John Rofe
Private Investigator
New Zealand is a land bordered by sea, sand and surf so it is no wonder we have some of the best sailors and surfers to be found anywhere. Surfers know that as soon as the sun rises in the East, the wind gets up and glassy rides cannot then be found until the evening when the sun goes down. Sailors voyaging to the Pacific islands know that the wind strength intensifies towards each afternoon, then it tends to fall in the evening. So it is little wonder that we automatically accept that the sun supplies 99.9% of Earth’s energy budget.
Our sailors have all quickly learned the difference between the terms “windward” and “leeward”, and also between “port” and “starboard”. After all, these determine the rules of the road, so that in any seaway the captain of every boat knows which has right of way and which must alter course to avoid a collision.
New Zealand is blessed as a narrow chain of islands which run North to South over a thousand miles or so. We are in a region known as “the Westerly Wind Belt” where the passage of frontal systems traverses our land from a Westerly to an Easterly direction. This allows us to demonstrate what really causes the difference between the climates of New Zealand towns, it is what is called by scientists, “the water cycle”.
The water cycle begins with evaporation from the huge reservoir of the oceans, lakes and rivers. These cover about 70% of Earth’s surface. Most climate scientists don’t publicise the fact that water vapour is always present in the driest deserts, or in the frozen Arctic regions. The warmer the air, the more water vapour it can hold before it rains so in tropical forests it may comprise about 4% of the atmosphere.
In both New Zealand and on average, water vapour forms about 1% of Earth’s total atmosphere – up to the altitude where it would freeze (10-15kms). Water vapour is lighter than air, so it rises until it condenses as clouds. In its alter ego as water, when it becomes heavier than air, it falls to Earth’s surface as rain, hail or snow. So everyone understands that there is “an ocean of water” suspended in the sky, so big that we need to quantify its volume and significance. It is huge!
Annual evaporation is roughly 423 trillion tonnes and precipitation roughly matches that, leaving 15 to 20 trillion tonnes suspended above us. When rain, hail or snow falls, it always has a cooling effect. For this reason, precipitation is always a moderating effect on climate. The hotter it is, the greater the evaporation and the greater the condensation and rainfall.
The other main feature of the water cycle is its power to clean up our atmosphere. After an asteroid strike, volcanic eruption, or other catastrophe and even human pollution, the water cycle has always restored our atmosphere and as the geologists point out, this has kept Earth’s temperature between a maximum average of 22oC and a minimum average of about 10oC for at least the last 540 million years.
Solar electromagnetic radiation enters our outer atmosphere as light, in the entire spectrum from ultra-violet, through what we see as visible light, to infrared. However it is absorbed and/or reflected by Earth’s atmosphere, such that only about half of it actually arrives at Earth’s surface. At high altitude, atmospheric oxygen converts the dangerous UV rays into ozone. The tiny but opaque droplets of water in clouds reflect a fair proportion of the sun’s rays. Then also the proportion of our atmosphere that comprises what are called by climate scientists “greenhouse gases” (because they keep Earth from cooking during the day and from freezing during the night) and absorb and reflect the solar heat.
There are four of these greenhouse gases – all invisible to the human eye. Water vapour (“H2O”) is greatest in volume and all scientists agree that it comprises 96% of all greenhouse gases. Then there is carbon dioxide (“CO2”) at 0.04% and is therefore just a trace gas. Methane gas (“CH4”) is far less in volume still, and nitrous oxide (“N2O”) is much rarer still. It is the calculation – or rather estimation – of how much CO2, CH4 and N2O we humans emit which is the subject of efforts by the UN and some governments, including our own, to justify levying a tax on our emissions and thereby to save the climate from heating up…or so they claim. The atmospheric cooling from 1945 to 1975 which certainly did occur, should have dispelled any notion that human emissions cause global warming.
The group of climate scientists who believe humans are changing the climate (“the humanists”) promote the idea that we must reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. But they have a problem. There is no empirical scientific evidence that elevated levels of these gases affect the climate. Nor can they advance any, other than pointing out the three gases whose emissions we affect (CO2, CH4 and N2O) do have a tiny radiative effect. The problem with that is that recent and conclusive atomic absorption spectroscopic research has proven that the radiative effect of water vapour totally dominates the effect of those other gases, and that is without taking into account its alter egos which are surface ice, snow, clouds and precipitation.
From atomic absorption spectroscopy (which actually is good empirical scientific evidence) water vapour molecules have five times the radiative efficacy of CO2 for incoming solar radiation, and twelve times the molecular efficacy for outgoing radiated heat as infrared radiation. The efficacy of CH4 and N2O molecules is so low that for climate warming purposes they are totally irrelevant. Water vapour always varies in density, sometimes rapidly from place to place. In the process and as already proven by empirical scientific evidence, it moderates any variations from normal impacts on climate, from whatever cause – natural or human.
For CO2, the large group of “rationalist” scientists who are pejoratively labelled as “Climate change deniers” point out a further problem. It has been found by experimentation that the rules of the Beer-Lambert law of physics apply. This means that the thermal radiative impact of CO2 was substantially saturated at the pre-industrial level (approx. 280ppm) and any further increases, or even reductions of say 20% of today’s atmospheric level of CO2, cannot possibly have any material effect on our climate.
CO2 clearly does have a minor role, but that is demonstrably minor. The UN IPCC scientists claim without any empirical scientific evidence whatsoever that while natural forces acting through water vapour have influenced Earth’s climate in the past, the addition of human greenhouse gas emissions now dominates. Confronting and giving the lie to this, expert evidence from the University of Auckland’s Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering Geoffrey Duffy FRSNZ shows why the natural water cycle modifies even the major catastrophic heating or cooling events that Earth encounters. For the water cycle, human “carbon emissions” are child’s play.
I am not a climate scientist. I am just a 73yr old retired forensic investigator with plenty of fraud investigation experience. I started trying to work out which version of climate change is correct and which is just hooey. I found to my surprise that I could easily prove which is correct and which is wrong. My eventual conclusion is that the claim of Global Warming is just a fraud so I have documented it and referred it to the proper authorities, the NZ Police, the NZ Serious Fraud Office and the Secretary for Justice.
For water vapour to be the overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas, it must be evident in the climate from time to time and place to place. In New Zealand with one windward coast and one leeward coast we have the ideal laboratory. The clouds climb up the mountains and release their rain, thereafter the air is drier. By selecting pairs of New Zealand towns with the same latitude and at the same altitude and taking maximum and minimum temperature for each, I was able to compare temperatures with applicable humidity, after converting relative to actual humidity (in grams per kilogram of air) as supplied by NIWA. This demonstrates that the town with the most greenhouse gas (i.e. water vapour) mostly had the lowest daily maximum temperature and the lowest amount of heat loss, yielding the lowest diurnal temperature range. Far from nuanced, the differences turned out to be very large! This result was proven on 11/12 and 21/22 February 2020, then replicated on 22/23 September 2020. A dozen towns were chosen for those dates.
These below are indicative of the results of the East coast to West Coast comparisons but the situation even applies from North to South and others at various altitudes…
The average figures (but over only those three days) are:
Location Av. Daily max. In oC Av. Diurnal range in oC. Av Daily humidity in gms/kg
Christchurch 23.7oC 10.7oC 7.1gms
Greymouth 17.7oC 4.3oC 9.5gms
Napier 23.3oC 7.7oC 8.0gms
New Plymouth 20.0oC 5.0oC 10.0gms
You will notice two features. 1. The solar gain and therefore the maximum temperature in the towns with lowest humidity was far higher, and 2. The heat loss was far greater due to escaping heat at night, to yield a far higher diurnal temperature range than for the towns with a higher proportion of the dominant greenhouse gas (water vapour). This difference is not always as pronounced, but it dominates anyway.
We see this in comparative TV temperatures nightly. I also compared average annual rainfall with the average diurnal temperature range for each town for the four months August to November 2019 inclusive.
For the first pair, Christchurch had a rainfall of 648mm compared to an average diurnal range of 11.25oC. Greymouth had rainfall of 2553mm compared with an average diurnal temperature range of 7.5oC.
And for the second pair, Napier had a rainfall of 879mm compared with an average diurnal range of 10oC. New Plymouth had a rainfall of 1,609mm compared with an average diurnal temperature range of 6.75oC.
Our total “greenhouse” effect is really water vapour, clouds, ice, snow and rainfall – the complete water cycle. This proof is not rocket science because it has always been known that low humidity in deserts leads to extreme heat during the day and yet extreme cold during the night. My figures can be checked by any year 12/13 school child. The figures on the internet come from NIWA, so I have asked them to explain this.
Any farmer or horticulturist who ever looked outside at 10 pm on cold nights to see whether there were any clouds and mist obscuring the stars ( trying to establish whether there is a risk of a potentially damaging frost), will know instinctively that the force of the water cycle is huge. Don’t forget that clouds cover 60-70% of the Earth’s surface at any instant. So the government is lying to farmers about carbon dioxide and methane emissions!
I don’t need this data to know that the folk at NIWA, the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and others have never done any proper due diligence. They have all merely accepted and endorsed the fraud that originated at the United Nations using the blatantly convenient lie that Anthropogenic Global Warming is “settled science”, when in fact there is no proper science backing it at all. The output of mathematical computer models based on assumptions isn’t science – it is just maths.
Anthropogenic Global Warming has required an ever increasing sophistry to obscure the truth. It is big, long-lasting frauds like this, with their intricate sophistry that do the most damage to the fabric of society. This lie is obvious every day, whenever we witness the huge influence of the sun and the water cycle.
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