Fact Finding

I had a big long blog all typed out with links and lost it all as I downloaded software that required my browser to be shut down, my blogging software has an autosave facility that saves every 2 minutes so I don’t know what happened on that occasion. I have just seen it auto save twice since restarting.

The content of the blog was basically that I would check out some of the stuff I wrote about in the last blog, firstly the decline in bird populations around Rathlin Island. This I recall from a BBC NI news story so naturally that was the first place I researched but no luck, I spent hours on this and eventually came up with a website http://www.birdlife.org/ ,  type decline into the search box and click on the article about Irish Birds in Alarming Decline.  This kinda substantiates what I recalled, that bird species are declining as there food sources are moving elsewhere.

I also stated that Rathlin was an amazing place, that Robert the Bruce hid out there for a while in a cave before heading back to Scotland to give the English a whooping at Bannockburn. A good website is http://www.goireland.com/antrim/rathlin-island-attractions-id3646.htm and it tells the story of how Robert got inspiration on the Island and came up with the expression “If at first you don’t succeed, try try and try again.” If it does not go straight to the Rathlin page then just enter Rathlin in the search box at the top of the site and click on first entry that comes up.

Marconi sent the first Radio Signal across water from the Island, you could say radio was invented there.

Mary Black the singer was also from the Island at least her parents were, I think she was born and brought up in Dublin, but I personally prefer her sister Frances, check out http://www.frances-black.net/ and click on the song ” Don’t be a Stranger” which  I propose to be the anthem of this blog.

I was going on to explore the assertion I made in the previous blog that the main issue was the speed of change of Temperature which leads scientists to conclude that this Global Warming is man induced.
There always has been temperature fluctuations, apparently there was a mini-ice age in the middle ages and people could skate on the Thames.
Over the last 150 years since the industrial revolution got into full swing the mean temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees which may not seem a lot but if compared with the change since the last major Ice Age which ended about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago which at it’s coldest it was only 5 degrees colder than now. This coldest part of the Ice Age was probably about 15,000 years ago, so in that time the temperature has risen 5 degrees, about .0003 degrees a year, but in the last 150 years now our temperature has risen about 0.6 degrees, that is .oo4 degrees a year.

This may be a simplistic calculation but it appears that the rate of change is ten times faster than before we began belching out all that CO2, and they try to blame the cows, an animal I like to call the Benign Bovine. I will explain the rationale behind that another time.