Greenie study comes to some awkward conclusions

Some amusing stuff here.  Ozone depletion is doing something new and nasty?  What about the 1989 Montreal Protocol and the ozone hole?  Hasn't the ozone hole mostly healed up by now?  Instead of depleting, shouldn't the ozone be increasing?  Is this report undermining the ozone hole story? It would appear that it is.

And in one way, that's reasonable.  The ozone hole waxes and wanes as it always has and its greatest extent was in fact in September last year.  So the Montreal convention of which Greenies are so proud has in fact achieved exactly nothing. But by the same token ANY systematic change in the ozone levels is a fiction, including ozone depletion.  So the claims below are  rubbish.

I could go on but I like a sentence from the Abstract too much to quarrel further with it:  "climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends"

Translating that into plain English:  "The global warming theory is wrong.  It does not predict reality".  How's that for today?

Journal abstract follows the summary below


Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion over the Antarctic are increasingly pushing rain-bearing storm fronts away from Australia's west and south, according to a new international study.

The research, which involved the Australian National University and 16 other institutions from around the world, has just been published in the Nature Climate Change journal.

It found Southern Ocean westerly winds and associated storms were shifting south, down towards Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of rain.

ANU Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, the lead Australian researcher, said this had contributed to a decline of more than 20 per cent in winter rainfall in southwestern Australia since the 1970s.

"That band of rainfall that comes in those westerly winds is shifting further south, so closer towards Antarctica," Dr Abram, from the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said.

The study attributed this shift directly to human-induced climate change, primarily from rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.

Dr Abram said the loss of rain combined with "2016 being on track to smash the hottest-year record was ominous for communities and the environment".

"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are remote but this region influences Australia's heatwaves, affects whether our crops get the winter rainfall they need and determines how quickly our ocean levels rise," she said.

The international research team examined how recent Antarctic climate trends compared to past climate fluctuations using natural archives such as ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice sheet.

They found the bigger picture of the region's climate trends remained unclear because of Antarctica and the Southern ocean's "extreme fluctuations in climate year to year".

Dr Abram explained the climate measurements were not yet long enough "for the signal of anthropogenic climate change to be clearly separated from this large natural variability".

Lead author Dr Julie Jones, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, said there was still an enormous amount to learn about the Antarctic climate.

"At face value, many of the climate trends in Antarctica seem counter-intuitive for a warming world," Dr Jones said.

"Scientists have good theories for why, but these ideas are still difficult to prove with the short records we are working with."

SOURCE

Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate

Julie M. Jones et al.

Abstract

Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the 36-year satellite era, significant linear trends in annual mean sea-ice extent, surface temperature and sea-level pressure are superimposed on large interannual to decadal variability. Most observed trends, however, are not unusual when compared with Antarctic palaeoclimate records of the past two centuries. With the exception of the positive trend in the Southern Annular Mode, climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends. This suggests that natural variability overwhelms the forced response in the observations, but the models may not fully represent this natural variability or may overestimate the magnitude of the forced response.

Nature Climate Change 6, 917–926 (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3103




How can we call something a thousand-year storm if we don’t have a thousand years of climate observations?

The article below gives the official NOAA answer to that question.  It is a bit heavy with statistics but it makes a fair point given its assumptions.  And the main assumptions is that the recent record is representative of the longer record.

And that assumption is wrong.  We know that the longer climate record had much more extreme events than the recent record has.  There were warm periods, little ice ages etc.  The recent record CANNOT be used as an estimate of the longer record because it is not representative of the longer record.

What they say is not guesswork. They are not just making things up. It is conventional extrapolation but the conditions for accurate extrapolation are not met.

I give the text minus graphs below just to give readers an idea of the argument.  It is a well set-out and respectable argument but it relies on a false premise.  And, sadly, they must know it is a false premise.  The writer is capable of good academic work but has prostituted his work to prove a falsehood.  We CANNOT accurately know things about the climate of the past for which we have no historic data


The summer of 2016 overflowed with extreme rain events. Here at Climate.gov, we’ve written about two of them: the June floods in southern West Virginia and the mid-August floods in Louisiana.

After the historic flooding in West Virginia in June, the National Weather Service said that in parts of West Virginia, 24-hour rainfall amount—more than 10 inches in some places—were a thousand-year event. We often do not have observations that go back 100 years, let alone 1,000. So how do scientists figure that out?  The answer lies in statistics.

Precipitation, rain, West Virginia, flooding
An "early glimpse" of 24-hour rainfall totals from storms over West Virginia on June 23, 2016, based on PRISM data from Oregon State University. "Early glimpse" data may not include data from all stations in the reporting network, and totals should be considered preliminary. Even the preliminary totals are enormous, however, with up to 8 inches of rain in many areas of southeastern West Virginia. Map by NOAA Climate.gov.

Dinosaurs and data

Estimating the size of a thousand-year event using a much shorter history of observations is like how paleontologists can take an incomplete collection of fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex bones and turn them into a picture of what T-rex  probably looked like when alive. The climate “bones” are all the observations we have. Since we have an admittedly incomplete set of weather observations, we have to use what we’ve got to create an image of the actual climate “dinosaur.”

Let’s work through it with a real-life example. I have compiled over 80 years’ worth of daily rainfall observations from the Beckley VA Hospital in West Virginia, near where June rains were so extraordinary. First, I eliminated any year with more than 10 day of missing data. Next, I pulled the highest daily rainfall amount that occurred in each year (1). Some years clearly have larger daily rainfall maximums than others.

Annual maximum precipitation, rain, bar graph
Annual maximum daily precipitation totals from 1909 to 2015 at a weather station located at Beckley VA Hospital in West Virginia. Years where more than 10 days of precipitation data were missing are excluded. NOAA Climate.gov based on data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

To figure out how rare a particular rainfall event was, we need to understand the range of the data. We’ll start by putting the values in order from smallest to largest.

Annual maximum precipitation totals (inches) sorted from smallest to largest for 82 years at Beckley VA hospital in Beckley, West Virginia. The annual maximum precipitation total exceeded 4 inches in only two of the 82 years. NOAA Climate.gov map based on station data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Ordering the data from lowest to highest allows us to see the spread in totals but doesn’t help us figure out what is the most common daily rainfall maximum. For that, we need to sort the values into bins defined by rainfall amount (a bin for 0 inches, 0-0.25, 0.25-0.5 inches etc), like sorting clothes into piles based on size. It is at this step, that we can begin to see if there is a pattern.

histogram, precipitation frequency, heavy rain, extreme, West Virginia

A histogram of annual daily maximum precipitation totals for Beckley, West Virginia. There are 82 years in total. Precipitation totals are sorted into 0.25-inch bins. The most common bin, with 18 events, represented daily precipitation totals between 2 and 2.25 inches. 80 of the 82 years had precipitation amounts less than 4 inches. NOAA Climate.gov figure based on data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Certain piles have more items of clothing in them than others: we have more mediums than extra-larges so to speak. It is clear that some yearly 24-hour rainfall maximums occur more often than others. In 18 of 80 years, the highest 24-hour rainfall was between 2 and 2.25 inches. In 15 years, the highest daily rainfall total was between 1.75 and 2.0 inches. Only one time in 80 years was there a daily record above 5 inches.

However, the other thing that is clear is that the spread is incomplete. In this example, there are no years in which the highest daily rainfall total was between 4 and 4.5 inches, but there are some cases between 4.75-5 inches and 5.25-5.5 inches. It’s not physically plausible that the atmosphere would just never produce those rain amounts. It’s more logical to assume that if we had enough data going far enough back or forward in time, that there would eventually be a daily event filling in the gaps.

This is where statistics come in. Scientists apply what they call a “distribution” (the dark line in the figure below), a relationship of the magnitude of the rainfall to how often that rainfall amounts occurs (2). The distribution line is like the final picture of the dinosaur. It uses the observations (bones) as the input for a reconstruction of the whole climate picture.

The observations from Beckley, WV, of the frequency of rain events of different sizes (dots inside bars) can be used to estimate the full range of likely events and their frequency (dark line). This statistical estimate is called the probability density function, and it's like the process of using the bones from an incomplete dinosaur skeleton to describe what the complete creature probably looked like. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NCEI.

And now, researchers can see how often an event of any rainfall amount is likely to occur. In fact, if we consider the total area under the curve (dark line) and recognize that it must equal 1.0 (100%), then the probability of a single event of a given size occurring at some point is simply the area under that portion of curve (dark line). The probability of a yearly daily maximum rainfall event greater than 4 inches, for example, is just the area from 4 on the x-axis to the right, bounded by the distribution line.

In this type of graph, the curved line marks a hypothetical list of all possible extreme rainfall events, with the caveat that the total area under the curved line must equal 1.0 or 100%. The percent chance of any single rain event being more than a specific amount is the percent of the total area to the right of that rainfall amount. The percent chance of a rain event less than or equal to that threshold can be found by subtracting the area to the right of the threshold from 100. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov.

Since we can figure out the probability for a given rainfall amount, we can also figure out what rainfall amounts correspond to specific probabilities like 0.1%, or said another way, a 1-in-1,000 year event (1/1000).

SOURCE  





Green pixie dust energy policies

Democrats fight climate change with renewable pixie dust, while rest of world burns fossil fuels

Paul Driessen

“There’s been a record six straight years of job growth, and new Census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation,” NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt misinformed Americans, as he launched the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate September 26.

In reality, Obama era economic growth has been an anemic 1-2% annually. More than 93 million working-age Americans are still not working, and over 6 million are working part-time, because their hours have been cut back or they cannot find full-time positions. We’re creating private sector jobs by turning four high-pay full-time jobs with good benefits into six lower-pay part-time positions with few or no benefits. Average middle class family incomes are still lower than in 2007.

The primary reasons: the world’s third highest top marginal corporate income tax rate (38.9%); a $1.9-trillion-per-year federal regulatory burden, equal to all individual and corporate taxes collected by the federal government in 2015; and an administration obsessed with “dangerous manmade climate change” and replacing reliable, affordable fossil fuels with expensive, mandated, subsidized “green” energy.

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats would expand these policies and the harm they cause.

America could become “the clean-energy superpower of the twenty-first century,” Mrs. Clinton said during the debate. “We can deploy a half-billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. That’s a lot of jobs, a lot of new economic activity.”

The “climate emergency,” the Democratic Party Platform (DPP) proclaims, is an “urgent threat” that demands immediate “ambitious investments” in new “green” energy systems. America must slash greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 2005 levels by 2050; get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2027; and ensure that the nation runs “entirely on clean energy by mid-century.”

The DPP also supports impeding or rejecting oil and gas leasing, drilling, fracking and pipelines, as well as gas-fired power plants – while accelerating and incentivizing wind and solar installations and transmission lines. It says America should “lead the fight against climate change,” locally and globally.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton has said she would stringently regulate hydraulic fracturing, banning oil and gas extraction from public lands is a “done deal,” and her party is “going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” (But it will re-train miners and fund their pensions with taxes and red ink.)

In short, Democrats support a government mandated and regulated energy system that would require constant infusions of taxpayer and consumer subsidies via grants, loans, feed-in tariffs and crony-corporatist arrangements. It will oppose fossil fuels that provide reliable, affordable energy – and generate tens of billions of dollars a year in lease bonuses, royalties, and corporate and personal taxes.

The Democrat policies are green pixie dust. They will never generate the energy and revenues required to put America back to work and rebuild our aging, broken infrastructure. And they ignore what developing countries are doing at a feverish pace: producing, buying and burning coal, oil and natural gas, to lift billions out of poverty and bring them modern living standards. But the Democrat Party faithful apparently believe chanting DPP mantras often enough will make them come true.

(By contrast, the Republican Party Platform supports free enterprise innovation and policies that increase domestic fossil fuel production on public and private lands, to create jobs, generate revenues, reinvigorate the economy, and “reduce America’s vulnerability” to foreign suppliers and price volatility.)

Many poor countries signed the Paris climate treaty. But they did so (a) to share in the trillions of dollars they expect currently rich nations to give them for climate change adaptation, mitigation and reparation; and (b) because developing nations are not required to reduce fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.

That means America may slash its plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide emissions, make its energy costs skyrocket and become uncompetitive in the international arena – but developing countries will emit 100 times what we painfully reduce. It is not the “leadership” that any sane country would provide.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama unilaterally ratified the Paris climate treaty on September 3. Barely three weeks later, China said it can no longer afford current levels of wind and solar subsidies, and so is sharply reducing renewable power generation. Instead, it plans to increase its thermal coal production by 182 million tons per year. Meanwhile, Chinese banks and construction companies are financing and building hundreds of new coal-fired generating units in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Africa, Latin America and beyond – including nearly two dozen in the Balkan countries.

India has become “the center of the world’s oil demand growth,” says Citigroup. Its economy will likely expand by 8% per year through 2021, its domestic coal production even faster, and coal demand for factories and electricity generation is rising so rapidly that India is financing a major coal mining operation in Mozambique.

Southeast Asian fossil fuel consumption is expected to double by 2040, to 1,070 million tons of oil equivalent per year. Oil, gas and coal will then represent 78% of the region’s energy mix, up from 74% today. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte again criticized Western powers for their “hypocrisy” in trying to restrict poor country development on the grounds of CO2 emissions and climate change.

Japan has joined this Asian bloc. Instead of reopening nuclear power plants or expanding renewable power generation, it is using coal and natural gas for 75% of its power, compared to 54% in 2011.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama’s “Power Africa” initiative has been a dismal failure. In 2013 he promised that the USA would bring the continent “more than 10,000 megawatts of cleaner, more efficient” renewable electricity. (By comparison, total US generating capacity is 1,069,000 MW.) So far, the project has provided less than 400 MW – 4% of what was promised, and 0.04% of US capacity.

As to getting all US energy from “clean, renewable” sources by 2050, that is a ridiculous pipe dream.

The United States currently plants corn on an area the size of Iowa, to produce ethanol that accounts for 10% of its gasoline fuel blend. Replacing 100% of US gasoline and diesel with corn ethanol would require cropland the size of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico combined! Plus massive amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides, tractor and truck fuel, and electricity for distilleries.

The USA now generates a measly 4% of its electricity from 49,000 wind turbines. Assuming 75 acres per megawatt, those turbines tower over lands the size of Connecticut. Generating all US electricity with wind would require more than 710,000 monstrous 400-foot-tall 1.5- to 2.0-MW turbines across 93 million acres – an area the size of Montana – costing over $3 trillion! (The same issues imperil solar power.)

It would also require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – crossing state and private lands via eminent domain and a “streamlined” federal permitting process. Of course, all those turbines and lines would require billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass, rare earth metals and other raw materials … plus land and energy for mining, production and installation … to produce electricity 15-20% of the time, so we end up with electrical power when it’s available, instead of when we need it.

Meanwhile turbine blades moving 180 mph at their tips will slice and dice millions of eagles, hawks and other birds and bats, from local habitats and even from nesting areas 100 miles from the turbines.

Put bluntly, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are trying to impose an energy – and economic – system that is totally, utterly unsustainable. It would bankrupt the nation, leave millions more jobless and homeless, impair human health and environmental quality, and bring no global CO2 reductions.

It’s time we had some grownup thinking and policies, instead of green pixie dust.

Via email




Dr. Fauci: Eliminating Zika-Carrying Mosquito Would Not Cause Profound Environmental Impact ‘At All’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, spoke Wednesday of the possibility of eliminating the Zika-carrying Aedes Aegypti mosquito through genetic modifications.

“You will never completely, nor should you, eliminate the mosquito, but there’s a certain subset,” he argued. “The Aedes Aegypti mosquito is a bad actor, so if we were able to suppress, if not eliminate, Aedes Aegypti, I don’t think there’s going to be an environmental impact that’s profound at all.”

Fauci joined Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Wednesday to speak with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the threat of the Zika virus and ways to combat it.

“Why doesn’t our species eliminate that species, Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes?” Goldberg asked. “I want to just hear you out on the efficacy of that idea, of genetically engineering them out of existence, and what are the environmental and ethical consequences of doing that?”

“The Aedes Aegypti mosquito, people call it the cockroach of mosquitoes,” Schuchat replied. “It’s really hard to get rid of.”

Schuchat noted the recent success in Miami’s Wynwood area, where the CDC lifted a travel warning for pregnant woman, saying it was no longer an active transmission zone.

“Aggressive integrated mosquito control was able - we believe - to stop, to really bring down the numbers in the Wynwood area and to stop local transmission,” she said. “This was with a combination of factors, but we think this one-two punch of area spraying with Naled insecticide to kill the adult mosquitoes and with BTI to kill the baby mosquitoes or the mosquito youth, that one-two punch really helped in an unprecedented way.”

“Whenever people talk about genetically modified anything, there’s always a segment of the population that pushes back understandably,” Fauci said of the possibility of genetically engineering the Zika-carrying mosquitoes out of existence. “You don’t want to perturb the environment in an irreversible way that might have unintended consequences.

“If you’re going to do that, you’ve got to do a test and an environmental impact to show that you’re not going to have deleterious consequences, and the FDA has already given permission for in a controlled way to take a look at whether or not that would be effective and what the impact would be, so I think there is a future to genetically modifying,” he concluded.

Fauci added that he personally thinks “we should try whatever we have at our armament tools to suppress mosquitoes that are the cause of disease such as Zika and other diseases. You will never completely, nor should you, eliminate the mosquito, but there’s a certain subset, as Ann said, the Aedes Aegypti mosquito is a bad actor, so if we were able to suppress - if not eliminate - Aedes Aegypti, I don’t think there’s going to be an environmental impact that’s profound at all.”

“I think there’s so many different mosquitoes that could take their place that you won’t have to worry about that,” he explained, “but that particular mosquito is terrible. It bites indoors. It bites outdoors, and the other thing about it is that unlike other mosquitoes, it just loves humans. It doesn’t like any, it doesn’t get distracted. It’s not a promiscuous mosquito. It only bites humans, and that’s a bad thing.”

Schuchat agreed that “we really need research and careful studies on all of these promising approaches to mosquito control, and we need better repellants and better pesticides.”

“I think the idea that we’ve neglected this area, there’s lots of room for evaluation and exploring, and we really want to see the data, so I think there are promising approaches,” she concluded.

SOURCE  




A Greenie tool hits blowback

I have no sympathy at all with the dead Greenie described below.  He was the tool of oppressive Greenie regulations that were interfering with a farmer's livelihood.  He knew that the regulations he was enforcing were causing great grief in the farming community but he continued being at the cutting edge of those regulations.  One hopes that a decent man would have resigned instead of continuing as an instument of tyranny.  But he continued in his role and paid a just price for it.

And there was no need for the heartburn.  If Greenies and their representatives had always insisted that farmers be compensated for financial losses inflicted on them by new regulations, there would have been very little anger.  But Greenies hate people and treated farmers as if they were cockroaches to be trodden on.  In their great arrogance they were as contemptous of farmers as they are of people generally.  To them, farmers were not people with feelings and interests but noxious pests interfering with their dreams of a new Eden.

Greenies depend on the peacable nature of ordinary decent people to get their regulations obeyed but on this occasion one elderly farmer cracked.  I would be delighted if there were more incidents like it.  We had enough Fascism in the 20th century to put us off all Fascism forever, including Ecofascism


ROBERT Strange is a haunted man. Hunted like an animal for 20 minutes by a man hellbent on killing, as his mate and colleague slowly bled out through three gunshot wounds, he lived a nightmare which still shocks him from his sleep.

It’s two years since Rob cradled dying environment protection officer Glen Turner in his arms in the dark on the dirt of a remote road outside a property at Croppa Creek, near Moree.

Glen had been shot three times by 78-year-old farmer Ian Turnbull: a man hellbent on revenge, and who will die in prison.

“He shot an innocent man, twice,” Robert, the only witness to the murderous 20-minute game of cat-and-mouse Turnbull played with the pair, tells Sunday Night journalist Steve Pennells, who has also gained the first interview with Glen’s wife, Alison.

“He went there with the sole intention of killing Glen.”
Glen Turner died in his colleague’s arms, survived by wife Alison, and two children. Picture: Channel 7

Glen Turner died in his colleague’s arms, survived by wife Alison, and two children. Picture: Channel 7Source:Supplied

In his first media interview since the murder, Robert fights tears as he reveals in chilling detail the panicked, macabre cat-and-mouse chase as Turnbull took down the man he had been fixated on after a long-running dispute with the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Glen’s employer, over illegal landclearing.

Land was a valuable commodity to Turnbull, the patriarch of a rich and powerful farming family in an area which boasts some of the most fertile land in Australia.

It was Glen’s job to police the clearing of native forest the area. Turnbull had done just that, illegally, and wound up in court.

By the time Turnbull had been fined $140,000 plus costs over the illegal clearing in 2011, Glen had become, in his mind, his nemesis, the focus of a hate bordering on obsession.

And Turnbull was to prove a merciless, and deadly enemy.

The pair hadn’t seen each other for almost two years until that fateful day on July 29, 2014, when Glen and Rob headed to Croppa Creek to take pictures of stacks of burning vegetation, evidence of fresh land clearing.

Late afternoon, Turner got wind they were there, picked up a pump action shotgun and got in his ute.

And the bloody nightmare began.

Rob fights tears recounting the horror as Turnbull got out of the ute, shotgun pointed, and advanced on them wordlessly.

He was 15 metres away when he fired. The first shot struck Glen’s cheek. The second hit high in his left shoulder. First the head, then the heart.

The gun swung towards Rob. Turnbull told him to get back, and drop his camera.

Cowering with his stricken mate behind their own vehicle, Rob pleaded they were unarmed. “I need to get him help, I need to get him out,” Rob begged.

Turnbull replied the only way Glen was leaving was in a body bag.

And the stalking began. Rob would encourage a heavily-bleeding Glen forward or back behind the vehicle to shield them. Turnbull would follow.

At one point Rob felt the gunshots whistle past his ears ands the words: “I told you to f****g get back. I will kill you.”

It went on for 20 minutes as the life sapped from Glen. “He was croaky, but still doing everything I told him to. Every time I told him to move forward or back and crouch, he did,” says Rob.

As darkness closed in, Turnbull seemed “frustrated” he hadn’t “done what he wanted to do”, Rob says.

“If he’d any sense of compassion he would have let us go,” he says. “He went there with the sole intention of killing Glen Turner, and he wasn’t leaving until he did.”

As the light slipped away, Glen knew he was dying, and made a break for it. Turnbull raised the gun. “I just said ‘oh no’,” Rob says, as Turnbull shot Glen in the back as he ran towards a line of trees.

He lowered the gun, looked at Rob and said: “I’m going home to wait for the police. You can go now.”

In the darkness, Rob turned the vehicle lights on Glen. “I sat down with him, poured some water over him and said “come on, we’ve got to get home’,” he tells Pennells.

“I knew he was dying.”  Hearing a car on the road, convinced it was Turnbull coming back to finish them both, Rob stood in the glare of the headlights, arms raised, eyes closed.

It wasn’t a shot that came. It was help.  As Rob cradled Glen in his arms, a neighbour gently told him his mate was gone.

SOURCE

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