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An opinion from Owen McShane on the gas leak

An opinion from Owen McShane on the gas leak:

This is the best thing to happen in NZ this year.

People had no idea how dependent we all are on gas and how much benefit it provides.
The only long term answer to this problem, caused by a leak in a single pipeline, is to find several gas wells distributed around the country (most likely to be off shore) and create a gas grid like the electric grid that means every location has alternative supplies of gas.

Gas is the fuel of the future. We are now finding massive wells of gas wells evenly distributed all around the world. They have even found a shale gas well in England of trillions of cubic metres.

The Middle East dominance of fuel supplies is over and Peak Oil is no longer an issue. Gas generates electricity and the electricity can power our cars and buses. GAs is the starting point for a whole new petrochemical industry.

We will need some form of liquid fuels for our aircraft but we would get enough of that as an offshoot from some of the wells.

But a number of Political parties and Green lobbyists and Coastal Iwi say we should ban exploration for gas and oil offshore.

The Other Climate Theory

In April 1990, Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times "To Skeptics on Global Warming" in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers.

He soon became vice president and his conviction that climate change was dominated by man-made emissions went mainstream. Western governments embarked on a new era of anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research that might justify it. As far as the average Western politician was concerned, the debate was over.

But a few physicists weren't worrying about Al Gore in the 1990s. They were theorizing about another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or "cosmic rays," whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth.

These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.

9/11 and the Successful War

It has been 10 years since 9/11, and all of us who write about such things for a living are writing about it. That causes me to be wary. I prefer being the lonely voice, but the fact is that 9/11 was a defining moment in American history. On Sept. 12, 2001, few would have anticipated the course the resulting war would take — but then, few knew what to think. The nation was in shock. In retrospect, many speak with great wisdom about what should have been thought about 9/11 at the time and what should have been done in its aftermath. I am always interested in looking at what people actually said and did at the time.

The global warmists’ dam breaks

A graph they'd prefer you not to notice.

Tucked away near the end of online supplementary material, and omitted from the printed CLOUD paper in Nature, it clearly shows how cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules (“particles”) that in the real atmosphere can grow and seed clouds. In an early-morning experimental run at CERN, starting at 03.45, ultraviolet light began making sulphuric acid molecules in the chamber, while a strong electric field cleansed the air of ions. It also tended to remove molecular clusters made in the neutral environment (n) but some of these accumulated at a low rate.

As soon as the electric field was switched off at 04.33, natural cosmic rays (gcr) raining down through the roof of the experimental hall in Geneva helped to build clusters at a higher rate. How do we know they were contributing? Because when, at 04.58, CLOUD simulated stronger cosmic rays with a beam of charged pion particles (ch) from the accelerator, the rate of cluster production became faster still.

The British Riots - from The Australian

The riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.
They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.
Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.
Consider for a moment the following: although youth unemployment in Britain is very high, that is to say about 20 per cent of those aged under 25, the country has had to import young foreign labour for a long time, even for unskilled work in the service sector.
The reasons for this seeming paradox are obvious to anyone who knows young Britons as I do.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-bound Dr. John is a lifelong rambler looking for redemption

He never intended to be Dr. John. He didn’t even want to lead the band.

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. aspired to be a professional songwriter, producer, session musician and sideman, like the utilitarian New Orleanians who forged his creative worldview in the 1950s.

Forty-three years after he reluctantly stepped into the spotlight as Dr. John the Night Tripper, his peers have welcomed him into rock’s most exclusive fraternity.

Monday night at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, Rebennack will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Neil Diamond, Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, Leon Russell and ‘60s girl group singer Darlene Love.

This year alone, the Recording Academy handed out 109 Grammy Awards. By contrast, only 605 people have been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since its 1986 inception. They include Rebennack’s fellow New Orleanians Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, Allen Toussaint, Lloyd Price, Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson.

[Click link below to read full article]

Lunch with Hone - as broadcast Jan 28, 2011

I am writing to express my disappointment and disgust with the foul language used by a sitting MP in a family restaurant in the presence of children.

On Wednesday 19 January my wife and I dropped by the Bank Street McDonald's in Whangarei for a quick lunch. While we were eating, a group of people, including Hone Harawira sat down at the table next to us and we were only separated by a thin partition.

While everyone else at the table spoke quietly to each other or made discrete cellphone calls, Mr Harawira carried on a loud, basically one-sided discussion with a woman across the table.

The only voice we could hear was that of Mr Harawira and his frequent use of "f" words, as well as the even cruder language he used to describe someone he referred to as "Helen Keys."

If Mr Harawira wants to carry on like that in his own home or on his marae, then that's his business. But my wife and I don't appreciate being subjected to his loudmouthed and totally inappropriate crudity in a public place and don't think the children who were in the restaurant at the time should be subjected to it either.

Let Mr Harawira be a "legend in his own lunchtime," not in ours.

Kind regards,

2010 Was the Warmest Year on Record - rebuttal

Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

Let Huck Finn tell it as it was

"That is just the way with some people,” says Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s eponymous novel, published in 1885. “They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.” Huck was talking about the Widow Douglas’s disapproval of smoking. But his point applies more generally to the legions of American parents and political activists who have lately sought, with considerable success, to ban or censor Twain’s work.

Huckleberry Finn is not the world’s greatest novel, but it is the most American of the world’s great novels. It follows Huck on a rafting voyage down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave. Along the way, with subtlety, wryness and explosive humour, Twain deflates the ideology of racism as Americans lived it in the 19th century. For US adolescents, the book has been an irreplaceable bridge from juvenile into adult reading. Its page-turning picaresque draws the reader towards deep questions of the human condition. Unfortunately for present-day sensibilities, it does so in the dialect of Missouri in the 1840s. Twain’s characters use the word “nigger” at least 200 times.

[Click link below to read full article - registration required (free).]

Why Most Published Research Findings are False

Those aren’t my words — it’s the title of a 2005 article, brought to my attention by Cal Beisner, which uses probability theory to “prove” that “…most claimed research findings are false”. While the article comes from the medical research field, it is sufficiently general that some of what it discusses can be applied to global warming research as well.

I would argue that the situation is even worse for what I consider to the central theory of the climate change debate: that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere causes significant warming of the climate system. Two corollaries of that theory are that (1) the warming we have seen in recent decades is human-caused, and (2) significant warming will continue into the future as we keep using fossil fuels.