Sandra Mckechnie: Celebrate the Climate

I feel sorry for the Green Party members, especially their MPs, because they have no idea about history, or geology. 

I have only a rudimentary knowledge myself: but I know how the sun governs earth, and what a  “star” it is. I also have some idea of how our planet Earth and humankind began.

By studying radioactive elements in the earth’s crust, scientists, geologists, etc, tell us that Earth may have been formed 4 billion years ago; that life of a sort existed some 500 million years ago and that humankind was not part of all this until quite late in the piece. 

It took all of that time for various stages of the development of crustaceans that lived in the molten lava on the ocean floors which was during the first recorded age. Think of a clock-face, and start at 1pm. It is named The Cambrian period, and its oceans contained little worms and crustaceans that lived on their floors. It was followed between 2 and 4pm by the Silburian period which enabled armoured creatures like small lobsters to develop along with fish which now had backbones.

From 4-6pm the fish were much larger  (under the Devonian period) and they were able to fight and    live on the lobsters. From 6-8pm, it was the turn of the Carboniferous period for Earth, when its forests grew lushly. (Now, why was that??? Let’s give you a clue: CO2 or Carbon Dioxide  is the reason). But we  haven’t quite finished looking for a hairy man yet. We are almost there. 8-9pm was the Triassic period, the time for Amphibians, and  sea lizards with feet and legs legs appeared.  From 9-10pm was Jurassic and Brontosaur and Stegosaur roamed the forests. Birds also found the forests of our world.

From 10-11pm the Tertiary Period  came in, (today we are living at the end of it) and little mammals such as opossums and lemurs came in and developed eventually into monkeys and possibly apes; and behold:  in the last half-hour of the clock, mankind and the missus made it into our world. [Just to let you know how slowly it all works there.]

Now, the Sun was a ball of flaming masses and molten metals, and it began to oversee our planet Earth. As the metals cooled they formed a metallic crust  which cooled, condensed and solidified to squeeze out slag which formed the early crust of the Earth. Amazingly, this crust contained iron, lime, sulphur, sodium and potassium – all needed by life itself. Even more amazing: when the cooling crust cracked and when giant volcanoes sprouted all over the world, out of the bowels of the Earth came steam. This condensed into water and carbon dioxide gas – which is needed for the photosynthesis of every leaf of the forest. Without which we would die. The sun’s rays also turn the water and carbon dioxide into starch. Starch is needed for all plants, again, every blade of grass, and every cell in our bodies Ask why those forest platforms were so healthy all those years ago. Because of the carbon dioxide and the starch. It is no coincidence, either, that the coalfields of today were inherited from the lush afforestation of 500 million years ago.

The Sun, spinning as it does, is a very strange thing. It gives us day and night; and it causes some of the great winds which regulate and modify the climate. The earth spins around the sun, too;  but it is slightly tilted on its axis and this is what causes the differing seasons in both hemispheres. During its revolution around the sun the earth turns on its axel almost 365 times. And the year has exactly almost 365 days. What a coincidence.

Wonderful changes have taken place over the years since the Earth became the home of living creatures. The crust has been broken and cracked; ocean beds gifted mountain ranges to the world (Himalayas among them); the Dolomites were once coral reefs; and many parts of the Earth’s surface have been alternately land and ocean floor. Earth has had its tropical changes too, when great forests and jungles grew in the Polar regions; and it’s had its Ice Ages, when much of Europe was under glaciers. Greenland was once covered in green forests, then followed the glaciers.

We need to mention the Moon, here. It revolves around the Earth once every 27 days. As the Earth is a bit of the sun, so the Moon is a bit of the earth. It was torn off by the tug of the Sun from the molten Earth  all those years ago; nowadays the Moon raises the tides in the seas including, king tides, which ebb and flow, but it can’t retain the gases or the water vapour as Earth does, because it doesn’t have the gravity. It also dictates the time for seasonal change in both hemispheres, round about the 20^th of the month every 12 weeks.

The United Nations has much to answer in its quest for one world government; not the least of which was the nonsense about global warming. It was obliged to change that title to climate change, because it couldn’t prove global warming. And I was twitchy to hear a muppet from the BBC telling us all last week that the UK was about to have a heat-wave “the first since records were kept, 20 years ago.”

Sorry Muppet. What about July this year: what about last year when it reached 40 deg C;  and when people in Italy were leaping into fountains? I’m sure you’ll find the evidence in your library.

And when I was a girl, I played in a robust tennis tournament in English summer heat, in a temperature, which, the muppet clearly wouldn’t understand, of 108 deg F in the shade, and it was 1956. It made the BBC News that day. Oh, and the Fahrenheit reading matches exactly the 40 deg C of today. The Brits love record keeping. Always have.

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 But the concept of climate change is promoted for entirely political reasons. By the Marxist left, who are really after the control of the voting public. In the 1980s they infiltrated our tertiary institutions (successfully enough); and then they started on the school-kids and then early childhood and kindergartens, with their need to save the planet at all costs.

The United Nations was delighted, too, when President Bush Senior allocated USD 2 Billion a year to prove that Global Warming was not without foundation. Meanwhile, over in Britain, Margaret Thatcher started to close down the coalmines. She wanted even cheaper electricity, and she opted for Nuclear Power.

Greenland was warmer a thousand years ago than it is today.  The icebergs expand and contract naturally. They are governed by thermal expansion and retraction, and people forget that.

The media continually show the ice caps breaking off; what they don’t say is that it’s the equivalent of autumn leaves falling.  Which is what occurs every year.

Somehow the liberal left luvvies seem to blame CO2 for that, too. But an Arctic climatologist told us that wasn’t possible. He said the gas follows any changes in temperature, it doesn’t cause it. The oceans release CO2 depending on the temperature. But when it cools naturally, the oceans store enough CO2 for life to go on. The Sun cools us, and heats us. The sun also regulates the clouds, and the rains that fall.

 And if the Earth were to place itself nearer to the Sun as it spins around, even a tiny bit, we would warm rapidly. We would die.

So thank goodness, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth have got it all sorted out. Let’s leave the climate right where it belongs.

Sandra McKechnie’s long career in journalism and public relations encompasses a diverse range of organisations from the Woman’s Weekly to British Airways. She is now retired.