Our KIds

 

 

Our Kids

 

Albert died recently, I’ve known him since April 1965, and over the past few months, watching his decline wasn’t easy. I used to pay him a weekly visit, as much for myself as for him because he was the last person around me who had the ‘old knowledge’. It’s the cycle of life and we were well aware of the fact. Sooner or later, the old must give way to the young and I can thank my good fortune because on my daily morning’s walk, I see the same kids on their way to school and most give a smile or a hello, some stop for a few words and I’ve even been sung to by some Tongan siblings. I’ve been doing so for five years now and some of them have moved on, while others have become school seniors. The important thing is the connection and smiles, I have no idea of their names might be, or what their lives are really like… not that I want to, but I hear the statistics and do notice some aren’t as regular attendees as others. I often wonder what’s behind those wide smiles.

 

Linda Creed wrote: I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside, give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.

 

Basically, we’re failing our kids and have been for some time, and it’s getting worse! In the telling, it’s best first to draw from experience and I can say my childhood was pretty good; fortunately, I saw no hint of family violence and was encouraged to ‘use my brain and save my back’ because there were chores to be done. During my early days of forestry training I saw some things that I can relate. Near where I was based, there was a ‘drying out hospital’, well that’s what we called it, it was a hospital where alcoholics were treated. The hospital used the forest to reintroduce ‘cured’ men into the workforce, the only trouble was that none of them were cured, all of them were returned men having served in World War II and their alcohol use was just a symptom of a deeper mental trauma. They stayed in the single men’s camp with us and tried to work side by side with us. The detail is unimportant… what they had experienced was.

 

While I was working in Tanzania, there was a serious food shortage and I decided to do something about it in the schools I worked with. I was frustrated because the well-known children’s charities were not prepared to help because ‘the government hadn’t declared a food shortage’, one of those charities used my report to raise funds, but we, nor the kids we were trying to help, never saw any of it. We did receive funds through my personal contacts and when we had the food, the village governments wanted control of it, to sell to their mates. The fact is, food shortage is common in Africa and the authorities don’t care because they have money in their pockets so their families are ok. So, the children suffer… on average they were going three days without food and to break that food drought they had banana mixed into water and took half a glass. After giving a village environmental seminar, the village government hosted me to a meal… while hungry kids waited for me outside! The ‘adults’ refused to share! However, ordinary people value their kids… there’s no government handout when people age, which is why, in the past the birth rate was high. There was a high attrition rate among children, so to ensure someone was left to care for the elderly, they needed the higher birth rate.  

 

I read Exodus by Leon Uris in a forestry hut high in the mountains, some time after seeing the movie, so I had some understanding what Israel is about, and on my crackly radio, listening at night, I heard about the 1967 Six-Day war, and Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defence chief, I remember he had an eye patch. Later, there were headlines in the local paper where Golda Meir said, ‘Peace will come when Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.’ And all the time the PLO leader Yassa Arafat, seemed doggedly unprepared to negotiate.  So I gained my own perspective. The brother of an old mate visited Israel not so long ago, and as they sat drinking wine in the evening, their ‘entertainment’ was watching Hamas rockets flying over only to be destroyed by Israel’s defences. There’s something sick about that! I watch protests here and abroad demanding an Israeli ceasefire, but for me, it’s difficult to get past the fact that if those Hamas… call them what you like, had stayed at home instead of venturing out on 7 October, none of the deaths would have happened. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, but I’d put children first. The situation in Ukraine is different but basically the same, blood doesn’t have to flow to cause mental issues for children or their parents, kids begin life innocently, and adults corrupt them because they are unable to unsee the horrors they witness.

 

There’s a problem in the West, even if there is no conflict, life is easier than it has ever been in history, there is far less manual work, more free time, more discretionary money is spent on entertainment than food, there is more food than has ever been produced historically, life expectancy is up, death by weather events is down and we can more easily combat disease… yet nobody is happy. A few years ago, there were the yolo’s, maybe they still exist… the ‘you only live once’ people who didn’t think responsibility was a requirement of life. Such attitudes have consequences. Before Covid, school students were failing in the three R’s and that’s multiplied since the Covid lockdown, the latest in this country was that only 49% were up to an acceptable standard. The lockdowns didn’t serve our kids well… the big question is, did ‘the authorities’ think through the consequences of lockdowns, and did they know the virus wasn’t as bad was the rest of us were led to believe? The answer is probably no and yes, so the next question is, will anyone be held accountable? The answer is probably, no. Some believe, it was a test to see how easy it is to control the populus… maybe so, but a generation will be affected for life.

 

Children also fear the consequences of climate change with some fearing our planet is about to burn up… that’s no state of mind any child should have! There are several powerful forces at play that fill the minds of children with fear and it would be fair to say those forces care not a bit concerned about the mental welfare of our kids. I have a farming background and know that kids are taught about farming being the most significant cause of climate change. This can cause a rift within the family unit. But the whole concept of climate change is based on ideology, models and a lot of purposeful misinterpretation of information. Climate alarmists aren’t happy debating the issue because there is no argument that carbon dioxide has massive importance because it supports the world’s food chain… and there’s no substitute! Think about this; say there’s a hundred atoms of carbon mixed with two hundred atoms of oxygen floating in the atmosphere, and grass takes it in and the miracle of photosynthesis changes it into energy… protein and carbohydrate and a cow comes along to consume it. Some of those carbon atoms are used to ‘drive’ the cow, some to make bones and some to form meat and milk. The bacteria in the digestive system takes some carbon atoms to manufacture methane, CH4 and puffs it into the atmosphere, but there are only twenty carbon atoms of the original one hundred left to go into the atmosphere. To start, what harm were those hundred atoms doing in the atmosphere? None… if so, tell me how. So how will those twenty carbon atoms cause harm now? In a few years, the methane will convert to carbon dioxide and water… both being critical to the photosynthesis process. Nevertheless, the children of farmers are facing bullying at school because town-children are frightened of the world ending and their assumed death!

 

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres says things like the sea is boiling and the world is on fire. No wonder kids become afraid, he is a leading world figure, an authority, so if he says so it, it must be true! Back in the day, when we wanted a cold beer after a day’s work in the bush, we would cover the crate of beer with wet sacks, the process of evaporation cooled our beer by about 1°C. This planet has a cover of 74% water, and the heat from the sun evaporates it, with a tiny, yet significant amount of cooling. The water vapour builds up to form clouds… clouds block out the sun, thus cooling the planet, a bit like when you stand under a tree on a sunny day. But because the tops of clouds are white, they reflect incoming radiation from the sun, so the land receive the energy. When conditions change slightly, the clouds condense and it rains, further cooling the planet and the clouds disappear, allowing the sun to start the evaporation process once again. Evaporation is a thermostat, and Guterres is plainly wrong!

**Nature gave we humans sweat glands for the same reason… but he’s a problem, the children I walk past smell like chemist shops because of their ‘antiperspirant’. What harm are those chemicals doing? Maybe if climate alarmists didn’t use ‘antiperspirant’, they wouldn’t get so hot under the collar about climate!

 

Anyone who tries to convince you that emissions of carbon dioxide or methane are dangerous, they are talking about extreme weather events. Pick any decade in the past… the United Kingdom has a very good weather record. You will find worse weather events, fires, floods and droughts happened in the past when the levels of carbon dioxide were much lower than today, which shows carbon dioxide isn’t necessary for adverse conditions to happen. During those times there may well have been more methane because of the vast grasslands where more browsing animals would have lived. You might hear that carbon dioxide is a pollutant… if so, why is it in your favourite cold drink? Billowing smokestacks don’t indicate carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is invisible and doesn’t smell… instead of spending money on reducing carbon dioxide, it would be sensible to clean up real pollution! Tell your children that they are safe and that changing land use (vegetation cover and asphalt) causes different microclimates, but overall, any changes to the actual climate are down to natural variability, which mankind has coped with for as long as we have been able to stand upright. You will also hear about mass extinctions and a loss of habitat due to climate change… well, the number of endangered species have declined ten-fold over the past one hundred years because the planet is warmer and because of modern protections, it’s the cold that caused the past extinctions, and yes, warmth increases biodiversity, just look at the tropics.

 

We must find ways to enlighten our kids and stop the nonsense by encouraging logic and critical thinking.

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Manipulating Societies

 Manipulating Societies

We are fed the ideology that in democratically elected governments, it is the voter has the power. But that’s just politic-speak because once elected, politicians have the tenure of government to do whatever they want, with no easy way for the voter to reign them in. Their most used rhetoric is ‘it’s good for the country’, which usually means pandering to those who funded their campaign, or if that statement is too harsh, the supporters of the party, usually to the detriment of opposing parties. Many politicians have some agenda or other that may not be in the interests of the voter.

Governments have the power to do things that can affect the very fabric of a country’s society, the present flood of refugees and those wanting to migrate to various places in the world is a case in point. The makeup of people a country allows as immigrants has a flow on effect within that society. Currently New Zealand has changed its criteria to that of potential income. What does that mean and what effect will it have in ten, twenty years’ time?

It is relatively easy for a government to make vital changes which can cause dramatic downstream effects on society and usually the passing years allows them to duck from responsibility. Here’s a case in point:-

Maori were the incumbents on this land when the British arrived but the trappings of modernity, or shall we call it ‘civilization’, has not been kind to them. They make up 14.6% of the population while they are represented by 51.5% in the prison population. Only one out of every ten earns more the $50 000, which is modest in this day and age. The unemployment rate is 4.9% for European descendants, and 15.5% for Maori. It is therefore safe to say that as an ethnic group in New Zealand, Maori are disaffected.

The reasons for this depends on who you are listening to, few of the schemes to address any inequities have worked no matter how well-meaning or how much money has been poured into them. One of the causes not discussed or addressed is the social engineering by the 1984 Labour Government and a financial regime termed, ‘Rogernomics’. There was sleight of hand from the first, they had a secret agenda that was not divulged or even hinted before the election.

This was the crew that had the theory that the rich were going to help the poor by some osmosis process they termed, ‘the trickle-down theory’. They wanted to cut down on government spending so they decimated the government departments and agencies of electricity, coal, post, forestry railways, and public works among others. As well by encompassing the global economy and floating the dollar, the direct result was the loss of 76 000 manufacturing jobs. So suddenly there was massive displacement of workers effecting small communities and small community infrastructure. ‘There is social welfare available for the affected.’ Was the rhetoric. The principles that people in work return almost half their income back to government by way of taxes, that people produce stuff that also brings in revenue and that in any business, cashflow is the name of the game, was lost on them.

By introducing individual employment contracts, workers lost powerful union representation, the flow-on is still in effect today. While I was on the other side of the table to unions, I know there remains an obvious need. Professionals who have attended universities and immigrants who employ without actually working in the general workforce have no idea about the labour laws and flaunt them without even realising that they are flaunting them! Maori are among the groups who needed strong union advocacy.

This Rogernomics thing has left an indelible mark on wider society because it upset a balance that was always fragile. Granted there was a need to tinker with the economy, there always is, but they used a bulldozer when a push-hoe would probably have done the job. It was an agenda by those few, which effected a population, but turned out to be worst for Maori. They were highly represented in manufacturing, forestry, railways and public works. When they lost their jobs overnight they were introduced to welfare payments and stayed at home. Because the education system had largely failed them, and there was no longer demand for their skills. We all know the natural thing is for children to follow the example set by parents, so kids saw their parents at home on the dole, making it a natural course of events for them to follow suit. Add to the mix, the new-fangled video games, alcohol and drugs to create a social disaster that has become worse as time has gone on. Without the comradeship found in the workforce, where the new recruits are taught skills and values by the older hands, Maori youth find a similar experience in gang culture, which may or may not be associated with increasing violence, including domestic violence. Whether or not the violence has an association with gangs, there is underlying anger, which is easily fuelled by alcohol and drugs.

The intrinsic thing that is missing is pride. As a forest manager, we regularly held man management courses. Every time the question was asked, ‘Why are you in your present job?’ The overriding top-of-the-list reason was, ‘Job satisfaction.’ These days ask the same question, ‘Money.’ Is the reply. Pride has evaporated from the workforce.

The question is, ‘Is the situation fixable?’ While hope springs eternal, as we have seen, manipulating society is a risky business. Maori are a proud race but they have been displaced and they see the system as the cause. They view themselves as a special case apart from the rest of the population, which has inherent risks because the rest of the population have their own issues to resolve! I see no magic bullet and the road back will no doubt be as long as the road down has been.

It is topical to say, ‘Beware the politician.’ It is true a tiny band of men kept on their path starting 1984 despite widespread protest, I was among the protesters and I wrote to Sutton, my local member of parliament outlining what I though their course of action would cause. Platitudes returned. They were like a steam train without a brake! Once these sort of people take power, common man has no influence. So perhaps, before each election, candidates need to sign a disclosure statement and if they fail to adhere to what they promise, propose or intend when they are in office, there should be a simple procedure of sacking them – without perks!