Corruption, de Freitas, Vaillant

corruption:
In NZ: Samoan MP convicted of corruption:
Seems he let some Thai men stuck in Samoa stay in his house. They did some tiling work as a thankyou.
Somehow one guy didnt get a visa, got angry and called the NZ police.
Meanwhile in England:
"contributing to the democratic life of the country through trade union activities or canvassing for a political party" - could reduce the [visa] process from three years to one."
And back in NZ a minister gets $1K per week for renting his house from his wife.
Dont get me wrong, I thought about hiring a hit on the RP agent who took money from me for a visa and didnt do squat, but this conviction seems like racism.

---

Wildfires
The area of forest burnt by wildfires in the USA.. to increase by over 50% by 2050.. the worst affected areas .. Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, wildfire ... 78% and 175% respectively.
...based on a increase of 1.6° C over 40 years.

---

Amazon.......
the Amazon river is 11 million years old and took its present shape 2.4 million ybp... two boreholes near the mouth of the river
nasa

---

Peak Oil
The International Energy Agency believes peak oil will come perhaps by 2020. But it also believes that we are heading for an even earlier "oil crunch" because demand after 2010 is likely to exceed dwindling supplies.???
(isnt that the definition of Peak?)

---

Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s chief executive, Jeroen Van Der Veer warned that the next spike in oil prices is already in the making as demand will continue to grow and the current oil and gas industry cannot supply all the additional needs.

---

Climate Denialogue in NZ
, there is an atrocious paper that has just been published in JGR by McLean, de Freitas and Carter that is doing the rounds of the denialosphere. These authors make the completely unsurprising point that that there is a correlation between ENSO indices and global mean temperature – something that has been well known for decades – and then go on to claim that that all trends are explained by this correlation as well. This is somewhat surprising since their method of analysis (which involves taking the first derivative of any changes) eliminates the influence of any trends in the correlation.
... In New Zealand, Salinger got the sack for speaking.Yet these people and Plimer keep their jobs for doing really, really bad science.
.............................

Chris de Freitas paper trashed.... Auckland University revealed as harbouring a fool... how shameful
tamino

Dr de Freitas published a major study last year in the Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, edited by his brother Dr Tim de Freitas, of Talisman Energy in Calgary, arguing that “there is no reason to believe that catastrophic [climate] change is under way”.

On further examination, De Freitas is a Scoundrel, not simply a fool

realclimate

---

Bryan Leyland is an “energy consultant” and prominent NZ climate crank. He has an aggressive approach to the local media, and has often been able to get indefensible rubbish into print....cross the line from exaggeration into downright misrepresentation.... Leyland wrote “I twisted Gorman’s arm – but it didn’t need much twisting.” Even if Leyland is playing to the gallery, it makes Gorman’s original approach to the story the more reprehensible.shit masquerading as science..
Carter long ago burned his bridges to academic respectability. He is on record as claiming that m.odern temperatures are the same as those 60 years ago (see Bob’s big lie). De Freitas has a history of denying the basic science of climate change, and McLean is just another in a long line of amateurs playing. with data, trying to bolster a predetermined position.
...

---

Wind Turbines
Typical NZ complaint 'those wind turbines will "Totally ruin this landscape"' -
I guess "Totally ruin" is one stage less than ...."Literally, Totally ruined" eg hydro lake,
which would be one step less than................. "Seriously, Literally, Totally ruined" eg coal mine,
which would be less than ................................."Completely Fucked up. Seriously, Literally ruined" eg 6°C climate shift

---

Machiavelli : ".. If you wish to deprive a people of their liberties, cr.eate the conditions in which they demand you do so..."
Kunstler has great comments

---

Crisis
Prof. Santiago Niño Becerra.

when the real crisis occurs in 2010. Right now we are still at the outer margins of this crisis.

"We find ourselves in the 'pre-crisis' that will last from September 2007 to July 2010, a phase where it goes up and down, but mostly down. The stock market will fall and rise, the same with unemployment, and some - mainly politicians- will assert we are on the right track" the 58-year-old professor told berlingske.dk

kunstler

---

the next two things to watch for will be the fall flu season in North America, and exacerbated problems with the world food supply (e.g. how Ug99 has reached the Americas)
kunstler

---

Vaillant
thomaspainescorner
Vaillant, who, in 1894, exploded a bomb in the Paris Chamber of Deputies, strikes the true keynote of the psychology of such acts:

“Gentlemen, in a few minutes you are to deal your blow, but in receiving your verdict I shall have at least the satisfaction of having wounded the existing society, that cursed society in which one may see a single man spending, uselessly, enough to feed thousands of families; an infamous society which permits a few individuals to monopolize all the social wealth, while there are hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who have not even the bread that is not refused to dogs, and while entire families are committing suicide for want of the necessities of life.
.................
“Gentlemen, I am one of these last. Wherever I have gone, I have seen unfortunates bent beneath the yoke of capital. Everywhere I have seen the same wounds causing tears of blood to flow, even in the remoter parts of the inhabited districts of South America, where I had the right to believe that he who was weary of the pains of civilization might rest in the shade of the palm trees and there study nature. Well, there even, more than elsewhere, I have seen capital come, like a vampire, to suck the last drop of blood of the unfortunate pariahs.

---

Cow Methane

AgResearch has genetically modified forage crops .. can reduce methane emissions from livestock
..three traits they have isolated... Grasslanz Technology in Palmerston North...... reduced methane emissions, improved the nitrogen cycle and led to superior performing livestock. ???
....less nitrous oxide and ammonia being expelled, while modifying lipids resulted in lower methane emissions.
.....meat and milk even more healthier for humans by altering the ratio of fatty acids.
odt
(early Spring grass have Omega 3 ???)

---

Iran
nytimes
NYT is describing the 3 Americans who wandered into Iran with a bottle of whisky, as incredibly decent guys..."Zapatisa..., peace and conflict studies..., New American Media"... gosh the Iraians are going to look really really mean if they dont hand them back. This setup seems way more sophisticated than Hillary could have come up with...

---

Iraq
following the Iraqi Parliament's eviction of the UK on Wednesday and the withdrawal of the last Australian troops on Friday, it has finally shrunk to a coalition of one...

---

straw bales for the edges, composted horse manure for the soil, and cardboard to smother the grass/weeds. As he says, just add seeds and water!
__________________________________________________________
Sahel North African Monsoon to rise again?
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
..(some) climate models, which predict a return to conditions ...Sahara into a lush savanna... 12,000 ybp.
..Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel,.... Biogeosciences.
...huge increases in vegetation in ..central Chad and western Sudan.
..Throughout North Africa, new trees, such as acacias, are flourishing,..
In 2008 Kröpelin...visited Western Sahara...
"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."
..it's a similar story in the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan..
"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," ...
"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back...
"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."
..An explosion in plant growth has been predicted by some climate models.
..2005 a team led by Reindert Haarsma...forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel.
...Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall.
..Max Planck's Claussen said North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modelers.
.."Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend."
nationalgeographic

---

a unique desert lake in ..northern Chad.
..Lake Yoa, sustained by prehistoric groundwater, has survived for millennia despite constant drought and searing heat.
..an unbroken climate record going back at least 6,000 years,.. Stefan Kröpelin ..
Ancient pollen, insects,.. in the lake's sediments point to a gradual transformation to a desert environment.
..The study contradicts past research that suggested the region dried up within a few hundred years. That research was based on windblown Saharan dust found in Atlantic Ocean sediments.
..Pollen samples .. the decrease in tropical trees accelerated after 4,800 ybp,.. desert plants.. 3,900 -3,100 ybp. ...
....The only rapid change..was in the lake .., which switched from a freshwater to a salt lake .. 4,200 - 3,900 ybp
..when monsoon rains began moving .. south..
..6 meters. of water evaporate .. every year...
The last green phase,. 12,000 ybp, may be due to increased water evaporation from oceans. This led to monsoon rains that penetrated the interiors..
"Now, today, man is probably causing the same thing," he said.

So Climate Change may green the Sahara... despite Lovelocks "Gaia likes it colder"

---

Tracking Alien Species With Smart Phones

every time I came across a weed like Spanish Broom, especially a new occurrence we didn't know about, all I would have to do is take a photograph of it and it would automatically be linked to a GPS point and we wouldn't have to do any data entry,...........
On campus we wanted to do something where we can explore the flora that exist around our university. So we had students go out into UCLA and take pictures of things that are blooming at the time. So we had an application that students around campus could use and you can capture the actual photo, capture a photo of these flowers around campus." According to the AP, Students submitted about 4,000 photos in only two weeks

nationalgeographic

---

Basking whale

Cory, Hoki, Trees, Heartland

Cory Aquino dead at 76 Colon cancer
Corazon Cojuangco.... I guess its a relative who cut trees in Palawan...
the Cojs richer even than the Aquinos?
“The answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform, but police and military action.”
15,000-acre sugar plantation,

1986 , people power, I wasnt in Manila, got there a few weeks later, got in the queue to walk through Malacangang palace, saw Marcos's bedrooms, his & hers.
Imelda's with the oxygen bottle in case Ferdie payed a visit. My impression of a Dictators life... not so flash, no windows, a dictator cant afford to have windows. Lots of shirts in boxes, a bunch of shoes. Didnt seem so wonderful.
The ground floor area, which used to be open to the Pasig river, closed in... for security, to enable air-con, and to keep out the smell?
Imelda has a thing about the Mendiola bridge leading to the palace. She closed it, Cory opened it, but then her troops shot dead 19 (13?) protesters upon it. That seemed the end of a fantastic approach to freedom.
The city was alive, a dozen sudden new newspapers. I had a buddy who lived there, wrote speeches for Cory (WHO, against tobacco, we smoked ganga in the evenings. The night life was in full swing, expensive sound systems. You can be certain there wont be another time like that. Chernobyl, coral reefs, shabu.
Dictators may fall, but you wont get to walk through their bedrooms.
Cory went on street demos against Gloria.... plus ca change...

---

"money power will … work upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Lincoln
joebageant

---

Efficiency
The late great Professor June Pallot told me that of the very few efficiency analyses done, one showed clearly that the then 'Ministry of Works' was more efficient than private concerns in the field.
google
Has the NZ national library got this yet??

---

Fuel Cells for Soldiers
Livermore (Calif.)-based UltraCell and Adaptive Materials of Ann Arbor, Mich. Their solution: small, sturdy fuel cells that can power a soldier's clutch of mobile devices for a week on a gallon or so of methanol or propane. Battle-ready versions of the fuel cells will be available this year.
[- Why not urine based fuel cells... theres a lot of energy in that fixed nitrogen
[dontcha realise, gunpowder was made from saltpetre.... ie urine...]

---

cash for Clunkers
replace with new cars.... this is a really bad idea.
Much better idea: replace the computer chips in existing cars, so that they run on 2 cylinders... ie very slowly .. 30kph
...Save all that energy required to build new cars.

---

Rebuilding Global Fisheries – evaluating 31 marine areas...
gives NZ a tick
But: Orange Rought excluded, because they didint have the data... ie a bias against including dodgy fisheries?
"..to improve the sustainability of the hoki fishery,” Wayne McNee said. “Catch limits were progressively reduced, from 250,000 tonnes in 2001 to 90,000 tonnes in 2007, to reduce fishing pressure and enable the stock to rebuild. The recently-completed 2009 assessment shows that the stock is now within the target range.”


After the fish are gone,, you get giant jellyfish?

___________________________________________________


Independent science consultants Dragonfly ... 2006-7 ..
3107 seabirds and 542 marine mammals were killed in our trawl and long-line fisheries,

---

"Major Conservation Policy Issues for Biodiversity in Oceania' is available for download at the SMC Resource Library.
????? not seen
sciencemediacentre

---

sciencemediacentre



Forestry plantings
trees plantations
___________________________________________________

Trees...??
nzherald
mfe
570,000 ha post 1990 - I cant understand this report
"LUCAS has mapped post-1989 forest (Kyoto forest) area as 566,106 hectares. This is 18,000 hectares lower than the estimate of eligible Kyoto forest area used in the 2009 Net Position Report based on the NEFD."
Is this good or bad news??

---

Natural Gas
USA has a lot:
2,074 trillion ft³ of domestic natural gas ( ng)reserves = 350 E9 bbl oil, = Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves

....displacing large numbers of gasoline-fueled vehicles with natural gas....
USA consumes 390 million gallons of gasoline per day. .[.A gallon of gasoline 115,000 BTU]
45 trillion BTUs per day. [ng 1,000 BTUs per standard cubic foot (scf)]
.. to replace all gasoline consumption would require 45 billion scf per day,... 16.4 trillion scf per year. Current U.S. ng= 23 trillion scf per year ..replacing all gasoline with ng = a total usage of 39.4 trillion scf per year, an increase of 71% .

2,074 trillion scf...= 53 years of combined current ng and gasoline consumption

USA has absurd high licence fees to convert cars to cng.... they could maybe learn from Muldoons NZ think big cng conversions?
But not from the absurd catalytic gas to petrol ???
theoildrum

---

informationclearinghouse
the big lie in Afghanistan

---

Alice Walker in Gaza

"The best place one could be on Earth"
...Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the "rez." To the "colored section." In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do..............
.
We don't hate Israelis, Alice, she says, quietly, what we hate is being bombed, watching our little ones live in fear, burying them, being starved to death, and being driven from our land. We hate this eternal crying out to the world to open its eyes and ears to the truth of what is happening, and being ignored. Israelis, no. If they stopped humiliating and torturing us, if they stopped taking everything we have, including our lives, we would hardly think about them at all. Why would we? .
...we are lucky to live at a time when all lies will be exposed, along with the relief of not having to serve them any longer.
....Israeli military has destroyed over two and a half million olive and fruit trees alone since 1948.

electronicintifada

---

National Socialism??

almost all land inside Israel’s 1948 borders, including West Jerusalem, has been registered as “state land” managed by a body known as the Israel Lands Authority.
The authority allows neither Palestinians nor Israelis to buy property on state land. Instead long-term renewable leases are available to Israeli citizens and anyone eligible to immigrate to Israel under the country’s Law of Return -- meaning Jews....................
...Settlements in East Jerusalem -- now covering 35 per cent of the eastern city, according to Mr Seidemann -- are also built on land declared as “state land”, in violation of international law

jkcook

---

Christopher Johnstone Landscape Paintings of New Zealand
I have just now noticed this 2006 book at Unity books.
It covers the intellectual landscape from Frank Pound's "Frames on the Land" 1982 [the sublime], to the Kelliher prize, awarded from ca 1956-1977 [the ridiculous]
Our entire family would regularly visit the Dominion Museum for the Kelliher. Even as an 11 year old I knew it was horrendously lowbrow (cousin Frank had perhaps educated me)
We would comment on how the more distant hills were more blue, and how true to life this was. How we loved the Dominion Museum, with its cluttered glass cases of stuffed animals. We went there a lot as a family.
Te Papa with its awkward angular shapes and dioramas (how tediously 20th century is a diorama?) - how could it arouse such affection?
I'm glad to see CJ's cover is a Don Binney. (Despite being the boss of the art school?) DB's reputation has wavered towards the lowbrow. I have a vested interest. I own a charming Binney Charcoal of Mana island, which I bought in 1970 (for $120?) from Peter Mcleavy's gallery in Cuba St. I suppose I am the first owner. Mcleavy's was new and thrilling then. I recall a 2m oil by Colin McCahon which I declined because it was too expensive ($250?). OK a McCahon family friend told me, they have heaps like it.

__________________________________________________
Pressure cookers??? KFC recipe is now public?? when will we see the big come-back of pressure cookers?
My youth was filled with the small hissing of an aluminium pressure cooker, aluminium of that early pitted non shiny kind, cooking ham-bone soup with split peas (were they a kind of lentil?) the long slow cooking was overseen by Granddad Tom, who was also responsible for coal fire. Both tasks tinged with danger (explosion or fire from unextinguished ashes) Serious tasks for the old civil servant, living in his daughters house.
Occasionally the weight would blow off the small aperture, and soup would hit the ceiling.
But Granddad never caused a fire in the newspaper-wrapped ashes, in metal rubbish bins...

__________________________________________________
Heartlands Institute: Blame it all on El Nino

he two-year study by three Australasian scientists was published yesterday in the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research ..

Auckland U Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter James Cook U Townsville John McLean have concluded that little or none ...Climate Science Coalition..

So the denialogues have got a peer reviewed paper explaining an upward trend by cyclic causes.....??
...
I am fascinated by the emotional basis of these denialogues, several prominent members seem to reside in NZ
A desire to stand out, an anti-establishment, an anti-authoritarian urge? Its difficult to understand these guys who cheerfully prepare to submit their grandchildren to a world of deserts, starvation and warfare.
I remember as a young adolescent having a "popular mechanics" delight and firm belief in technical progress. Nothing could, or should stand in the way of industrial progress, Werner Von Braun's popular book on rockets burned in my measles feverish mind. It took a lot of human intercourse to temper this glorious vision. Oppenheimer over Teller?
Anti-authoritarianism is a healthy principle. However the ability of carbon containing gases to shift light into the IR frequencies is well demonstrated. 2 Watts per m², so far...
Its not so difficult to understand how this shift will crank the world temperature up.
Humans will undoubtedly adjust. Its just that this adjustment will involve crop changes that will mean civilization shifts, which, sans planning, will surely involve famines, giant refugee movements, nuclear war, huge massacres. Its planning which is required. Hyper-individualists like denialogues seem to despise planning. Which is a position of such naivete, evidently they havnt heard of Keynes ("most practical men are indeed in thrall to the ideas of some long dead economist") Sadly giving up Planning to GM - whats good for America, is now defunct, since GM itself is defunct. How I used to pore over and memorise the new years new cars, how excited I was when we got a "Valiant"
I begin to see denialists as early adolescent holdovers, stuck in a teenage truculent refusal to submit to cleanlilness, tidiness, respect, cooperation. Indeed a refusal to submit to socialisation. A nasty carelessness. If this infantile attitude manages to carry the day, and derails efforts to plan for a fuel-less world, then we can expect a tantrum ridden world, messy with depleted uranium ridden rubble heaps.

---

Leopard vs Crocodile
__________________________________________________