Rallying Call

A Rallying Call

 

I saw Mike Pence saying he hoped Putin would stop his invasion of Ukraine because the war is taking the world focus off climate change. Well, stopping Putin in his tracks would be front of most minds right now, and frankly, Pence’s remark is unfitting of a person in his position. The Covid pandemic has stymied the climate alarmists but they are now starting to get airtime for their rhetoric, taking advantage of every opportunity to rallying the troops. After their continued exposure to the rhetoric of climate change, the populace has been conditioned to treat all unusual weather events and wild fires as being caused by climate change. The other night I watched a documentary, The Green Planet… I’ll watch any nature programme, because the natural world has been my lifelong fascination, and y’know, the fellow who narrated the programme used to be my hero, but blotted his copybook by telling the outlandish fib about walruses committing suicide because of climate change! A typical example of how climate alarmists stretch the truth to prove their point. There are lots of examples of alarmists stretching the truth and they’ve even stooped altering historical data! I don’t know how much of the documentary this guy actually wrote, but because I see the whole climate debate from a different perspective, I pick up on the little inaccuracies. Most of the time nobody takes the slightest notice of my protestations, but I’ve always been a seed sower and sure enough, a few seeds sometimes germinate.

 

The narrator discussed fungi, and in detail, mycorrhiza, a symbiotic fungi that helps all plants locate nutrients with fine filaments of mycelium. He said a new discovery has found showing that trees can communicate with each other through the threads of mycelium… it was as if he was relaying some newfound phenomenon. Somewhere in my previous writings I’ve detailed the importance of mycorrhiza and how it works, but I first used mycorrhiza to green unthrifty Douglas fir as far back as 1965 and a bit later at our nursery we jumped through the necessary governmental hoops to import special mycorrhiza fruiting bodies from the United States to enrich our tree seedlings – that’s how important it is. What wasn’t told, and just as important, is that roots graft onto the roots of same species trees to share nutrients and often the stumps of cut trees can live on for years, still feeding off the standing trees. We’ve known about all of this for donkey’s years, and it’s reinforced in a book  my son sent me, The Hidden Life of Trees – what they feel, how they communicate, authored by Peter Wohlleben, the copyright was 2015, so the narrator’s news isn’t new at all.

 

He stood in a stand of Sequoias… to be picky, they looked to be Sequoiadendron giganteum as against Sequoia sempervirens, I always knew the tree by the common name, Wellingtonia but many do use the alternate name, Giant Redwood that the narrator used. He said they were three thousand years old and were in danger of dying because of drought, induced of course by climate change. By way of explanation, our once important indigenous timber tree was Rimu, and I recall our lectures in Ranger School, where we were told at around six hundred years, the tree matures and ‘crowns out’ i.e. becomes dominant in the canopy allowing its branches spread out to maximise its intake of sunlight. At about eight hundred years, it starts to die, and the process of dying can take up to three hundred years. As for the Giant Sequoias he was standing among, some had not crowned out but many had, so the natural process was happening. Can’t people figure out that trees like all living things have a lifespan and death can occur for a number of reasons? Obviously some of those trees are naturally in their autumn years. I checked the drought record of the America West taken from tree ring data: those trees have survived a 200 year drought from 850AD to 1050AD… a 270 year drought from 1120 to 1405… a 20 year drought from 1450 to 1470… and from 1490 to 2000 (as far as the records go) there’s been a period classed as wet, lasting 510 years without any significant drought… of course living memory will only recall the wet period and a bit of a drought becomes alarming! Digesting those figures, anyone relating the current dry spell to carbon dioxide induced climate change, hasn’t checked the historical record.

 

The narrator took us to South Africa where Protea scrubland burns naturally on a regular fifteen year rotation… I bet that would be approximate. He admitted that the fires are necessary to germinate seeds for renewed growth, and added that after the fire, fire lilies spring up and flower taking advantage of more light. Their life cycle allows them to remain dormant for fifteen years and they bust into flower after fire clears the ground. But he warned, climate change was causing fires to burn hotter, so the fire lilies are threatened… and he wheeled out a fire officer who agreed with him. But hang on, aren’t we told that climate change is ‘happening now’?  Anyway, surprise, surprise, the fire lilies emerged on cue, despite the narrative. There are a number of species that need fire to stimulate germination, one of them being gorse. Gorse is a prickly, invasive weed species that I’ve fought through most of my forestry career - if we wanted to plant pine trees amongst it, we had to control it long enough for the trees to poke their noses above it. There are so many weather variables, fuel load variables, fuel load moisture content and topography variables that can affect how a fire burns. I was in charge of controlled burns over large areas of gorse infested land for twenty five years and we tried every combination you can think of to suppress the gorse regrowth… roller crushing, cutting line leaving the cut material to fry in the rows, desiccant spraying and combinations. Fast fires in tinder dry conditions do less damage to the soil compared to the slow, hotter back burns that we preferred because we wanted the whole plant to burn, making planting access easier and cheaper, but slow, hot fires burn some of the duff layer that a fast burn misses. But no matter how  hot the fire, the gorse always came back by year five, as vigorous as ever… seed viability is seventy years for gorse, but the duff layer becomes deep burying seeds well beyond where a fire can damage it. The Protea fires left the sticks, mean the fire was hot and fast.

 

The IPCC has just announced that the floods in Queensland are a yet another sign of climate change and the floods will become more frequent. My condolences go out to anyone affected by flooding, it’s one of the worst events anyone can face. But there’s an explanation, and Brisbane is a good example. They don’t call them flood plains for nothing and they’re dotted all over the globe! There’s a range of mountains west of Brisbane, which forms a large catchment area, and the land around the city is flat, built of river sediment over the centuries, and the river is tidal. There’s a pattern to the weather in Australia, periods of dry, maybe intense dry, are always followed by monsoonal rains sooner or later, so the river fills, the tide holds the water back causing the flat land to flood. I checked Australia floods in Papers Past, there are several pages of reports, on page one, these are the years when severe floods occurred; here they are as they were listed: 1943, 1923, 1933, 1941, 1893, 1939, 1927, and 1906. So you see, floods have been random and not uncommon at all. It would seem that the council has tried to mitigate the flooding, but obviously not well enough, nature is a tough cookie to beat and there is always a risk when building continues on flood plains. There’s been a recent study of global extreme rainfall events from 1950 to 2018 over 8730 locations, 9% of them showed an increase of events, 2% a decrease and 89% showed no change. Does that tell you anything?

 

Happily another IPCC report has said that by planting trees and shrubs in city environments, will have a cooling effect. A professor no less has come to the conclusion. Well, check out on some of my earlier essays, I’ve been advising the same thing… some of us have understood for decades that reflected heat from asphalt, concrete buildings, roofs of buildings, vehicle bodies and exhausts (not carbon dioxide, but heat from combustion) are altering the temperature in cities and holding night time temperatures, reducing frost which people interpret as global warming.

 

The climate alarmist don’t want us to delve into this sort of thing, which is why they refuse to debate climate matters with climate realists… The basis of their narrative is that carbon dioxide causes global warming, and global warming causes extreme weather events. So I ask, if the planet is warming because of a buildup of carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution, how come the world’s hottest ever temperature was recorded at Death Valley, in 1913? And why was my own county’s hottest temperature at Rangiora in 1973 well before carbon dioxide was hovering at the so-called ‘tipping point’? Despite all that we’ve been told about carbon dioxide, why has there been an eight year cooling trend up to this year… some researchers even say the cooling has been since 2004 which make it… um 18 years?

 

Severe, wild and random weather has always been a part of our planet’s history, and people and scientists have noticed periods of extreme weather believing that the climate is changing. Here are a few snippets from newspaper articles I found during a half hour search, the blame for the change of climate went to anything from iron railway lines to sunspots:

3 February 1913. Is the climate in Europe changing? ‘A study of the Greenwich records for the last 200 years suggest negative – yet many believe otherwise.

28 December 1931. Britain’s weather, changing climate, wetter and milder. ‘The summer of 1931 has been one of the most disappointing in living memory.’

6 October 1965. Climate in the far north of New Zealand may change to sub-tropical.

29 October 1903. Climate changing. ‘The climate of England is going to the dogs! Is our climate changing? The answer is in the affirmative… caused by an alteration of the Earth’s axis.’

23 October 1920. Gulf Stream missing! Is the Panama Canal to blame? ‘Britain’s cold summer could become permanent!’

7 October 1911. Wireless changing climate – California turning cold. ‘Sir Oliver Lodge, English scientist says it is being caused by jolts of electric current in the atmosphere.’

24 December 1934. Arctic warmer, tropics cooler. ‘Change of climate due to more intensive interchange of air.’

17 January 1961. Climate becoming drier and cooler.

19 July 1958. NZ climate change. ‘NZ’s weather has changed extensively during the period of human occupation of 750 years. The climate was 4 – 5 degrees warmer.’ (that would be Fahrenheit)

 

There’s pages and pages of similar material to be found in our Papers Past. My working career has been using (sometimes fighting) the weather cycles to best advantage, maybe wet, dry, harsh or moderate, and over the past 60 years I’ve seen nothing to make me agree the climate alarmist theory that extreme weather events are carbon dioxide induced.