With an election in the offing and a US President behaving oddly, the weather may well be the last thing on your mind. If so, this post may change your mind.
When I was younger, exploring the natural world didn’t interest me that much. Possessing a brain full of politics, history, footie, sex and music didn’t leave much room for mountains, river deltas , plants, weather and wild animals. There was also, in our family, my Mum – and her conviction that straying too far south or East was asking for trouble.
“When your father came back from the war in the Far East, love,” she’d say, “he looked like a centre-pole holding up a tent”. Travel to anywhere prefaced by the word ‘Far’, she felt, was a recipe for death from poor hygiene. When I told her some years ago I was going to be camped by the River Zambezi, she advised, “Well don’t fall in dear – you never know where it’s been”.
Buying a house in rural France, Buddhism and my second wife combined as a troika to cure me of naturophobia. Over the last two decades I have, far too late, learned the value of watching seasons, wildlife, people and agriculture in most of Europe, large bits of Africa, snatches of Asia and eastern Australia. I have ploughed through safaris in jungles, on the sea, along rivers, across deserts and over the veld in search of snakes, whales, crocodiles, lions and giraffe. I’ve held koala, smelt camel breath, planted herbs and created hedges. But the last Earhtly safari is still ongoing, and its open to everyone rich or poor. It’s called weather.
The interest began for me off the coast of Australia, while talking to a guide taking us out to the Great Barrier reef. Far from wearing the Green card on his sleeve, the bloke was a fisherman by profession who had, over forty years, observed changes in the sizes of catch, mutations of species, decline of the reef and power of the sun in and around his homeland. It’s perfectly possible to be a climate sceptic; it is not a viable debating position when it comes to things with three eyes, a human body surface riddled with melanoma, and a thumping great hole in the ozone layer.
Hitching a ride on a turtle off Dunk Island helped me grasp just how much is at stake here. They are ancient creatures which, like crocs, have not changed – not evolved in any way at all – for tens of millions of years. If you stick your arm on a turtle shell and look at that face in close up, not only is it largely unperturbed by your presence: it has an air of disdain to it – an expression suffused with tolerant contentment. It doesn’t take much of a climate change, however, to ruin the entire model of reproduction by laying eggs in covered sand.
As my paid work wound down and we spent more and more time in the French countryside, it began to dawn on me just how globalised agriculture is now. It didn’t take a lot of digging to see how the French senior bureaucracy has invested hugely in weather prediction. You may find this far-fetched, but it is true: the agricultural planners here use weather predictions supplied by none other than the CIA. Not directly, but the data they get is largely of CIA origin. On this basis, news filters down quickly via the préfectures: there is x or y chance of a drought in country a, b, or c….but our weather will be almost perfect for wheat this year. So plant wheat.
Thus – while down here between the Dordogne and the Tarn – the wine, fruit and corn for dairy cattle will still be there year in year out, hundreds of sunflower fields (now the craze for vegetable fuel has waned) get replaced by wheat. The next year, there might be shortages predicted elsewhere of tomatoes, barley or spinach, and so adjustments here too will be made.
The local farmers I know take all this pretty much in their stride, overcoming their natural dislike of fonctionnaires on the basis of some stunning successes in recent years. But like my fisherman acquaintance off the Queensland coast, their profession depends on sharp observation. They spend a helluva lot of time, for the best of reasons, looking at the sky.
In the last three years especially, other events have caused me to start doing the same.
Once you start taking a real interest in the seasons, it’s natural to look at the skies. Last year, doing this made me realise that it was early December and the geese still hadn’t migrated. By the middle of February this year, they were back again.”That’s not normal,” said my neighbour Ange. Three years ago, while converting the old barn to a gite, we came across an aggressive pair of snakes. There aren’t many like that here, but these two turned out to be South European vipers. They aren’t supposed to be here at all. The climate here is getting warmer: the issue is far too complex for me to have any firm idea why, and I can’t abide ‘debates’ about that subject: they just turn into shouting matches. But I know (because I see it) that the blossom arrives earlier, and the birds are confused. My Chilean potato vine now flowers all year round….as do the periwinkles.
But the climate data aren’t consistent.
The Spring brings with it the chore of opening and cleaning the pool area. Ten years ago, by August the temperature in the pool would be a balmy 28°. For the last three years, it has rarely if ever gone above 24°….yet the sun “feels” as hot as ever.
The difference, I’ve concluded, is clouds. There are, simply, more of them or less of them depending in not very much that is natural. And they often don’t look natural at all. We’re getting wetter winters and earlier, “hotter” summers….but the corn crops have never been more abundant. Talk to the farmers, and they will say “Ces jours-ci, le maïs n’a pas soif comme autrefois” (the corn these days never gets thirsty like it did in the old days).
A veil of oddly-spread cloud keeps the land (and the pool) cooler. But many of these clouds simply look wrong:
The shot above is typical of many I’ve taken over time. The shot was at 3pm CET with one huge cloud against an otherwise clear sky. The density of the cloud makes the light look more like 6pm, but odder still is the shape and colour of the thing: both are unnatural given the prevailing front at the time. Like something that got left behind the herd, it sort of wobbled across the blue sky, after which everything went back to being hot, clear and sunny again.
The shot below was taken at 5.50 pm CET a month ago during a 72-hour bone-dry period of unseasonal high pressure. With a better lens I could’ve got the entire skyline in: but I think you can detect here the abnormally straight line in which these bizarre looking clouds stretched right across the western horizon.
The tentacles beneath the clouds are not rain by the way: such does happen down here, and always has. The difference now is that, in the midst of overwhelmingly dry conditions, just this one row of slate-grey clouds laden with water sits there looking like fish in a tree, as they say in Kentucky.
Below is a sunset shot taken here in very early Spring this year – you can see that the starkly profiled trees are bare. You can also see just in from left and right the same “heavy-laden”, slightly tentacled clouds shown earlier. Given how dry it was at the time, those clouds don’t make sense. Also somewhat unusual (although not unique) is the level of cloud-cover above the sunset-darkened clouds.
The single biggest difference in the skies down here, in fact, is the sheer amount of cloud we see for everal days….not when it’s grey and rainy, but when it’s hot. There is a growing tendency on the internet to put this down to so-called chemtrails…..although chemtrails alone don’t explain the weather here at the moment – mid April and we haven’t seen a cloud in weeks – they remain of interest to the open-minded.
When I first heard about chemtrails, I felt the idea had conspiracy crazies written all over it. However, evidence is piling up to suggest I may well have been at best too aetheist in the subject, or at worst wrong.
This is a shot I took at my property a month ago just after sunrise. The vapour trails shown are difficult to explain away as normal airline traffic given
- They go east-west and west-east, whereas most flights here go north-south and south-north
- The early hour at which it was taken
- The fact that we were still only in mid-March….far too soon for any explanation involving holiday/vfr traffic by air.
Other more macro facts have come to light recently. Two years ago during a Senate hearing, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science and technology David Walker answered a question put by Senator Lisa Murkowski about the infamous HAARP project as follows:
“This is not an area that we have any need for in the future. We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do…to inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed.”
Watch the video HERE
You could call this a good news/bad news answer – it all depends on how you feel about weather control. Even in my childhood, “salting” clouds with ice from aeroplanes to stimulate rainfall in dustbowl areas was accepted, and seen by most people as another giant leap forward for science.
But in those days – I’m talking the 1950s – everything was much more black and white. Today, the topic of weather control is just one more infowar in which two or more sides with multivariate motives rubbish each other. On the one hand we have the extensive works of Dane Wiginton, and on the other a barrage of both sound and dubious sources insisting that it is easy to debunk what Wiginton claims.
The debunker axis makes some good points, but the degree to which they reject each and every motive for the military possibilities of climate control leave the objective commentator suspicious.
War is conducted now using a plethora of perverted avenues. Cyber destruction, energy valuation, internet falsification, financial transmission, bond investment attacks, export and import boycotts…the list expands with every year. The idea that – given American advances in the understanding of ionispheric manipulation – the Pentagon has failed to see any weapon potential there is preposterous.
I referred earlier in this piece to the global nature of the agricultural sector today. But multidimensional war in our lifetime has in turn become global in a way far exceeding nuclear. The greatest nuclear threat today is not between the superpowers: it is proliferation of it to those promoting insane religious beliefs and ideological principles. To dismiss weather as a way of dealing with a geopolitical bogeyman like Russia is to close one’s mind to probability.
Let’s take Russia as the example for a few paragraphs here. Russia is hugely overdependent on the right low winter temperatures to sell lots of oil, and the right summer temperatures and rainfall to feed its people from the massive wheat crops. Things going wrong with the weather plus a global oil glut take the Russian Federation as a functioning superpower to the very edge of existence….and Vladimir Putin’s position as national leader with it.
Western Europe this year had the mildest winter for years (ten days in total of sub-zero temperatures). As of this weekend (22nd/23rd April 2017) this is now the hottest, driest Spring in South West France ever. The forecasts for May look unseasonably cool (not enough to use much gas or oil) but still dry. The medium range forecasts for continental mass Europe, however, are looking at cool, dry El Nino conditions.
If you were trying to completely screw Russia into the ground, then this would be almost exactly how to do it. On the basis of CIA derived forecasts, France in 2017 has more agricultural land put to winter wheat than ever before….because the French are looking for export gains to shore up their commercial and industrial export disaster exacerbated by Brexit.
Please be clear: I am not saying that these facts add up to conclusive evidence of US weather control. I am observing merely that global mercantilism makes geopolitical tensions (and war) more likely…and the evidence that Alternative State US is without question developing weather as a potential weapon is growing.
In short, my own slowly emerging conviction is that chemtrails are not it as far as weather-as-weapon goes, but rather just one dimension of it.
I have no way of proving a link between that macro-reality and my own micro-observations here….and I am not in the business of making wild claims. My growing interest in this area is based on two obvious concerns: first, the concept of Homo sorcerersapprentice arsing about with planetary weather fills me with horror; and second, there is enough paranoia around in the China v Japan, US v Russia and EU v Islam needle matches as it is without hegemonist science being caught red handed doing the very things the major powers claim they don’t do.
As a close chum of mine remarked while we were discussing the subject recently, “Just because weather control as a form of war sounds loopy doesn’t mean to say some sociopathic c**t in the Pentagon isn’t working hard to make it happen”.
Having a bloody daft election to solidify The Arse May’s position in the UK Conservative Party (while giving her carte blanche to sell out the genuine Brexiteers) really is indefensible at the best of times. Allowing it to be the basis for choosing those “leaders” required to deal with a more dangerous world is off the scale of madness. That only 13 of our legislators voted against having one tells you just how much of a pointless bunch of self-seeking, irresponsible political minnows they are.
As the ‘Big No’ shot on The Slog’s homepage suggests, I believe the best future for Britain is to be a less materialist and more innovatively neutral trader than Switzerland could ever hope to be. But with every year, such an outcome looks increasingly fanciful.
Oh well. Enjoy the weekend anyway.
The Slog 