Dealing with the housing crisis the wrong way

I admit I used to be an avid Guardian reader and believer, but since 9/11 when the cultural Marxists have taken over, it has ceased to become a newspaper in the proper definition, rather it has because a loudspeaker for its hard left, eco-nonsense, anti-semitic views. One particular example is this. Yes, I know there is a housing problem in the UK and yes, there are people fleeing war, persecution etc from Syria, Afghanistan and so on.  In this article, Dawn Foster suggests that we should build on the green belt.  As someone who loves the outdoors, I say this is a crazy article even by Guardian standards. She goes on to mention that there are 635,000 empty homes in the UK.  Whether that is true or not, there are questions about this

• Are those homes in a habitable condition?
• Can they still be homes now? That is, have they been converted to industrial or commercial use?
• Where are those homes situated? Are they in areas of high or low employment?

She mentions that Oxford has problems recruiting teachers due to high rent?  Why are there high rents?  And why are so many teachers needed?  Its all to do with supply and demand.  Demand comes from population growth and the source of this population growth is migration.

Why stop at building on the green belt? Why not build on river meadows? Why not build on arable and pastoral land? Why not build on the renaming wild spaces in the UK.  The UK should be looking to control its population growth, not looking to keep building and letting people in.

Unreported effects of global warming

As mentioned in a previous post, activities on the Sun affect the Earth's climate, not only that but the Earth's orbit around the sun is actually more like an ellipse rather than a perfect circle.  This is because other planets (notably Jupiter and Saturn), comets and asteroids pull on the Earth with their own gravity.  This means that there are periods where the Earth gets closer or further away from the sun.  This too has an effect on climate.  We hear a lot of negative effects about climate change such as rising sea levels, loss of polar ice caps etc.  However, there are more positive effects as shown here.

Rising sea levels means more liquid water to evaporate and fall back down again as rain.  Also more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means more food for plants. This means higher crop yields.  I remember watching a natural history DVD which said that plants can lose 90% of its water through the sames pores in the leaves which it breathes the carbon dioxide.  More carbon dioxide means less pores need to be open and then less water will be lost. All this unfortunately is lost in the climate change debate.

sun spots and global warming

As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, I am reading Patrick Moore's "can you play cricket on Mars and other questions".  It is a thoroughly interesting book, which introduces alot of astronomical concepts in question and answer format. I now know about constellations, supernovas, red dwarves, black dwarves and beetlegeuse.  The section which intrigued me the most was about sunspots. These are results of solar "storms" and are actually cooler than the surrounding area.  Solar flares are linked to them.  Indeed, each sunspot is a pair, one of each polarity.  Like the weather, sunspots come in cycles.  They appear in periods of high solar activity and when they do, they cause a warming effect on the Earth. 

Scientists now know that previous periods of global warming - Roman warm period, Medieval warm period etc coincided with extra solar activity and more sun spots.  And is includes the period we are in now.  When there is low solar activity, we have a global cooling and this was evident in the little ice age a few centuries ago.  We really need to question how much human activity can warm up the planet, or a much better question would be, how does human activity exacerbate this natural cyclical warming by the sun?

Personally I believe that man-made global warming is a hoax or rather a religion. In fact it takes our eyes off other eco problems like pollution and human overpopulation.  But never mind, it gives the far left something to moan about.