. 

How come? Gus and Gus can repeat ourselves ad infinitum. You either trust the planet is spherical or that it’s a plate with a gaseous dome. You know the answer to this one, I hope. If you don’t you have no hope to grasp the nettle. From then on, you need to study each part of the atmosphere and see that the caper is very thin — and it is subjected to convolutions, sometimes dangerous to us. This is not knew. We call this the weather. The dangerous aspects of weather are monsoons, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, downdrafts… These have been with us since we fell of our tree. Even so, we know that between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago there was a big melt. The planet warmed up for "whatever reasons*" by about 6 degrees Celsius. We know that dinosaurs bombed out of the surface of the planet about 65 million years ago. Sciences can't tell us what was the weather on June 17, 1246, though there could be some farmer’s records that would not be calibrated, but sciences can give us a fair idea of the trends then and now — and what affect these trends. 

CO2 is a warming gas that is involved in keeping the planet warm. Water vapour is the main component of the planet's heat, yet without CO2, the atmosphere temperature would plummet by 35 degrees Celsius. This is calculable within a rabbit’s fart. 

The weather observations from the ships involved in Trafalgar were precise enough to give us an idea of the wind and cloud conditions of the battle. Luck went with the English as it always seems to in naval warfare. The commander of the French/Spanish fleet should have known that the conditions were not favourable to them — and avoid battle with ships barely doing one or two knots. But this is hindsight versus foresight…

When Darwin was wiped of the map on Christmas day 1974, The Met bureau knew something was coming. The cyclone had been tracked. The climatic trends had also been surveyed. See ENSO...

Only 1974, dominated by one of the strongest La Niña events on record, was wetter with 760 mm. 2010 was also the wettest year on record for the Murray–Darling Basin and Queensland, while 2011 was the wettest year on record for Western Australia.

———————————

In 1974, the tornado “super outbreak” flattened towns and killed and injured thousands, all with little warning and in the space of 24 hours

Forty-three years later, this event still holds the record. 

On this day in 1974, 148 tornadoes known together as the Super Outbreak wreaked havoc across 13 states. Three hundred thirty five people died and more than 6,000 were injured, according to the National Weather Service. The storms destroyed or damaged
thousands of homes.

Tornadoes are deadly, and they’re hard to predict even today, writes Brian Clark Howard for National Geographic. They form when a column of air gets caught in the space between a cloud and the ground, often in association with a thunderstorm. and begins spinning violently.

Scientists aren’t totally sure what causes a tornado to form, or what sets the column of air spinning, or even how to predict when it will end. They do know when conditions are right for it to happen, which is when they call a tornado watch.

A tornado outbreak is when the same weather system spawns multiple tornadoes. What happened in 1974 was a “super outbreak” because three different weather patterns collided, writes John Galvin for Popular Mechanics, causing an unprecedented number of tornadoes to happen near each other in a short period of time.

Although it was terrible, he writes, the super outbreak “brought about the modern tornado measurement system—and lots of cash for cyclone preparedness.”

In 1974, National Weather Service forecasters were still using 1950s-era equipment to detect potential extreme weather. Even with those, he writes, they knew something was up:

A sprawling mass of cold, dry air dropped down from Canada towards the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, and an opposite mass of warm, moist air pushed northwards from the Gulf of Mexico. They were set to converge beneath an intense jet stream with 140-mph winds at an altitude of 40,000 ft.

The forecasters knew these conditions made for extreme storms, but they had no idea exactly how strong they would be, how widespread, or even precisely where they would erupt.

As three different weather patterns collided, tornadoes tore across the states, the worst one in the area of Xenia, Ohio. That tornado alone caused an estimated $100 million in damage and the loss of 33 lives, which was only a fraction of the total damage caused by the Super Outbreak.

But two important things happened because of the 1974 outbreak, research meteorologist Howard Brooks told Galvin. “First, the National Weather Service adopted the Fujita Scale. And second, support and money for tornado-intercept operations greatly increased.”

The Fujita scale created a standard language for the scientific community to talk about tornadoes, Galvin writes. Intercept operations, which send scientists out to actually chase tornadoes, have allowed them to observe what was happening firsthand, improving future warnings.

These innovations, combined with the money and political will to update detection gear, mean that the National Weather Service now has more weather stations and better forecasting technology, he writes. Research, more weather stations, and Doppler radar
combined have increased the average tornado warning time from "about zero," as one meteorologist put it, to 12 to 14 minutes.

"It doesn't seem like a lot," he told Galvin, "but when you need to take shelter every minute counts.” Even with all that, writes Howard, it’s not always possible to predict when—or where—a tornado will strike.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-148-tornadoes-one-day-1974-changed-emergency-preparedness-180962706/
———————————

So was there a correlation between these tornadoes and Darwin cyclone? La Nina?… Was there also some massive monsoons in the same year? There was as well...
————————

The devastating flood damage wreaked by Tropical Cyclone Debbie has left many residents in northern New South Wales facing an enormous cleanup that could take months.

Any Lismore local will tell you that flooding is a fact of life in the Northern Rivers. In the floods of 1954 and 1974, the Wilsons River rose to a record 12.17 metres. This time around, the river peaked at 11.59 metres, breaching the flood levee built in 2005 for the first time.

So what are the conditions that caused those historic floods? And are they any different to the conditions of 2017?

Like the current flood, cyclonic rains also caused the 1954 and 1974 events. But unlike those past events, both of which were preceded by prolonged wet weather, almost all of the extreme rainfall from ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie fell within 24 hours.
https://theconversation.com/northern-nsw-is-no-stranger-to-floods-but-this-one-was-different-75701
—————————

CYCLONE WANDA 1974-01-24
Wanda was a weak cyclone when it crossed the coast near Maryborough. The winds were strongest in the night after landfall when a high strengthened in the Tasman Sea. Tewantin and Caloundra then had average 50 knot easterlies and Cape Moreton had average 56 knot easterlies. Torrential rain followed and in the 5 days to 9am 29 Jan falls reached 900 mm in the Brisbane area. Mt Glorious had 1318 mm.

The Bureau in Brisbane recorded 314 mm in the 24 hours to 9am 26 Jan and the 1931 flood was exceeded at 9am 27 Jan. Heavy rain in the 24 hours to 3pm 27 Jan caused the major flood. In the Brisbane Ipswich region 6007 houses were flooded. 56 of these were destroyed or condemned. Damage on a large scale was 200 million 1974 dollars. 12 People were drowned in Brisbane and Ipswich. Additionally several elderly people suffered fatal heart attacks while being evacuated and a 2yr old child drowned in a Brisbane creek.

http://hardenup.org/be-aware/weather-events/events/1970-1979/cyclone-wanda-1974-01-24.aspx


2016 was an El Niño year. Scientists know that El Niño years tend to be warmer than normal, and that events can produce unusual and dramatic weather patterns around the world. But as the year progressed, alarm bells started going off for coral researchers across the Pacific. Temperature readings for oceans around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and at islands from Fiji to Hawaii were sky-high—hotter, in many cases, than ever before recorded.


Corals, which aren’t great at dealing with either extreme heat or extreme cold, languished in the tepid waters. Stressed by the heat, they started to sicken and bleach, and in some cases die. By the end of the season, before scientists’ distressed eyes, vast swaths of the Pacific’s reefs were bleached bone white.


Oceans have been warming up quickly and steadily because of climate change. But in 2016, that warming was bolstered by a particularly strong El Niño event, which helped push the planet into the warmest 12-month stretch ever recorded.


The effects of El Niño events ripple across the planet, changing weather patterns from Dakar to Delhi to Boston and beyond. These powerful events happen naturally, but climate change may tweak their strength and ferocity in the future.
…
During some of the most famous El Niños of the past, the deluges have been so strong that entire villages have slid down mountainsides. In the 1972 to 1973 event, ocean temperatures skyrocketed off the Peruvian coast, nearly wiping out the anchoveta fishing industry, a critical one for the country. During the 1997 to 1998 El Niño, the country sustained over $3.5 billion in damage to buildings, agricultural lands, and other infrastructure. And in 2016, corals bleached across the Pacific, floods ravaged South America, and drought-fueled fires ripped across Australia.


The events can last for as long as a year, though the warming tends to be strongest during the Northern Hemisphere’s fall and winter months—October through February. In fact, that timing is the source of the name: “El Niño” means “male child” in Spanish, and also refers to the baby Jesus. Fishermen in South America, who have long known and described the phenomenon, called it “El Niño” because the some of the biggest effects spin up around Christmas—and the name stuck.

...

It’s also not yet clear whether the cycle has intensified since humans started warming the planet by pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases.


What scientists can say is that [the] ENSO [phenomenon] has existed for thousands of years and is likely to persist far into the future. And whether or not the actual cycle changes, we’ll likely feel its effects more strongly in the future.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/weather/reference/el-nino-la-nina/


Now these are observation of weather events. What is clear is that there is some temperature increase overall, as measured by all our instrumentation since the 1950s.

Can we dismiss this? When record temperature above the arctic circle goes over 38 degrees Celsius, should we start to panic? But how much panic? When all our scientific indicators show records, should we ignore the sciences? The sum-total of events, glacier melts, coral bleaching and rising sea level should tell us something… Are we game to listen? Are our gauges accurate enough? Are we prepared to see the next event that could destroy our (not someone else’s) hard earned comforts? 

Miranda Devine told us once it was not carbon but the sun that was warming up the planet… She is correct… It’s the sun warming up the CO2 in the atmosphere that is creating the present warming. It is measurable: CO2 absorbs particular frequencies of infrareds, like water molecules reacts to specific frequencies of microwaves in a microwave oven. Cooking in the sunlight, CO2 then warms up quickly. We are lucky there is not more of it in the atmosphere, like on Venus, the surface of which is burnt at 450 degrees Celsius, by its CO2… How much CO2 can we have up there before it becomes uncomfortable? Sciences can make some dire bracketed predictions but are we game enough to listen?

Have we destroyed enough of the forest by controlled burn offs to avoid a repeat of the 2019-20 bushfires? For how long?...

Did WW2 influence the spike in warming records, 1940-1946?...
Scientific predictions can tell us that in 80 years, the sea level will have risen a minimum of 45 centimetres up to a metre. The temperature average on the planet will have risen from a minimum 3 degrees Celsius to a possible average of 4.5 degrees Celsius with a high of 6 degrees Celsius...

Are we prepare to listen to the avoidance of infinite error?

Gus Leonisky
Q and A midget...


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A new report details multiple instances of President Donald Trump making disparaging remarks about members of the US military who have been captured or killed.

The remarks allegedly include referring to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers”.

The allegations were first reported in The Atlantic. A senior Defence Department official with firsthand knowledge of events confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press, including the 2018 cemetery comments.

The defence official said Mr Trump made the comments as he begged off visiting the cemetery outside Paris during a meeting following his presidential daily briefing on the morning of November 10, 2018.

Staffers from the National Security Council and the Secret Service told Mr Trump that rainy weather made helicopter travel to the cemetery risky, but they could drive there.

Mr Trump responded by saying he didn’t want to visit the cemetery because it was “filled with losers,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss it publicly.

The White House blamed the cancelled visit on poor weather at the time.

In another conversation on the trip, The Atlantic said, Mr Trump referred to the 1800 Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

“This report is patently false,” White House strategic communications director Alyssa Farah said.

“President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn … These nameless anecdotes have no basis in fact and are offensive fiction.”

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/trump-news/2020/09/04/donald-trump-ward-dead-losers/

 

 

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As Napoleon may have lost Waterloo because of unseasonal rain on the previous day — bogging down his cannons and horses as mentioned at top — we should indulge in some historical mischief as seen by Captain Mainwaring of Walmington-on-the-Sea. Here the romantic role of the female of the species is split between Josephine in the filum, the ticket-selling lady on the bus, back from the movie house — and Mainwaring’s wife who is never seen but seems to weigh half-a-ton, according to the shape of the bunk above, in the bomb shelter… After a dinner with hard cheese he bought from black marketeer Walker, some stout from Sergeant Wilson also bought from Walker — and something unmentionable supplied by butcher Jones, at the Home-Guard’s office — the vicarage — Mainwaring, the leader of Dad’s Army, has indigestion and by 2 AM takes a sleeping pill… He thus dreams off to a time of lost Napoleonic glory when defeat was glorious and the surrender sweetly romantic, like defending the honour of the lovely bus conductress. 

Before Napoleon, others had lost battles because of the weather. Not only this, entire civilisations could have gone bust because of climate change. Quite a few historians have put their brains on the why and therefore, from the East, north of China, to the Americas, there was a sudden cluster of civilisation collapse in the sixth century AD... 

The Years without Summer: Tracing A.D. 536 and its aftermath (872)

"In the fall season of A.D. 536 Cassiodorus sat at his writing table....." So Joel D. Gunn begins this interesting and unusual topic of study. Fifteen further papers discuss the climatic events and ramifications of that year, when the absence of sunlight turned the grapes bitter and gaunt faces walked the streets of Rome and all of Europe. This book examines the first millennium A.D. worldwide context of Cassiodorus and the situation he and his contemporaries experienced. Can we draw any comparisons with today's global changes?

Read more:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Years-without-Summer-D-aftermath/dp/


This six century event was “catastrophic”… a bit like the "dinosaurian" extinction of 65 million years ago — but humans are more adaptable than a Tyrannosaurus Rex because we're smart...

So, there was a climatic change in 536 AD. Another investigator, in the book “Catastrophe", David Keys, explains that the same culprit of more recent times could have been the instigator of the “Catastrophe” by exploding like a million atomic bombs in 535. KRAKATOA.

The story is similar to 1258 AD, another year without summer. Yet at the time, the influence of this Krakatoa eruption changed the dynamic of human civilisations. This was followed by the birth and expansion of Islam, fought by Christianity up to the Battle of Poitiers on 10 October 732, now a serious problem in Europe again after recent migration, due to various reasons — from climate change and wars — and like of humour. 

But the climate change due to the Krakatoa explosion was temporary. By now, we all are (we should be) aware that a small change in climatic conditions will change crop production and personal comfort zone. And we also should know that these new climatic conditions can be induced by small changes in temperature of the atmosphere, leading to desertification, cold, heat and diminishing herds due to natural grasses depletion. Say for example in Mongolia, from 536 onwards, horses were in trouble, while cattle managed to survive well enough. Horses, used as war machine and transport, the Mongolian hordes had to “migrate” and invaded Europe, right to the edge of the Roman Empire...

This is why presently, the serious scientists who study present “global warming” — the effect of infrared radiation on ANTHROPOGENIC increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are freaking out BECAUSE, unlike a Krakatoa explosion, IT HAS A SOMEWHAT PERMANENT EFFECT, a long lasting effect for thousands of years. They know that this will have a serious impact on our civilisations, East and West. And due to the vagaries of such, this isn’t going to create uniform “impacts”. Some people will suffer more from climate change, including from the rise of sea level.

Some people can be horses, others can be cattle… By this I mean the ability to adapt to a change in food supply and resistance to plagues is variable, to a point of no-return extinction. Has climate change (aka global warming) induced the present pandemic? It’s a long shot, but it is a question to be investigated as to why in the 21st century, humans are still fighting “a pandemic” like Covid-19, in a manner that to say the least is a threat to our "advanced" civilisations... Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JBdedLx-GI


GL.


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