Climate scientists have developed new models which plot natural oceanic temperature cycles, solar activity, and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) television household penetration against average global temperatures over time.  They show a surprising an unexpected result.  The recent unprecedented change in climate appears to be closely related to the number of cathode ray television sets in use.

At the beginning of the second world war, there were only about 8000 sets in use.  By 1949, there were over 3,602,872 in the US alone, and by 1959 accumulated sales in the US totalled more than 67 million.  Sales continued through the 70s and 80s at over 10 million sets per year.  As the global economy flourished, the trend was replicated all over the developing world.  The studies showed that the globe warmed more and more rapidly, matching the rising numbers of TV sets, until around the turn of the millennium, when it paused for ten years, and now appears to be in decline.

Interestingly, the models hind-cast the temperature variations since 1950 with astonishing accuracy. And critically, when the CRT penetration is removed from the models, we cannot explain those temperature variations.  There is no other acceptable conclusion, no other factor that can achieve the match with temperature variations.

Ah, I hear you object, China and India, the new Asian super-economies, are booming.  The number of TV sets sold is sky-rocketing again.  If Global Warming has ceased, how could it possibly be related to TV sets?  Right now, the number of sets in use in the world is 1416338245.

Pay attention!  TV technology has undergone a sea change.  The cathode-ray tube is out.  In the twenty-first century, flat-screen TFT and LED screens have taken over.  These do not emit the same radiation as the older, earth-warming monsters that sat in the corner of the room and heated our planet.  And as the old CRT screens sputter, distort and die, they are being replaced by the new, green, tree-hugging, polar-bear-loving flatties.  We are saved!

Earlier climate models achieved a reasonable match using global CO2 atmospheric variations, enough to give cause to speculate that the reason for the rise might be CO2.  But only to speculate.  CO2 concentrations are still rising at an increasing rate, but the global temperature since 2000, initially flat, is now declining.

And that, dear readers, should be the end of the argument.  I defy you to show me that this little analysis is any less robust or scientific than all of the scientific reports used by the IPCC, Al Gore, the EU or Skeptical Science.  The data behind my reasoning shows a closer match to world temperature fluctuations than any of the computer models used by NASA, GISS or UEA.

Trust the science on this.  Using our model, we can predict with 98.73% certainty that the temperature will decline for the next thirty years to at least the same level as it was in 1970.  More likely it will be even lower, as by 2040 there will be very few CRTs still in use.

What’s that?  You want to examine my data?  You have a confounded cheek.  It’s commercially sensitive and the TV companies have placed it under an embargo.

And I didn’t archive it, and seem to have lost it.

In 2009, 16 children died in New Zealand, killed by members of their own families.  Child Protection Studies chief executive Anthea Simcock said the figures for child deaths equated to one killing by a family member every 23 days.  “This research shows child abuse at its clearest and most stark.  We need to start talking about child abuse …  Child abuse is a massive problem in its own right.  Let’s not allow it to be hidden under the blanket of family violence”.

Child abuse in New Zealand is a disgusting disgrace.  Its a double disgrace.

The first disgrace is the collection of apologies for human beings who visit violence upon defenceless children – all too often their own family.  Pita Sharples, the Minister of Maori Affairs in NZ, calls them “mongrels”.  He’s  not wrong.

Tragically, the violence often ends in death.  From 1993 – 1996, 35 children up to the age of 14 were killed by members of their own families.  (Died from injuries purposely inflicted).  That’s 8.75 deaths per year.   By August 2007, the average child-abuse death rate per year was reported to be 12.

And that leads to the second disgrace.  Politicians who mouth on about how disgraceful it is, about how we are all collectively responsible, and promise firm action to protect children from abuse.  In 2007, they took that “firm action”.  And now in 2010, here is what NZ still sees:

Ineffectiveness of Child, Youth and Family (CYF) – the social welfare agency charged with protecting the interests of children.  No meaningful overhaul of their procedures.  No tracking of known problem parents to see if they have more children when the state has taken their abused babies into care.  No attempt to address the social breakdown and lowering of educational and behavioural standards that result in children that grow up to be selfish, careless and abusive parents.  (Children are carefully taught their rights, but nothing about responsibility or duty of care).

The “firm action”  was an easy politically correct “solution” – an anti-spanking bill.  Almost all of the NZ parliament, Tory and Labour, Greens and Maori Party, forgot that they were elected by the people of NZ, and colluded to ram this monstrosity into law against the wishes of nearly 90 percent of the NZ population.  The new law classifies all parents who resort to spanking, even when it is  necessary, as criminals by default.  Good parents and bad.

It is now a criminal offence to spank a child in NZ – period.  No spank is considered reasonable under law.  The police have the sole choice on whether to prosecute.  If they decide it is “trivial”, then the parent is not prosecuted.  So only the police can consider a spank reasonable or trivial – incredibly, the courts of law cannot.  The parent has no defence if charged except to plead “Not guilty”.  If it is proved that the parent spanked the child, the only possible verdict is guilty.

So what we get to address child abuse is an anti-spanking law, to stop us from hitting and beating our children.  The vast majority of parents never would do that.  The kind of mongrel (the Minister’s own term) that would hit and beat a child would not pay a blind bit of attention to any law prohibiting spanking.  No more than a recidivist drinking driver would be deterred by lowering the driving alcohol limit.

How do I know that child-abusers are not deterred by the anti-spanking law?  Results.  Since it was passed in 2007, the rate of child-abuse death has continued.

When a petition in 2009 overwhelmingly called for the repeal of the anti-spanking law, the government did nothing.  No, the law is working, they said, and necessary to prevent child abuse.  And besides, they criticised the wording of the petition!

I have news for you, NZ politicians.  The law is not working.  It is an unjust and ineffective law, and NZ children continue to suffer and die at the hands of those whom it should be their birthright to trust, unprotected by effective laws and failed by NZ social welfare.  Read this, and weep:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10629760

The weka is a native New Zealand bird.  It s a large, brown flightless bird that has a famously feisty and curious personality. These two qualities traditionally made the bird an easy food source for Māori and early European settlers.  The Europeans called them “wood hens”.  By all accounts, they’re damn good eating.

The satellite temperature record shows that January 2010 was the warmest January since satellite temperature measurements began in 1979.

Yep. The data don’t lie.

They didn’t lie about the cooling from 1998 to last year, when the published global temperatures by the AGW lobby said the earth was still warming.

And they didn’t lie about the extra warm January in 2007.  And they don’t lie about January 2010.  It’s warm – very warm.

The Grumpy Old Man is in the mood for sooth-saying.

First prediction:  Many of the AGW lobby will now temporarily forget their distrust of satellite-measured temperatures and insist that this result supports their belief that the earth is warming as a result of man-made CO2.  They will forget that distrust, that is, until the satellite-measured temperatures fall, just as they did from 1998 to last year.  If the data don’t support their beliefs, then the data will be obviously wrong, and will be supplanted by carefully homogenised temperatures from an AGW-friendly source.

Second prediction:  Some of the responses to the Accuweather Global Warming blog post that reported the January record temperature will provide supporting evidence of the truth of the first prediction.

First Speculation:  The warmer Arctic temperatures caused by the negative Arctic Oscillation will result in thinner than usual sea-ice.  Spring and Summer will therefore bring a collapse of Arctic sea-ice, similar to the one that occurred in 2007.  Which will be cited as further evidence of AGW.

Second Speculation:  Global temperatures will drop dramatically in 2010, just as they did in 2007 after the record January temperatures of that year.  And the AGW lobby will suddenly mistrust the satellite record once more.  NASA will publish their own terrestrial records, homogenised and averaged beyond all recognition, which will diametrically contradict the satellite record.

We’ll be able to assess the two predictions after reading all the responses to the Accuweather post.  The speculations will take the rest of 2010 to assess.

The cancer of Political Correctness is now affecting the popular English game of Bingo – believe it or not!  In the town of Suffolk town of Sudbury, England, the local officials have banned bingo-callers from using the traditional number identifiers “Legs Eleven” (for the number eleven) and “Two fat Ladies” (for the number eighty-eight), on the grounds that they are politically incorrect and may spark lawsuits against the council from outraged portly persons, or from women who might deem them sexist!

Oh, good grumping grief!  Are the Poms going mad?  Bingo calling is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for the players – the rhythm, pitch and cadence of the caller’s voice, the traditional embellishments that globally identify the numbers.  These are as old as the game itself, as instantly recognisable as a market fishmonger’s patter, square-dance calls or a running joke in a sitcom.

The bingo call “Two fat Ladies” is so much a part of the English bingo tradition that it was adopted by two gifted female chefs as the very name of their highly successful television cooking show.  Get this – the two lady chefs were indeed fat, cheerful, entertaining and talented.  And obviously unabashed by being two fat ladies and happy to adopt the term as their own.

If a caller used the platform of the bingo hall to make gratuitous racist or derogatory jokes, then I would expect lawsuits to be a likely consequence.  Not to mention a black eye.  But bingo calls are not gratuitous insults like racist jokes.  They are the traditional fabric of bingo, part of it’s colour and ambiance, giving pleasure to the players.  What court of law would uphold such a lawsuit?  Or are English jurists as bonkers as some English local officials?

P.S. Bingo is a Pommie tradition that has even found its way to some of England’s former colonies.  The harmless group gambling game attracts faithful followers, who revel in the company, the cheerfulness, the excitement, the chance to make some extra cash for the price of an outlay so small that it has no more significance than the cost of a movie ticket.  And given the low quality of the average cinematic pot-boiler, bingo can be more entertaining.

Players each draw bingo cards, that have rows of numbers.  No two are alike.  The players pay a small fee for each game.  The pot of their fees is the jackpot for the game, and the winner takes all.

The game is led by the bingo caller, who has a sheet for each game, for which he calls the numbers in turn.  Players mark off each called number on their own card (if it is on the card).  The first player to have marked off all the numbers calls out “Bingo!” and subject to a quick check by the caller, the game is won.

P.P.S. “Pom” is an antipodean colloquialism for an Englishman.  When used without any other qualifier, it is a fond term, not a derogatory one.

I love free speech.  I am very happy that I live in a society that allows all to hold and communicate their opinions.  For me, free speech is a cornerstone of democracy and vital to its survival.  It is also vital to the growth of human knowledge – remember the difficulties that confronted Galileo?  Censorship, thought control and political correctness are the tools of the forces of darkness.

The world-wide-web with its email facilities, blogs and social-networking systems provides a platform for the whole world to communicate.  So I should rejoice, right?  Well, not entirely, mate!  A platform for learning and enlightenment is also a platform for banality.  A medium for information can also be used for misinformation.  A forum for understanding is also an opportunity to promote bigotry and hatred.  On the Internet, geniuses and halfwits, poets and proselytisers, statesmen and racists, thinkers and wanna-be celebrities, scientists and chicken-lickens, writers and chain-letter zombies, all have the same right to disseminate and promote their views and themselves.  And so, they twitter away.

Blogging provides a wealth of information, entertainment and amusement.  From travel anecdotes to family records to seriously well-informed scientific discussions – whatever, it’s all there.  Some of the forums raise very intriguing questions, inviting replies from interested readers.  The self-promoters butt in in the forum response sections, with mindless gushes like “I just wanted to say Hi”, or “Amazing – keep up the good work”.  Good grief – all to see their “contribution” in a public forum.  It’s a waste of space and time, and the noise makes it more difficult to find the answers from the real contributors to the forums.

You know the chain-email types.  Pass this on to at least 20 people and spread warm fuzzies, raising the total happiness in the world.  Or save a starving child/dolphin/nuclear family/world peace/the Earth.  Break the chain and they are doomed and you will suffer bad karma and die alone.  If you really believe this stuff, don’t saddle me with it.  Keep your fantasies to yourself.

And then there are endless emailed jokes.  It seems that nearly everybody forwards every goddamn joke and cutesy URL link they ever receive, to everybody else.  Is there anything to be said in their defence?  Well, maybe – some are actually funny.  About one in a hundred, that is.  And of the one percent that are funny, one in ten is funny enough to forward on.

That leaves ninety-nine percent that are not funny and a waste of storage space, bandwidth and my time.  That would be bad enough to deserve a good old-fashioned grump, but it’s not the worst of it.  No, the worst of it is that a disturbing percentage are created to promote the bigoted stereotypes of the writers and senders.  Their intention is to promote and maintain hatred or derision of whatever group or groups the writers themselves may despise.  That could be Muslims, Jews, Blacks, Asians, Whiteys, Catholics, Capitalists, Communists, Republicans, Democrats, whomever is blamed by the writer for the ills of the world.

Here are three examples of Internet “jokes”.  I wonder if they will make you laugh:

Scientists are trying to combat crime by combining the DNA of a Maori and a Samoan. The are hoping to come up with a blackie that is too lazy to steal.

The presidential inauguration compared to  Hurricane Katrina:  “How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, D.C., in one day in subzero temps when 200,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?”

“Breaking News!  Playboy just offered Sarah Palin $1 million to pose nude in the January issue.   Michelle Obama got the same offer from National Geographic.”

These examples are not funny, and I am very grumpy about them.  If you are in the habit of passing on stuff like them, please stop it.  There’s enough misery in the world.

P.S.   If you get a one-in-a-hundred joke email that is really funny enough to pass on, send it.  Even grumpy old men need a good laugh.

Bicycles are the best thing about the Netherlands!

Grumpy Old Man and a well parked bike

The country is flat, there are bicycle lanes in and between nearly every street in the cities, between the cities and towns and out in the country through reserves and farmlands.  There are bikes with extended wheelbases and big buckets on the front for carrying up to four children.  There are bikes with extra seats (and sometimes, pedals) for children.  I have seen one young mother on such a bike with two children pedalling away and another in a small seat behind her.

The ease and safety of cycling and the excellence of public transport render cars unnecessary.  For the first time since we were very young parents, my wife and I do not own even one car.  We have bikes!  (And a shopping cart which we take to the supermarket!)

Cars here are actually very careful about bikes – accidents are very rare.  Cars, trucks and even buses patiently follow bikes through the narrow streets in places without bike lanes.  The cars stop and let the bikes in ahead of them.  Signs proclaiming one-way and no-exit streets usually have a picture of a bike with the caption “Uitgezonderd”.  It means “Bicycles excepted”.  The rule does not apply to them.

God help any motorist who has an accident with a bicycle.  Even if the cyclist was completely wrong and the motorist completely in the right, the motorist will be found guilty and punished, and the cyclist will get every assistance.  If the accident was caused by the cyclist, then only if there is incontrovertible evidence that the motorist moved heaven and earth in an attempt to avoid the accident and it was totally unavoidable, will he get off the charge.  Bikes rule, OK!!!   Well…

Bicycles are also the worst thing about the Netherlands!  They give way to nobody, use the footpath as a cycleway if it is more convenient, and as a bike-park if it is ten feet closer to their destination than one of the many bike parks provided free of charge by the authorities.  Usually, pedestrian crossings are placed in the places most convenient to corner bars, railway stations, supermarkets etc.  “How convenient”, think the cyclists.  More often than not, they park their bikes on the footpaths and block entrances to pedestrian crossings completely.  Passing policemen completely ignore this rude, inconsiderate and very dangerous situation.  This forces the pedestrian (often an old man or woman) to step off the footpath into the adjacent bike lane, where naturally the cyclists swear at them for walking on the bike lane (or even run into them).  Bikes rule, not OK!

GRUMP