L'Eau Commotion Westabout

3:00pm Friday 6th July 2018 ( UTC-8 )
The various weather programs accessed through PredictWind all seem to indicate lighter winds along the 14th Parallel so mid morning the course was altered to the North West with the single reefed main and the jib also to Port but free of the spinnaker pole. This has given L’Eau Commotion a gentle and steady motion and with sunny blue skies and a 26C cabin temperature an ideal platform to espouse my ideas on what has been called the greatest moral imperative of our time.
In the 1980’s it somehow became an established fact despite zero supporting evidence that the temperatures on the planet were going to increase rapidly for some years until a tipping point was reached in the early part of the 21st Century when they would really accelerate:- the polar ice caps would melt and the Greenland ice sheet would slide into the sea producing sea level rise not seen since the birth of civilisation.This imaginary phenomena was given the title Global Warming and all sorts of associated ills were attached to it. Longer and more severe droughts accompanied by bigger and deeper floods and more frequent and more severe typhoons hurricanes and cyclones were a given. Obviously something had to be done about this so the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority ( GBRMPA ) was established with the enthusiastic support of James Cook University in Townsville. Looking for the ideal solution to these massive threats it was found that the Coral Reef Fin Fish industry was largely unregulated. It was found that at any one time there would be about 200 professional fishermen working the Reef catching Coral Trout and Sweetlip, or one to every 500 square kilometres extracting one Trout and one Sweetlip from each square kilometre each year. Armed with this information the Solution became obvious - exclude these fishermen from one third of the total area of the reef and then tax every Trout caught 50 cents and every Sweetlip caught 10 cents . Problem solved. Except for one thing. It was found that global temperatures were no longer rising so GRMPA and James Cook had to find another problem to fit the solution they had just found and it was not long in coming - Climate Change. Climate Change is a much simpler concept which does not require tedious manipulation or “ Homogenisation “ of large amounts of physical data. Just scan the daily press and somewhere or other in this wonderful world of ours you will find the warmest July, the coldest September, the windiest December, the wettest March. Of course with Climate Change you will have exactly the same problems as with Global Warming - unprecedented rise in sea level, longer and more severe droughts, bigger and deeper floods with more frequent and more severe typhoons hurricanes and cyclones. Indeed a Term For All Seasons.