Radschool Association Magazine - Vol 28

Page 10

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RAAF Kombi Information Needed.

Bruce Walker recently bought an ex-RAAF Kombi that he wants to restore back to its original RAAF livery and he’s trying to source as much information on them as possible. He’s hoping someone will be able to give him a hand and provide some info on the insides of the vehicle.

Bruce has provided a couple of photos of the vehicle in its colours, as it was used, and he hopes the photos will jog a few memories and someone will know something about the little beasts and will pass it on.

Bruce is ‘reasonably sure’ that the vehicle was used as a mobile control tower and he’s also ‘reasonably sure’ that the vehicle in the photos was used for a majority of its career at Pearce.

After it left RAAF service in the early 90’s and was put out to BOS, it was modified extensively and Bruce needs some help in finding what it was like when used, specifically the fit-out inside the van, both the cabin and the main area in the rear.

Bruce thinks the vans had a 'console' in the rear with a number of radios etc, and also had a stand section for 2 chairs. 

He thinks the cabin had a number of extra items in the dash which controlled the electricals etc, but again he doesn’t have specific details.

Bruce would love to hear from anyone who knows anything about these particular vehicles, it may only be that you saw them in service (location, years?), or maybe you know someone who used them. He says funny stories would be great, or even some detail on how they were used...whatever you have, he’s interested.

He intends to take the little machine to car shows, air shows, and displays when it is finished and on the road, and therefore wants to get it back to it’s original condition.

If you can help, please let us know and we’ll pass your info onto Bruce.

Email – Bruce Jones

“I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in its simplicity. As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates.

This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has got into your system. Here's what you do:

First, open your address book and click on new contact,' just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type your friend’s first name, type in 'A'. For the screen name or email address, Type:-AAAAAAA@AAA.AAAAAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here's what you've done and why it works:

The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1. This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends. When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAAAAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phoney email address you entered.

If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phoney address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.

Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAAAAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!

Pretty slick huh?”

(It’s a good story Bruce, and we’ve received it from several sources, but unfortunately, it’s a Furphy – it doesn’t work. See HERE – tb)

Canberra A84-231

On the night of 3 November, 1970, Canberra A84-231 (radio call sign 'Magpie 91') failed to return from a night Skyspot mission in support of ARVN forces. Missions of this type were, by this time, being flown only infrequently by Australian personnel.

The aircraft had taken off from Phan Rang at 7.00 pm, crewed by Flying Officer M.P.J. Herbert and Pilot Officer R.C. Carver, and made a transit northwards before reporting in to the USAF ground control 63 minutes later. The weather for this mission was unremarkable; over the target - a known enemy position in Quang Nam province, 65 kilometers southwest of Da Nang, it was the best it had been for some time with clouds which topped at about 6,500 feet and only thin cirrus cover above that. There were no thunderstorms in the area and very little turbulence above 10,000 feet. The mission controller, instructed Herbert to adopt an altitude of 22,000 feet in order to place the Canberra well above the maximum range of enemy anti-aircraft artillery known to be present in the area. He then asked the RAAF airmen to prepare to deliver their six 750- pound bombs in a single salvo with instantaneous fusing.

The aircraft made a normal bombing run, dropping its ordnance at 8.22 pm before breaking left. The ground station then came on the air to give the crew a brief description of the target they had engaged, and to tell them that their performance had been excellent. Flying Officer Herbert acknowledged this message, before signing off from Hanig's control and switching tactical frequency in the usual manner for the return flight to Phan Rang. At this point the aircraft would probably have begun climbing to 27,500 feet, which was the normal height for aircraft homebound from that region.

When Magpie 91 still had not returned to base by 10.15 pm, the usual procedures for an overdue aircraft were initiated within 2 Squadron. A check of all possible diversion airfields was undertaken, and 45 minutes later the request was made for search-and-rescue units on routine stand- by to be activated. A report from the American radar facility at Udorn in Thailand, which had been tracking the Canberra as it maintained a steady course on a heading of 120 degrees magnetic, indicated that contact had been lost at 8.22 pm when the aircraft abruptly disappeared off screen - apparently just moments after Herbert's last message.

A search by American air units based at Da Nang began at 4.30 am the next morning and was joined at 8.00 am by 2 Squadron's seven remaining Canberras which abandoned normal missions for the next three days. The search was finally suspended after 67 sorties had been carried out involving nearly 200 hours of flying time; 38 of these sorties, totalling nearly 114 hours, had been flown by 2 Squadron aircraft and crews.

Major Jack Thurgar and Sqn Ldr John Cotterell at a briefing on the discovery of A84-231.

Despite this effort, hampered by low cloud associated with bad weather and the double and triple canopy jungle which covered much of the search area, nothing was found which provided any clue to the fate of Herbert and Carver. Significantly, in view of later speculation regarding the cause of A84-231 's loss, none of the aircraft engaged in the search had encountered any enemy fire, even though much of the effort had been flown at only 500-1,000 feet above ground level.

It was the second and last Australian Canberra bomber to be lost in the Vietnam conflict. That was more than 38 years ago.

However, recently came the stunning news that wreckage of the bomber had been located in rugged jungle terrain in Vietnam's south-central Quang Nam province and hopes have been raised that some remains of Herbert and Carver, the last two members of the Australian Defence Force missing in Vietnam, might also be found.

A briefing was held in Canberra on the 23^rd April and Allan George has sent us a copy of the transcript of the meeting and you can read it HERE. You can also see the photos of the remains of the aircraft HERE.

Heaven and Earth.

Global Warming: The Missing Science. Ian Plimer.

Ian Plimer is a professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide.

Frank Alley sent us a copy of this article written by Ian Plimer and which appeared in The Australian on the 5^th May 2009. Frank says, although he doesn’t agree with the arguments presented by Ian Plimer, he says it is an important part of the whole “Climate Change” debate.

“IN my book, Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science. Initial criticism appeared before the book was released three weeks ago.

Well-known catastrophists criticised the book before they actually received a review copy. Critics, who have everything to gain by frightening us witless with politicised science, have now shown their true colours. No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather.

Despite having four review copies, ABC's Lateline photocopied parts of chapters and sent them to an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models. These critics did not read the book in its entirety. The compere of Lateline claimed that he had read the book yet his questions showed the opposite. When uncritical journalists have no science training, then it is little wonder doomsday scenarios can seduce them.

In The Age (Insight, May 2), David Karoly claims that my book "does not support the answers with sources". Considering that the book has 2311 footnotes as sources, Karoly clearly had not read the book. Maybe Karoly just read up to page 21, which showed that his published selective use of data showed warming but, when the complete set of data was used, no such warming was seen.

Robert Manne (The Weekend Australian, Inquirer, April 25-26) claims to be a great democrat yet demonises dissent on a matter of science. He is not a scientist. The gains made in the Enlightenment, the scientific method, history and integrated interdisciplinary science are all ignored in an ideological push to remodel the economy.

Primary producers should be very worried about an emissions trading scheme underpinned by incomplete science. Unions in industrial centres may even make conditional financial support of the ALP because the workforce they represent will be lambs to the slaughter with an ETS.

(ETS is now being called the “Employment Termination Scheme” by radio announcers in Brisbane – TB)

Capital city ABC and newspaper media outlets have treated the public with disdain. They have used arrogant pompous scientists who talk down to the public and yet these scientists forget that the public employs them. My critics are never asked: Who funds them? What have they to gain by following their party line? Why have they ignored a huge body of contrary science? What are their political associations? What unelected groups support them? Yet I am constantly asked these questions.

The huge number of recent letters tell me that there are winds of change. The average punter has been told for more than two decades that we are all going to fry. He is not stupid and is blessed with a rare commodity missing in many academic circles: common sense.

Life experiences of rural people are very different from those of city folk who have little first-hand experience of nature. My correspondents feel helpless and disenfranchised with the unending negative moralistic cacophony about climate change. They know it smells but they cannot find where the smell comes from. The reason why the book has been a publishing sensation is because the average person knows that they are being conned and finally they have a source reference.

The hypothesis tested in my book was that increased atmospheric CO2 creates global warming. This was shown to be invalid on all time scales and by a diversity of methods. In the past, climate change has never been driven by CO2. Why should it be now driven by CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 content is low? The main greenhouse gas has always been water vapour. Once there is natural global warming, then CO2 in the atmosphere increases. CO2 is plant food, it is not a pollutant and it is misleading non-scientific spin to talk of carbon pollution. If we had carbon pollution, the skies would be black with fine particles of carbon. We couldn't see or breathe. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong appeals to science yet demonstrates she does not have a primary school understanding of science.

The atmosphere contains 800 billion tonnes of carbon in CO2. Soils and plants contain 2,000 billion tonnes, the oceans 39,000 billion tonnes and rocks in the top few kilometres of the crust contain 65,000,000 billion tonnes of carbon in carbon compounds. The atmosphere only contains 0.001 per cent of the total carbon in the top few kilometres of the Earth.

If all the fossil fuel on Earth were burned, the atmospheric CO2 would double. The Earth has been there before and high atmospheric CO2 has accelerated plant growth and increased biodiversity. It is the sun, water vapour, rocks and oceans that have stopped a runaway greenhouse or a permanent snowball Earth.

I would like to see some fundamental questions answered by the climate catastrophists.

•      If CO2 drives temperature, why were there past ice ages when the atmospheric CO2 content was many times greater than at present?

•      Why has the role of clouds been ignored, especially as a 1per cent change in the amount of cloudiness could account for all the changes measured in the past 150 years?

•      If natural forces drove warmings in Roman and medieval times, how do we know that the same natural forces did not drive the late 20th-century warming?

•      Why didn't Earth have acid oceans and a runaway greenhouse when the atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than now?

•      Is the present increase in atmospheric CO2 due to the medieval warming?

It is human arrogance to think that we can control climate, a process that transfers huge amounts of energy. Once we control the smaller amount of energy transferred by volcanoes and earthquakes, then we can try to control climate.

Until then, climate politics is just a load of ideological hot air.

To argue that human additions to atmospheric CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, changes climate requires an abandonment of all we know about history, archaeology, geology, solar physics, chemistry and astronomy. We ignore history at our peril.

I await the establishment of a Stalinist-type Truth and Retribution Commission to try me for my crimes against the established order and politicised science.”

In the blue Corner.

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica.

Contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap, ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica.

.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, therefore, extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf, which is on west Antartica is what generates international headlines, however, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades".

The graph at right is the Antartic Sea Ice Index since 1979 – it shows a steady increase in the amount of ice.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head, Dr Ian Allison (below), said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica. "Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice, fast ice and pack ice, does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise. Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. "I don't think there's any doubt it is contributing to what we've seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica," he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual. "Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off -- I'm talking 100km or 200km long -- every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

The Lost Chapter of Genesis.   Adam was hanging around the garden of Eden feeling very lonely and sorry for himself. So God asked  him, "What's wrong with you mate?" Adam said he didn't have anyone to talk to or play with. God said that He was going to make Adam a companion and that it would be a woman. He said, "this pretty lady will gather food for you, she will cook for you and when you discover clothing, she will wash it for you. She will always agree with every decision you make and she will not nag you and will always be the first to admit she was wrong when you've had a disagreement. She will praise you!   She will bear your children and never ask you to get up in the middle of the night to take care of them. She will never have a headache and will freely give you love and passion  whenever you need it."   Adam asked God, "What will a woman like this cost?"God replied, "An arm and a leg." 

Then Adam asked, "What can I get for a rib?"   Of course the rest is history....

And in the Red Corner.

To keep the party clean, Frank Alley also sent us an arguement for the other side...

He saw this article in the Australian on the 22^nd April, 2009. It was written by Professor Peter Doherty

As an active researcher in an equally complex, but very different area of science, I have been grappling with the whole climate change issue. My understanding is that, in contrast to the interpretation in The Weekend Australian, the findings regarding temperatures, snow cover and ice sheets are exactly what the IPCC has been predicting and in no way discredit projections about the impact of climate change on Antarctica.

The IPCC message is that warming in the tropical regions is leading to a more intense hydrological cycle, which may in turn give a 3-20 per cent increase in Antarctic ice mass over the next century.

With regard to your overall commentary on this and related climate change issues, while everyone understands that there have been cycles of warming and cooling through geological time, the current situation reflects an additional variable: 6.8 billion human beings and their consumption of fossil fuels. Even small effects can skew complex systems and these effects are not small, especially when we consider the additional impact of tropical rainforest clearance. That’s why the IPCC process that uses the best available technology to integrate new research findings and attempt predictions from a broad range of disciplines is so very important.

Complex science is data driven. It’s not religious dogma and nothing is set in stone.

(Professor Peter Doherty is with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne. He was awarded the 1996 Nobel prize for medicine)   

When Doherty refers to ‘Even small effects can skew complex systems and these effects are not small’ he is talking chaos theory where an amplification effect occurs such as in ‘when a butterfly flaps its wings in Madagascar, a violent storm eventually results in the Caribbean.

Recently a professor of geology from Queensland published a book attempting to show that humans have had no effect on climate change and of course, the deniers have jumped onto this, including The Australian newspaper, a champion of climate denial. The deniers generally find one small aspect of climate that does not follow the predictions of the IPCC and for them, that proves that climate change is not occurring, or that humans have had no influence. It’s a bit like those pushing Intelligent Design over Darwinism, they search desperately to find a single thing that cannot be explained by current biological knowledge and that apparently proves their case that all biology is incorrect.

Reminds me of Erich von Daniken (right), the author of ‘Chariots of the Gods’, who used the strategy of ‘if you can’t explain how this occurred, then it must have been done by extra-terrestrials’. The book was a good read, much like “1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, also a good read, but full of inconsistencies and barefaced lies. Both of these books rely upon people’s mistrust of scientists and the hope that there is magic out there. Just have a look where, over the years, in so many American movies, the scientist is the illogical one and the handsome non-scientific hero saves the day.

Frank also found this video on “You Tube” and he says it’s worth a LOOK.

We recently saw a small video clip that proves, beyond doubt, that the climate is warming – if you wish to see it, click HERE.

Another indisputable article of proof is to look at how the need for warm clothing has changed over the years, see HERE

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