Tag Archives: NZ

Joe Bastardi – The Message or the Medium?

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Posted by JJ on July 6, 2011 – 4:38 pm
Filed under Global Warming
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Joe Bastardi is a weatherman.  He works for Weatherbell, a US-based forecaster, that provides global weather reports and forecasts through its website, http://www.weatherbell.com/.  Joe also has a number of corporate clients, for whom he prepares specific detailed forecasts tailored to their weather information needs.

If one judges a weatherman by the success rate of his seasonal forecasts, then Joe is a super-weatherman.

When my wife and I came from New Zealand to live in the Haarlem in the Netherlands in 2008, we needed local weather information.  My Dutch language skills were non-existent, so I went looking in the internet for English-language reports on current conditions and forecasts.  The most accurate forecasts for Haarlem at the time were on the website of Accuweather, another global weather forecasting company, at http://www.accuweather.com/en-gb/nl/north-holland/haarlem/quick-look.aspx.

I had long been interested in the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate, which had wide publicity in New Zealand.  My interest (and suspicions) had been aroused by the way in which every weather event was described as evidence of human-influenced global warming.  However, the concept behind the idea seemed worthy of investigation, so I was interested in finding out more.

A Dutch television channel showed a film called “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring Al Gore showing a PowerPoint presentation which presented Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph and argued in apocalyptic terms that the earth was in danger of a runaway greenhouse effect, caused by human beings, and specifically, the CO2 that we produce.

That film was a tipping-point for me.  ”An Inconvenient Truth” was far from being a reasoned, scientifically-based presentation.  It was full of half-truths and special pleading, presented by a salesman.  For the first time, I began to suspect that the AGW scare was a textbook real-life example of the behaviour illustrated by the classic fable of Chicken Little.

One of the blog links on the Accuweather site that caught my attention was also hosted by Accuweather.  Joe Bastardi’s European Weather blog.  Bastardi is no Shakespeare, but his postings were always entertaining and well-argued.

Now Joe Bastardi has left Accuweather, and resurfaced at the Weatherbell site.  Inexplicably, his blog posts are behind a paywall – they are in the premium section of Weatherbell.  That is tragic.  One expects to pay for premium services – after all, they are a big part of the income of a web-based service.  But to pay for blog-posts?

Bloggers blog to be read.  They blog to communicate, to give their ideas the widest possible coverage.  Including pensioners who cannot afford the premium subscriptions. I am over sixty-five years old, and at the end of this month, I too shall be a pensioner.

So long, Joe.  I shall miss your posts.

A Judge who thinks NZ Murderers don’t really mean it

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Posted by JJ on March 8, 2011 – 7:42 pm
Filed under Random Grumps & Raves
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On Tuesday 8 March 2011, Justice Joseph Williams sentenced Rikki Leigh Scott Ngatai-Check, 23, to life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, for kicking a two-year old toddler to death for wetting his pants.  Seventeen years before he can even apply for parole.  That’s pretty strong these days, when our penal systems are organised on the precept that all criminals are basically good guys, who need only TLC and rehabilitation to set them right, in spite of our appalling rate of criminal recidivism.

The sentence is deservedly strong.  Here is the shocking sequence of events, transcribed from the NZ Herald report:

The murderer was in charge of the little boy, who slept on the couch while Ngatai-Check spotted cannabis with a friend.  The boy woke up wet.

Ngatai-Check spun the child around, slamming him into a coffee table.  The impact broke the child’s ribs, causing internal bleeding.  The caring killer took the wounded boy to the toilet and left him there, while he went to the bedroom to play video games.

Five or ten minutes later, the boy came into the bedroom, trailing toilet paper.  Ngatai-Check sat up and planted a roundhouse style kick in the boy’s stomach, tearing internal tissue.  Then he kicked him again, ramming him against the wardrobe door.  This time the impact split the boy’s pancreas.

Ngatai-Check then took the boy to hospital, where he died.

One might expect the judge’s words to be at least as strong as the sentence.  One would be wrong.  This is what Justice Joseph Williams said:

“You did a monstrous thing, but I do not think you are a monster.  No one says you intended to kill Karl”.

Noting that Ngatai-Check had no previous history of violent behaviour, the judge said the stress of his hidden relationship was possibly made worse on the day because “you probably didn’t want baby Karl dumped on you again and just wanted to chill out”.  Moreover, Justice Williams said beatings from a stepfather when he was young had taught Ngatai-Check that children should “harden up”.  The judge noted further that in later years Ngatai-Check had been in the shadows of the Wanganui drug and gang scene, which normalised brutality. There, “violence is not just OK, it is downright cool”.

But the judge said there were “sadly too many cases like this”, in which adults abused the trust of vulnerable children – some much worse than Ngatai-Check’s.  He also stressed that the mandatory 17-year non-parole period was introduced by Parliament as a reminder that “these little people are at our mercy. We can so easily kill them”.

In NZ, murder means unlawful deliberate homicide.  Intent must be established to the satisfaction of the jury for a murder conviction to be obtained.  Yet here we have a sentencing judge who states that the killer, poor little Rikki Ngatai-Check, did not intend the killing, that he is a victim of his upbringing and gang lifestyle, wanted nothing more sinister than to chill out, and is receiving the heavy sentence only because an act of parliament made it mandatory!

What on earth is the judge thinking of?  All I can offer is a very astute quote from a Daily Telegraph blog posting by a British journalist, James Delingpole:

“We no longer understand or value our civilisation; indeed many of us feel rather embarrassed about it. We have been taught to view all our great historical achievements through a filter of post-colonial guilt; we have learned the weasel art of cultural relativism where, in their own special way, cultures that practise female circumcision and bury homosexuals under walls are just as vibrant, valid and meaningful as the one that gave us Michelangelo, penicillin and the splitting of the atom; we’ve been persuaded that elitism and authority are undesirable”.

Judges like Williams may be part of the reason that Parliament found it necessary to impose a seventeen-year minimum parole period for child-murderers.  I am sad that it was necessary, but glad they did so.  Frankly, I wish they would do so for all murders.

 

Power in NZ on the Rim of Fire

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Posted by JJ on March 1, 2011 – 4:33 pm
Filed under Random Grumps & Raves
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It is time to think carefully about the future of coal and oil-fired power stations in the NZ power-supply portfolio.   New Zealand has a lot of choices for power generation, renewable and non-renewable.  The renewables we have include hydro, geothermal and even the most expensive and unreliable of all renewable sources, wind.  We also have coal and gas-fired thermal stations.

We need them all.  Our capacity can be crippled by earthquakes at any time, and we would be foolish indeed not to  be prepared.

2503 MW of NZ’s electric power capacity is provided by dams built along the Southern Alps, which exist because of the great alpine fault in the South Island.  They provide reliable, renewable power, but they are at risk if (when) the really big earthquake strikes.  The recent Christchurch earthquake tragedy that has befallen New Zealand is a reminder of what is just around the corner, and when that happens a large proportion of our power supply will be severely compromised, if not destroyed.

NZ’s biggest thermal plant, with a capacity of 1448 MW, is at Huntly in the North Island.   It is run by Genesis Energy.  Here is the information from Genesis:

http://www.genesisenergy.co.nz/genesis/index.cfm?0E16177E-E313-418B-F397-3021BCE6E1EF

And here is the Wikipedia information about the site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…

According to the Wikipedia entry, there are plans to emasculate the Huntly facility, shutting down much of its capability and reducing it to a backup role.  The entry says:

“The plant, as one of the biggest carbon dioxide greenhouse gas generators of the country, contributing over half of New Zealand’s emissions of greenhouse gases from electricity generation, has repeatedly drawn the ire of environmentalists and has been the focus of associated protests. A 2006 government report outlining future anti-climate change and energy policies was seen by the operator as a sign that the plant might have to be closed by 2015 under these plans, with around 10 years of design life still remaining.

Resource consents to operate the four coal fired units expire in 2013.  Due to increasing costs of coal, equipment reaching its design life and costs due to the emissions trading scheme, operation of the four steam units is expected to be phased out, with their role declining to dry year, reserve generation. One of the four coal fired units will be taken out of service in 2012, and a second in 2015.”

I don’t know how much of what the Wikipedia article says about the capacity reduction is true.  I hope it is not, and that the plant will continue to operate.  It is one thing to aim to maximise power generation from renewable sources, especially reliable and high-producing ones like hydroelectric and geothermal sources.

Relying totally on renewable energy resources is quite another matter, especially when they are at risk.  And given our position on the Pacific rim of fire, those resources certainly are at risk.  More than most countries, we need considerable redundancy and diversity of power supply.  Failure to build more fuelled thermal power plants would be as foolish as failing to to take advantage of our hydroelectric and geothermal opportunities.  Removal of existing thermal capacity years before the end of its design life would be more than foolish.

It would be criminally stupid.