Will They Get Paid?

I just wonder if the thugs working for the Gadaffi regime know that the boatload of cash that was supposed to be heading their way turned round and headed back here?

Its currently docked in Harwich, sans cash.

I'm of the opinion that if they knew, Gadaffi might not have much of an army on his side.

Unless of course he's getting his money from somewhere that doesn't mind bankrolling a dangerous nutter.

Is it Just Me?

You know, I was going to post something incisive about whats going on in the globe and how it relates to UK political policy, especially regarding our military.

But you know, for the life of me I can't make any sense of it.

David Cameron talks a good game: it may have got him the most votes in the election, but it doesn't wash with mad dictators. Especially at the same time as he's ruining our military capability.

Not that I think the "unrest" in North Africa was as spontaneous as the media would have us believe. Was it really coincidental that countries either side of Libya would have an outburst of democracy? Or was Libya the target? After all, Gadaffi is just another dictator sat on top of a huge oilfield like Saddam was.

My cynical mind runs through the possibility that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the following regime changes were bankrolled and orchestrated in order to get more malleable governments in place in those countries, ready for a move on Libya?

And who exactly is bankrolling Gadaffi at the moment? He seems to have had a change in fortunes even after his global assets were siezed. It took a couple of days, which to my mind smells of deals being done with some other rich country.

My nose tells me there's more to all of this than meets the eye.

Climate Change: Its all about Density.

I do love the poor CO2-driven climate modellers. They're as nutty as a sack of walnuts. I mean, how on earth they came to believe that CO2, a gas which is minescule part of the atmosphere can drive huge climate patterns always amuses me.

I've always said that the main driver of climate on our planet is the Sun. It has to be, because its the most energetic thing in our solar system. We can feel its effects every day, providing many degrees different in the day and night temperatures.

Now obviously solar energy acts on atmopheric gases, producing immediate effects. We can all feel the effects in the warm summer breezes we get annually. But right there is where you can see that the atmosphere even when heated by the sun has little energy.

However, consider our oceans, which cover the majority of the surface of our planet. Now we all know that water is denser than air: every time we go paddling in the sea, we can feel its density as we attempt to move our legs through it.

The experience of moving through water directly correlates with the amount of energy required to move the water itself. Its very dense and very heavy and it takes a lot of energy to get it moving, to keep it moving, to change its direction or to make it stop.

Now if you think about it (and warmists may not be able to make the leap here) there must be a magnitude more energy involved in generating and maintaining ocean currents than atmospheric currents because of the difference in densities.

As an example, mariners know that the effects of the tide are greater than the effects of the wind. Sure the wind may disturb the surface of the sea, but that's all it can do because of the density difference: there isn't enough energy in the atmosphere to do anything else. Otherwise we'd see atmospheric effects travel deep within the oceans, which they don't.

We all know about Newton's law that describes the effects of one object on another. In practice we can do an experiment to graphically show how the atmosphere effects the sea. Take one snooker or pool ball and a pingpong ball. The snooker ball represents the ocean: very dense, very heavy. The pingpong ball represents the atmosphere: very light, a lot less dense. Now roll the pingpong ball into the snooker ball. Experience tells us that not much will happen, which is what happens with the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere. All we get are waves on the surface.

Its the direct effects of the Sun's energy on the sea which is the primary climate driver. The atmosphere and especially a small constituent gas like CO2 has a relatively low dynamic effect.

The warmists can big it up all they want, but the truth is that the CO2 theory goes directly against scientific principles.

Even if the atmosphere did in some way hold in heat (which again is untrue: endure a night in a desert and you'll understand how little heat atmospheric gas can hold), the direct radiant effect of the sun on the ocean far outweighs the atmospheric effect.

I can see it, I just can't understand why warmists can't.

Is the State Best Serving Us and our Armed Forces?

In my last post I mentioned our lack of a carrier to send to Libya to rescue our stranded citizens. There's a lot more to it than I mentioned and I want to cover it here.

In fact, I've heard on the grapevine of serious issues surrounding this very issue. The lack of a carrier isn't the only issue. The thing is, a carrier is not only the ship, it isn't even only the helicopters on board for deployment to rescue stranded brits: its a fighting unit, which includes fast jet air cover in the form of harriers, which make the air safe for those helicopters to operate.

So scrapping the carrier and the harriers removes a whole swathe of not only naval but aviation capability. No longer can we take aircraft to theatres of operation. Instead we have to rely on friendly foreign airbases to house our land based aircraft, something which isn't always available.

In the case of this weekend's desert extractions, we've had to rely on fixed wing Hercules transports utilising airstrips in the desert flying out of Malta no doubt with fixed-wing air cover in the form of Tornados or Eurofighters. Of course that means that we can only extract people who can travel to or are already at airstrips, leaving a lot of people behind. Helicopters need no runways to operate from.

Another question that needs to be asked is why the (untypical for government) haste to scrap the assets that have been retired and render them beyond use? We already know about the Nimrods that were cut up in public view, but at Christmas I had a look at Ark Royal only weeks after it had docked for the last time. Already the scrapping process had started in earnest.
I have no information about the Harriers, but one can imagine that their fate is something similar.

I have no idea why these assets have been scrapped so hastily rather than being mothballed and keep them in reserve just in case. Sure it'd cost money to mothball them, but nowhere near as much money to keep them operational.

I just think there's something spiteful either in government or the MOD in this rush to put these weapons beyond operational use. Is there rift between the government and the MOD?

In any case, the real losers aren't the government or the MOD, but those people done a disservice by the badly planned, clumsy and poorly executed reductions in capability: us, the people that pay for it all and those from the UK stranded in the Libyan desert.