Milestones (Part One)

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS

Today marks another of those milestones that almost seem to creep up on you without your even noticing.

Two years ago this morning, my first post was submitted to this Blog site.

Before that first post here, I had already been contributing on a small scale to a Car Care site, mainly in the form of tips on how to keep your car’s paint in a good condition. I would also sometimes add comments to other sites, mainly in the form of sporadic comments, and mainly at news media sites here in Australia that were open for comment.

I have a very close friend who lives in California, and we would share regular emails on a daily basis, sometimes as many as half a dozen a day. He would mainly send me links to sites that he thought would interest me, and since we shared similar opinions on nearly everything, if he found something of interest, he would forward it to me.

As you might expect, there were considerably more sites in the U.S. than here in Australia, so he would have access to a lot more than I did, hence he would send me more links than I would send back to him.

The idea of blogging, actually contributing posts to a site on a regular basis, as opposed to adding a comment to an already submitted post or news article was something still relatively new here in Australia, … so, in the main, those online media outlets were all that I really did have access to here in Australia. The comments I did add to them were few, and mainly on something that was of particular interest to me.

What these new links my friend would send me did tell me was that there were actually more than the major media sites available for ordinary people to be able to express opinion, and to talk about things that were of an interest to them, other than just adding a comment at the site.

That didn’t mean I dived in head first and started leaving comments at the links he was sending. It was a rare thing for me to leave a comment at any of the sites he was sending me, and even though the links were interesting, I didn’t feel the need to start commenting at random, just for the sake of leaving a comment.

One of the links he sent me was to a post from T. Lee Humphrey posted at our site, titled Counter Attack And Retake The Message.

Ed, who runs this site sent me an email asking me if he could use my comment as a post and he posted the comment with its own title on 16 March 2008. In that same email he asked me if I would like to contribute posts on a regular basis.

Having never done anything like this previously, other than a few tips at the Mothers Car Care Forum, I wasn’t all that sure I could even do it at all. I replied that, yes I would like to contribute, but I wasn’t sure if those posts would be anything worth reading, and that it might tap out after a few posts.

I had an idea that I might attempt a few posts on some aspects of the current Global Warming debate, with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, and how a blind adherence to something like that would see unintentional consequences in the area of the generation of electrical power. This may sound obscure, but I had 25 years in the electrical trade in the Royal Australian Air Force. My training as an electrician, in those far off days of the late 60’s and early 70’s, was a lot more in depth than similar training is today, and that may actually surprise you. We were trained almost to Engineer level in those days, and now, for a tradesman to be competent to work as an aircraft electrical tradesman, that level of training to such a comprehensive scale is not required. That comprehensive training was recognised at a later date, and those long term members of us who did that training were recognised with an Associate Diploma Of Electrical Engineering. For the last 6 years of my time in the Air Force, I spent teaching that electrical trade to new guys, and that also gave me a minor teaching qualification as well. I also spent nearly two years as the senior electrical trades examiner for that trade school.

What I hoped to achieve with those few posts I might be able to submit here was to impress upon people that a blind adherence to what Kyoto called for would lead to problems in that area of electrical power generation.

The series I envisioned at that time I actually thought would exhaust itself after 6 to maybe 8 posts, if I could stretch it out that far in the first place. As it was, it stretched to 51 posts, 2 explanations and a retrospective, 54 parts in all.

This is the link to that series, and there are 20 posts to a page, so to get back to the first post you’ll need to scroll back to the start, and also take the ‘Previous Entries’ link.

It seemed that the more I looked, the more there was to say. At first I would do my research here at the computer, compose the post and then send it off to Ed via email, and he would post it. I was contributing those posts at the rate of one every second day. It made for a lot of research at first, because I didn’t want it just to be an opinion piece. What I wanted was the facts, because those facts stand up better than opinion. True, I added opinion, but where possible I backed that up. After a month or so, Ed gave me the facility to login at the site and submit those posts directly.

The second problem I had was probably the most important, and that was to take something that is quite technical and then break it down to terms that the layman might understand, to simplify it if you will, but to offer explanation.

Along the way, I visited so many sites that even I started to learn things as well. Luckily, comprehensive training in that electrical field made it understandable for me.

Something like this does have some hazards, and one of those is a personal hazard. Right from that very first post, I nailed my flag to the mast. I stated right up front that I didn’t believe that what we were doing here on the surface of the Planet was contributing in a major way to Global Warming, which has since gone through a name change and is now referred to as Climate Change. I also stated that Global Warming is a fact, as the Earth has gone through previous warming periods and also cooling periods, and if those at that time were not caused by man made things on Earth, then it was a naturally occurring thing. We may contribute in part, but we are not causing it to the extent we are being led to believe, in what is basically a huge scare campaign. This is the link to that first post in that series, and it may seem a little amateur, but I have no problem now with what I said in that first post.

However, having said that, what I then wanted to point out was that even if you did believe in man made Global Warming, then there were consequences that you have not been made aware of. That was my task, to point those things out to you if you did believe.

Also, writing these things down left them there for all to see. That’s why I did so much research, and not opinion pieces, but actual factual information from those sites that gave those facts. Then I had to interpret them so they could be easily understood. This might also seem to be a hazard. All those posts are right there, admittedly online, but still in the proverbial ‘Black and White’. Again, they have also stood the test of time. No one has come and shot me down. That immediately tells me the information is factual, and most importantly, correct, something I have been well aware of all along. If that information was in any way wrong, then someone would have come in and corrected me, and oddly enough, the only thing that has been corrected is from a post that was not part of that Kyoto series, but was actually related to it, and it was something about cows stomachs. This is the link to that post, and immediately I was informed of the error, I corrected the post with an explanation.

The statistics I use have (quite naturally) changed over the last two years, and this only serves to confirm what I have been writing about all along, that being that something like this will take time, a really long time, it will be enormously expensive, which it is proving to be, and will have minimal effect, something also being borne out.

That original series is as current now as it was as each post was submitted.

It’s not the only thing I have done here at this site and in Part Two, I will deal with some of those other things.

Link to PART TWO: Milestones (Part Two)