Too Right is a supporter of enterprise and small government living in Auckland City. This blog will communicate his observations on issues that take his fancy. He welcomes comments on his blog.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Maryan Street Was a Director of Housing New Zealand 25 July 2001 18 May 2005
Isn't this the rankest hypocrisy?
The Companies Office records show Ms Street's directorship at Housing New Zealand as follows:
STREET, Maryan
25-JUL-2001
18-MAY-2005
23A Alexandra Road, Roseneath, Wellington
It was on Street's shift when many of the six conferences at luxury resorts happened. Doesn't she realise the gun she pointed at the Chair of Housing New Zealand for their culture of extravagance over the past nine years is pointing straight at her. The Chair and Board are culpable.
This is hilariously reminiscent of that marvelous scene in Mel Brooks's "Blazing Saddles" when the black sheriff holds his own revolver to his head and says to the advancing lynch squad, "Another Move and the Nigger Gets It"
Own Goal Maryan
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Icebreaker Trapped in Arctic Sea-Ice
Watts Up With That is always a good read; usually right on the case of the warming alarmists. It seems an enterprising travel tour firm has been offering summer tours to see "The Last of the Sea Ice". The tours are on the luxuriously appointed Polar Class Icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov.
Reports just in show the icebreaker has been stuck for 7 days in the sea icepack; drifting helplessly, wedged and stuck fast in very thick ice.
This is of course after we have a steady course of diatribe from the alarmists that the fabled Northwest Passage is now open (hence the reasoning behind the tour). The irony of being stopped cold by the very ice that does not exist was not lost on the travel editor of the Globe and Mail. He reported the first couple of days were amusing - by day six it was no longer amusing.
In a related story NASA-JPL has reported that the so called record loss of sea ice in 2007 was actually not attributable to temperature (global warming) but because unusual wind patterns blew the mobile (i.e floating) pack ice into warmer waters - it then melted.
Obama's Campaign is Doomed
Reports today Fidel Castro has endorsed the candidacy of US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama will further puncture his campaign.
Already Obama has the support of Hamas, a US Government declared terrorist organisation.
This news will seriously damage Obama's campaign to prove to the American people he is the right candidate for President - particularly as his opponent has the proven long career, experience and credibility to take on the role of Commander in Chief.
It is almost like the Democratic party has a death wish. This blogger thinks that once the campaign proper gets underway Obama will be unelectable.
New Zealand's own (New Zeal) blogger has achieved success from the blogosphere by diligently exposing Obama's links to US Marxists and has provided the evidence Obama's US communist party supporters have infiltrated the Democratic Party. New Zeal's author Trevor Loudon, has been invited to present his evidence in Washington...(Hat Tip Not PC) For New Zealand this is excellent news - 1 for the West (the west does not need a Marxist sympathizer snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq) and 2 for New Zealand (we don't need an inwardly focused democrat in the White House) ruining any prospect of further relaxing trade barriers.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Cunliffe and Cosgrove Dog Tucker?
I have spent the day wondering why Clark would call in the Auditor-General and allow him to set his own terms of reference and investigate all matters surrounding the shambles at the Department of Labour and particularly its Immigration Division.
It seems so un-Clark - letting Parliament's designated heavy hitter for anti corruption and independence on a hapless department and potentially her ministry...
I can only conclude she wants current Minister Cosgrove and former Immigration Minister Cunliffe (both from the right of the party) damaged - and probably mortally wounded, so they do not figure in the leadership contests come the blood-letting after the election.
There can be no other reason.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Random Impertinent Questions
How is the railways more environmentally sustainable when Cullen is driving than Paul Little?
How will Cullen owning the railways improve its integration with other transport modes and systems when Toll is a completely integrated transport, logistics, warehousing, freight forwarder and shipping company.
Why did Cullen leave Toll with the exclusivity of the rail freight forwarding business and network connections to the rail business.
Will Cullen have to buy Toll out of the freight forwarding business in order to provide meaningful access to the tracks by other freight forwarders.
If two globally successful railway operators Toll and Wisconsin Central could not make the railways work what has Cullen got that these two don't have?
If Cullen needed to buy the Railways to keep it in NZ hands why didn't he test the market for NZ buyers.
Monday, May 05, 2008
More Thoughts on the Government's Railway "Investment"
Today's investment by the Government buying out Toll's rail business is $1Billion - not $665Million.
I should have added to my earlier post the analysis of the Government investment of $665Million should include the loss of direct cash contribution by Toll of access charges of $48Million per annum. So rather than spending $665Million to avoid providing Toll and its customers a subsidy of $10Million the actual question for analysis is spending $665Million in June 2008 and ALSO losing a net contribution of $48Million per annum to rail operations. The present value of that annual loss of income for 10 years is -$337Million!!! (at a discount rate of 7% - a reasonable sense of what the Government could borrow at).
That makes the Government's direct investment in buying the Rail Operations off Toll as $1,000 Million - $1Billion! ($665M + $337M).
That number is not getting a hearing on the MSM tonight.
Over at Liberty Scott they have a good summary of Railway investment since the 1980's.
I would disagree with some of it - but overall a good summary and think piece. Their thoughts on subsidy are very good.
Historically rail uses a third of the fuel a truck does per tonne kilometre so it is very fuel efficient. I am not sure road user charges recover (on trucks) their full direct costs on the road network including depreciation or new investment.
Contact Energy Next on Cullen's Block?
Is Fran O'Sullivan onto something in her suggestion, the Statist, Finance Minister Dr Cullen might use the BG Group takeover of Origin Energy to acquire publicly listed Contact Energy back into state ownership?
Given the reasons Cullen has used to buy the rail assets off Toll, Cullen will be tempted.
Words like sustainable, integrated industry and so on would roll off his tongue.
At $5.4Billion market capitalisation today it would be a big bite - even for Dr Cullen. He would likely pay a lot more than that once it was in play. He also has no real leverage over Contact (unlike the situation with Toll who had to negotiate access with the government) without harming his own bevy of SOE generators and retailers.
He will be desperate to get a key asset back in his hands. Ignore the fact the non Government /private owners have made it into a fantastic business and it is not in need of state intervention.
Should we say, "Watch This Space".
Government to Buy Back Rail and Ferries for $665Million
Finance Minister Cullen has agreed to buy back the rail operations from Toll. Cullen's Statist credentials are now confirmed. Cullen said buying the rail operating business was the best way to increase investment in the industry and make it more responsive to customers' needs.
What could be more customer responsive than a business risking its own capital?
In a blow back to the Muldoon years Cullen says cabinet will soon consider multi-billion dollar investments into rolling stock.
Wasn't it having the then Railways managed by the government of the day that got it to 22,000 staff, and tiny four wheel wagons capable of 50km/h?
Cullen Says
Dr Cullen said Toll had done a good job increasing freight volumes and streamlining the operation of terminals, but it had struggled to run a "commercially viable" business without government support"...
So the Labour Government will be a more astute and cleverer operator than Toll - a multi-billion dollar transport company with significant operations worldwide?
Or will those subsidies go straight to staff, suppliers and customers? Cullen goes on
"The Government will now avoid paying subsidies to third parties and we also avoid the on-going disputes over the implementation of the National Rail Access Agreement that had the potential to destroy value in the business and erode the morale of the people who work in it."
Cullen's myopia against private capital is now absolutely declared. The subsidies will still be there - just they won't be efficiently filtered through one third party but through every begging bowl that is proffered. Customers, Staff, Suppliers, Local Government...
Toll has apparently been paying about $48 million a year since an access deal was struck in 2004, with the Government picking up the shortfall of about $10 million needed to maintain and improve the tracks.
So, the Government has agreed to spend $665 Million to avoid subsidising a private operator to the tune of $10Million per annum....instead the Government will subsidise itself. Not a bad idea if it was true...
I'll bet it costs the Government more than $10Million per annum to run its new rail operation...
As has been shown with OnTrack, the government owned rail infrastructure company, it is impossible to manage the myriad of customer, staff and supplier conflicts if you are state owned. The knowledge of the other side in a negotiation is government can always be persuaded to find the money - just ask Cunliffe - witness his debates with the Doctors and Nurses.
Surely Now is a Good Time to Re-Consider Whether Man Has Induced Climate Change
With the Government apparently considering a delay to aspects of the Emissions Trading System - only as a sop to a damaged economy, and because the country faces a dodgy electricity supply situation this winter - perhaps now is a good time to carefully review the evidence on anthropogenic global warming.
The catastrophic predictions of the effect on the New Zealand economy of imposing carbon charges (particularly if relatively speaking, the unilateral imposition of those charges) mean a careful government would examine very carefully the evidence before implementing the change. A wise government would take the time to consider the null hypothesis.
The Null hypothesis could be:
"Global warming is not due to greenhouse gas produced as a result of human activity"
Why is considering this hypothesis important?
The evidence seem to be that any warming phase has now disappeared.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean that spends roughly 20-30 years in the cool phase or the warm phase.
In 1905, PDO switched to a warm phase. In 1946, PDO switched to a cool phase. In 1977, PDO switched to a warm phase. In 1998, PDO showed a few cool years.
The PDO appears to have flipped and we are in a cooling phase.
The global environment is now apparently in a cooling phase and if it (as might be likely) is a multi-decade phase we'll need to prepare for a cooler climate and possibly more than beanies.
Thus the PDO mainly affects temperatures around the Pacific Rim - the Pacific is in fact a very large part of the earth - what is the effect/correlation of its cycling on global temperatures?
From the PDO data itself, it is apparently just too soon to be able to tell whether the current cool phase is just one of the shorter cycles, or whether it is the beginning of a longer term cycle observed back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Back to the case for carbon madness in New Zealand.
If the case for anthropogenic global warming fails it follows that the ETS can be shelved for good. Ditto coal fired power generation could be back on the agenda. Ditto the ruinous bio-fuel agenda could be ditched.
Let me state at the outset - I am all for being a good steward of all our resources. We should only use what we need and leave a minimum footprint in all we do.
Considering the power crisis. New Zealand has at least 1,000 years of coal reserves. We are an energy rich country.
Why oh why are we facing a power crisis?
Because Labour policy decisions to impose a moratorium on new fossil fueled base load generation have left the country relying on imperfect lake storage systems. No lake - no power - simple.
If the case for man made global warming was not valid we could have all the power we need.
The evidence is becoming clearer day by day that the warming in the latter half of the 20th Century is normal climate variability. More on this below.
Moving to the case for man made global warming - by the day the case against the IPCC climate change agenda gets stronger.
At every step recently the evidence (note evidence, not projection) is completely counter to any of the published IPCC projections.
Perhaps the most interesting point is the recent warming is ahead of the IPCC scenario projection....ie it was warmer than the models predicted....I'll come back to that further in this post.
When is the mainstream media and perhaps more importantly governments or opposition governments going to pick up this vital discussion.
The IPCC scenario projections are being proved incorrect as every month goes by. The only response of the IPCC prognosticators has been to say the results are unexpected but have no fear warming will return soon.
The realities: The mean global surface temperature has been reducing since 1998.
A German study, published by Nature last week, claimed that, ...(the world) may cool down until 2015 "while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions".Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF) published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.
What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).
The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.
Discussion of this at Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.
It is notable that the German computer predictions published last week by Nature forecast a decade of cooling due to deep-ocean movements in the Atlantic, without taking account of how this may now be reinforced by a similar, even greater movement in the Pacific.
Mr Watts points out that the West coast of the USA might already be experiencing these effects in the recent freezing temperatures that have devastated orchards and vineyards in California, prompting an appeal for disaster relief for growers who fear they may have lost this year's crops.
The fact is that what has been happening to the world's climate in recent years, since global temperatures ceased to rise after 1998, was not predicted by any of those officially-sponsored models.
Returning to my note above that the measured warming in the later period of the 20th Century was ahead of the IPCC scenario projections:
Perhaps the most cogent view on the forcing effect of normal climate variability is a comment by a reader at Climate Audit
“One of the reasons I got annoyed with the IPCC when I was involved, was an almost universal dismissal of the contribution of natural forcing to the observed warming - particularly the role of decadal-scale climate variability such as the PDO. In discussions with one of our Nobel Peace Prize winning meteorologists back in the 1990s, their position was that the greenhouse effect had overwhelmed natural variability and it just would not be possible for the PDO to switch.”
This is important - the recent warming was higher than the IPCC models predicted. Perhaps, just perhaps the warming was an outcome of natural variability in the ocean?
Rather than investigate, the warmists said greenhouse effects had overwhelmed natural variability....
So what is causing the cooling phase clearly in evidence?
The Government should can it and fast. It is a disaster and would be disastrous for NZ if introduced. Labour with the cunning Cullen canniving to take the ETS off the agenda for now will try to introduce it in the next parliament. That is a secret agenda. You see these morons, Clark , her simpering dick of a Climate Change Minister Parker and the buffoon Chauvel (steering the legislation through the select committee) actually believe this crap about anthropogenic warming.
National if they have the balls should use this "secret agenda" as a weapon to smash the Labour Government.
National should say now they will not introduce any form of ETS for the next term of Government - a la their (misguided) state owned asset policy.
National would then challenge Labour to declare whether they too will agree to shelve this disastrous policy for all time.
As I have blogged today - the evidence against warming is mounting. The anthropogenic warming case is getting thinner by the day.
National needs to follow-up its well timed and thought out policy on eliminating the additional fuel taxes proposed by Labour with a similar strong statement on the ETS. The electorate is extremely sceptical that there is any benefit at all for New Zealand by the ETS, over any time period - short or long.
For good measure National should also state that in Government it will review the entire Kyoto Policy in light of the new evidence that CO2 is not contributing to global warming and that the global climate seems to be in a cooling phase - further evidence today from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.
Finally, National should smack Labour for the idiocy of its energy policy - its moratorium on base load coal fired stations means New Zealand has no stand by if the lakes run short this winter. This lunacy can be sheeted home to Hodgson, Parker and Co. It has nothing to do with Bradford's reforms - Labour have had nine long years to put in place solutions.
More Evidence the Warm Phase is Over
My earlier post on the warming lull until 2015 led me to read this week's Nature. Most interesting.
Well well, an article reporting Antarctica's deep ocean waters are getting colder after years of warming....
This report is just in from a German expedition returning...
The latest work, by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, found that temperatures have cooled slightly since 2005, suggesting that more cold surface water is reaching the deep ocean, perhaps as a result of changes in sea-ice coverage and atmospheric conditions. The team plans to revisit the region during the summer of 2010–11.
It defies Physics to suggest we have global warming yet colder surface water (a relative measurement) is somehow making it to lower depths to cool that level.
Didn't the Nobel winning liar Al Bore show movies of warming causing ice shelves to calve in the Antarctic seas? Since proven to be a computer generated fiction - In April 2008 it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." Here's the transcript
SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)
(Voiceover) Al Gore's 2006 documentary, 'An Inconvenient Truth," makes the same point with actual video of ice shelves calving. Which shots have more impact?
AL GORE (FORMER UNITED STATES VICE PRESIDENT)
And if you were flying over it in a helicopter, you'd see it's 700 feet tall. They are so majestic.
SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)
(Voiceover) Wait a minute, that shot looks just like the one in the opening credits of "The Day After Tomorrow."
KAREN GOULEKAS (VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR)
Yeah, that's, that's our shot. That's a fully computer generated shot. There's nothing real in there.
SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)
(Voiceover) Audiences expect Hollywood to twist fact into fiction. But Gore's documentary does the opposite, using a fake shot to make a real point, that ice shelves are disappearing, and vanishing ice means global warming.
Apparently, ABC tried to get a comment from Gore concerning the matter, but none was forthcoming:
Panic Over - Global Warming canceled ......until 2015
News published today in Nature - the popular peer reviewed reference of the Warmists - that Global Warming is on hold until 2015.
The researchers models suggests the current cooling phase will continue 'till at least 2015.
This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
Have we reached a tipping point? Is this the first shoot of spring? Grudging acceptance of the fallacy of anthropogenic warming?
Rather than accept the warming period is long over the Warmists are saying "their model suggests that after a lull warming may resume in 10 years..."
Interesting isn't it - presumably the world and Asia in particular will continue to spew increasing volumes of CO2 until our next date with oblivion, 2015 - at the same time the world is cooling? But only for a while mind. Something doesn't add up.
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