So, Liam asks me this morning:

"Can we buy a Playstation Game this weekend, Andy?"

(he doesn't call me Dad anymore)

You can use your credit card.

Are we on the same page here?"

 

Holy crapola! Soon, he'll be exploring strategies to optimise our leisure opportunities going forward.

 

 

From the BBC:

Why NZ is a lifestyle superpower:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8683377.stm

It was the usual gushing stuff, until this bit:

"
It's just about to launch the world's most comprehensive emissions trading scheme to curb greenhouse gases, and some of its most senior civil servants are so with it, they look like they should be running organic supermarkets rather than the country
"

That's actually probably quite good advice.

Nick Smith, fancy a career as a greengrocer?

I had to check the date, but it is not April 1st.

Apparently, Sarah Colwill, who lives in Plymouth Devon, started speaking with a Chinese accent after a bad headache.

You can check out the video and article here

Now call me a sceptic, but she does seem to change a few words here and there to sound "more foreign".

Anyway, lets hope she makes a speedy recovery and starts talking like a real West Country person,
and lets also hope that the Chinese don't start talking like The Wurzels down here:

From Wikipedia:

In political jargon, the term useful idiot was used to describe Soviet sympathizers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them. The implication was that though the person in question naïvely thought themselves an ally of the Soviets or other Communists, they were actually held in contempt by them, and were being cynically used.

The term is now used more broadly to describe someone who is perceived to be manipulated by a political movement, terrorist group, hostile government, or business, whether or not the group is Communist in nature

There seem to be a lot of useful idiots around at the moment

From the BBC

"New York City officials have agreed to pay up to $657.5m (£437m) to thousands of rescue and clean-up workers at the Ground Zero site of the 9/11 attacks.

The settlement would compensate more than 10,000 plaintiffs who say they were made sick by dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers"

Two thousand or so citizens die in the 9/11 attacks, and people are claiming for "dust injury"?

What is wrong with us?

This article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph highlights some very worrying issues in the UK's energy policies proposed by the Conservative Party.

There seems a very real possibility that there will be a major energy crisis in the UK in the next few years, and much of it can be blamed, as usual, on the UK and EU's obsession with climate change.

Lord Monckton on PJTV

Compare this with TVNZ's pathetic attempt.

One may not agree with everything he has to say, but Christopher Monckton is correct in one thing:

The internet is now the mainstream media.

Goodbye, TV and newspapers, you are now no longer needed. You are irrelevant.

Some years ago when I was working in the Geophysical Survey industry in Aberdeen, Scotland, I went on a course delivered by Les Hatton.

Les struck me as a true gent. Intelligent, humble, and funny. His course in "safer C" left a lasting impression on me.

Well, it was interesting to see his name crop up on The Register where he questioned the IPCC claim that there was a link between hurricane activity and recent warming.

His conclusion, which is available at the Register link above, is fully verifiable by anyone with basic Excel skills. He claims that there is no statistical link.

Les emailed me today to say that this article  is his second most downloaded paper in his whole career, which is not insignificant.

On the same day, Roger Pielke Jr reported that the World Met Office came to exactly the same conclusion (OK, more or less).

My point? Well, Les Hatton isn't exactly the guy down the pub with an opinion. He is a respected academic with an impressive track record in Geophysics and Software Engineering.

If he can pick up some data an run it through Excel, and come to the same conclusion as the supposed "experts" in their area, in a matter of days. then why on earth don't the climate scientists open all their work to outside scrutiny?

On the same day, I hear that John Graham-Cumming has had his work confirmed by the UK Met Office showing bugs in their temperature software.

As I have said before, and as many others have said, including Steven Mosher, we need to open up the whole game to the public domain.

This is the only way trust will be restored in climate science.

This write-up from James Delingpole nicely exposes some of the obvious gaps in the carbon trading logic.

This story was covered by Christopher Booker a while back, so I am quite familiar with it. The amazing thing is that the mainstream media has completely avoided the topic.

The synopsys is this: "

Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy.

Corus is owned by Tata Steel of India.   Recently, Tata received “EU-carbon-credits” worth up to £1bn, ostensibly so that steel-production at Redcar would not be crippled by the EU’s “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. By closing the plant at Redcar – and not making any “carbon-emissions” – Tata walks off with £1bn of taxpayers’ money, which it will invest in its steel-factories in India, where there is no “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”.

"

So, Tata walk off with one billion pound of carbon credits, that they can trade freely on the carbon market. Happily paid for by the British taxpayer.

A new steelworks is opened in India, with no net change in emissions whatsoever

My dear old NZ government is apparently committed to an emissions trading scheme, which will open up all sorts of similar irregularities. Meanwhile, the average NZ householder lives in a poorly insulated, inefficient house; we export our coal to China, so they can build us windmills that will never supply our energy needs. Major polluters get subsidised by the NZ taxpayer.

Damned right -  it's time to get angry.

Prof Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University has written a very well written piece over here which discusses Climategate with particular reference to his concept of Post Normal Science.
I enjoyed the read, but these are my comments that I posted on WUWT:

This is a well written piece, but it is easy to be seduced by the language. Personally, I find the concepts of “post normal science” quite disturbing. I have worked as a scientist and as a software developer for some 30 years. I have also undertaken a lot of endevours such as climbing in the Himalaya, paragliding, and kayaking. In all of these activities, there are often times when the “stakes are high” In these situations, we do not throw out our preconceived ideas. In all this areas, we develop processes where we can react to the high pressure demands of the task in hand with a clear and reasoned approach. When facing an impending storm at 6000m in the Gangotri mountains, believe me the last thing you need is a paradigm shift. In this sense, I do not understand why climate change “science” needs a paradigm shift, especially as there is no immediate signal that any drastic action is required

A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,[1] kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence and/or terror, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain

Wikipedia

Great article on the collapse of AGW, as he sees it.

Very thought provoking

Today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and it seemed appropriate to remember what this meant to me as a young child watching this live back in 1969 on a grainy black and white TV

At the time, the kids of my generation were transfixed my the Apollo programme and by the moon landing. We had been brought up on a diet of "Dr Who" and "Thunderbirds", and to have a real life space adventure in front of our eyes was truly very exciting.

In some ways, the fate of the NASA programme seemed a microcosm of life itself, from child-like optimism to adult reality and perhaps, ultimately, disappointment.

I still remember the TV programmes on BBC with the ebullient James Burke and Patrick Moore. I had all the Saturn rockets, lunar modules etc as Airfix models.

I recently saw the Lunar module and astronaut gear at London's science museum. It is staggering that those guys got to the moon and back in such primitive gear.

My generation, that of Barack Obama too, sits uncomfortably between Baby Boomers and Gen X. The phrase "Generation Jones" has been coined for us, but for me, I prefer "Generation Apollo".

It was just such a defining era of my life.