ScoMo doesn’t need to go to Glasgow. I grew up there and can tell him all he needs to know

Stuart Ballantyne

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This article questions the need for Cop26. I have already published articles in support for action on climate change. This is for balance. It was first published in the Spectator Australia. The author is a close friend of Professor Alf Baird.

SOME BACKGROUND ON THE AUTHOR

Stuart Ballantyne is the Glasgow born (now Australian) inventor and designer and multi-award winner of the medium-speed steel-hull catamaran passenger/car ferry which he has built and sold to more countries than most other designers. He’s also a big indy supporter given his parents like many others had to take their large family to Oz to find work and a future back in the 60s. His mantra on Scotland under Westminster rule was: ‘anybody with get up and go got up and left’. His global ferry industry experience suggests temperature has not altered that much and neither has sea levels, and he should know as he has built a lot of ferries and ferry ramps which go into the sea around the globe, so he is well aware of what has been occurring with Mean Sea Level. Stuart makes a sojourn back to Scotland most years to try to convince the bureaucrat’s at CMAL-CalMac and the Scottish Government to buy his sensible and proven designs of ferries, without success so far, though his designs have operated successfully in Orkney for that past decade and more and are so efficient they don’t need any subsidy – and make a healthy profit to boot, plus lowering emissions by 50%. That’s probably good enough reason for CMAL-CalMac and the Scottish Gov and RMT to reject them! They’re just too good!
Stuart, a former Chair of World Ferry organisation Interferry and of the World Ferry Safety Association is chair of Sea Transport Corp based in Brisbane and Singapore, and currently in the process of building 30 ferries for the Philippines plus others for various global markets. He offered to build 30 of his proven designs of catamarans to replace the entire CalMac fleet for the same amount of money the Scottish Government is currently spending (wasting – £300m) on just two ferries, the yet to be completed poorly designed C-MAL ferries currently building at Port Glasgow: Ferries | Naval Architects, Consultants & Surveyors (seatransport.com)

I grew up close to Glasgow on the River Clyde, and from our kitchen window you could predict the weather with astonishing accuracy. If you could see the peak of Ben Lomond it was going to rain, if you couldn’t see Ben Lomond, it was raining. Pretty simple stuff.

After seven years globetrotting as a merchant navy officer, I changed careers, studying ship design and until recently, ran a successful ship design office in Australia. 

Our early car ferry designs in the mid 1970’s had a start point of the Mean Sea Level — MSL –and the shore concrete ramp toe point or tangent point was allocated from the MSL depending of course on the size of ferry, freeboard and so on. 

My first task was in Western Samoa, followed by Natovi in Fiji where I personally assisted the midnight construction company by building a shore ramp for the impending arrival of Fiji’s first roll on roll off passenger ferry, the 60m “Ovalua”.  

After visiting 70 countries 10 times, I managed to sell our innovative ferry designs to 47 countries around the globe. All of the shore ramp geometries were based off the MSL  

During my travels, I observed Maurice Strong, the founder of the UN Environment Program creating a significant business based on fear of global warming by declaring that “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about ?” Strong’s influence lasted for 20 years until 2005 when he was disgraced, but his legacy of fear lives on.   

We all heard Al Gore’s bold predictions of catastrophic global warming, melting glaciers and of course drastic sea level rises. As a ship designer, I was very happy with this prospect of water coverage of the earth increasing from 71% as it would need more ships. Secondly, I could take the dinghy from my old yacht right into my favourite coffee shop and provided the staff had welly boots or gumboots big enough, pick up my coffee in style. 

Alas, in 2013 the song sheet of “global warming” changed seamlessly into “climate change” when the UN’s IPCC finally ‘fessed up that the earth had actually been cooling for the previous 17 years. Despite this revelation, the closed shop of UN bureaucrats and self-promoting scientists, the fear generated by Strong and his sycophants had already captivated the minds of millions of people and media outlets globally, all too lazy to check the facts.  

Do I believe in Climate Change? of course I do! Climate is temperature. Sit out in your backyard for 24 hours with a beer in one hand and a thermometer in the other and watch the climate change hourly.  

The capital of climate change is definitely Melbourne. I still tell the story of a ship’s captain, who had a pet cat. This cat would do a forward somersault if it was going to be a nice day, or a back somersault if it was going to be a rainy day. After three days in Melbourne, the cat died of exhaustion.  

Anyone who has been there is aware that for Melbourne, picking the right clothes for a day out in and around this interesting city is indeed a challenge. I know, I used to live there, and like many locals moved to Queensland where the temperature is more pleasant and fluctuations are smaller.  

Do I believe in global warming? No, because after flying through Singapore for over 50 years, they always tell us on arrival the temperature is between 29-31 degrees. 

So in the last few months, I have contacted many operators of our ferry designs to find out what is the change in the Mean Sea Level, using the local harbourmaster’s wooden tide gauge, not a computer model. From Venezuela, Bahamas, Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, UK, Abu Dhabi, Holland and Africa, some were up some were down, but the average was marginally higher by around 25 millimetres. Almost imperceptible, but that’s not what government computer modelling continue to tell us. 

Would that small increase come from melting glaciers? I doubt it, but I have observed in most countries visited over decades, massive waterfront reclamation projects, with billions of cubic metres creating airports, new container ports, residential land and assorted activities. Governments love doing this as it creates land that they can sell, and also source tax on an ongoing basis. But they are generally quiet about such activities and happy to head nod about melting glaciers as the culprit. Wellington’s waterfront streets were all reclaimed land. Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai have had recent massive reclamation as have cities along China’s coastline.  

More recently the world has witnessed the diminutive Spratley islands having a massive reclamation by China into a sizeable defence base, while the bewildered Filipino leadership stood idly by. 

So as an Australian taxpayer, Prime Minister, please do not waste our taxpayer funds by going to Glasgow’s COP gabfest. Stay here, focus on getting the eight imposters off the bridge. Then surround yourself with people in the real world, not the sycophants of Maurice Strong 

I am happy to go as your representative and truthfully stand up and tell them my findings of what is actually happening around the globe (and visit my Scottish rellies at the same time).