I'll not pollute this blog by posting KRudd's latest round of dishonest rhetoric and sophistry. If you want to read his address to the Lowy Institute made on 6/11/09, then go here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/the-pms-address-to-the-lowy-institute/story-e6frg6nf-1225795141519
His address makes a couple of things abundantly clear. One of them is that it is clear that he doesn't actually believe in man-made global climate change, and another is that he is quite desperate for the AGW trojan horse to deliver its planned payload, and not because he thinks it is good for the climate or the children of the world, but rather (and only) because he thinks it will be good for his political future and place in history.
The fact his address is riddled with weasel words and phrases and appeals to (unquantified) authority (i.e. "genuine body of evidence") that are typical of those who want to be seen as being in honest support of something they don't actually believe the word of, and who do not wish to tell a direct lie, show that he is really only giving convenient lip-service and that he doesn't actually think for a moment that our children and childrens children are under any threat by mankinds pitiful contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere ... and doesn't he just luuurv the convience "precautionary principle" offers in that regard, too !
Thus, he shows himself to be almost as much a fraud as the ETS he and Wong have cooked up to betray and ruin the country with.
His obvious desperation to see the AGW trojan horse be brought through the city gates before Copenhagen, is delicious.
To build on the gambling theme he chose to repeatedly use in his address, I think he knows everyone knows he's holding a dud hand and is bluffing, but he has put so much of himself into the pot that he might as well see it through, because to abandon his play now would be to lose absolutely, whereas while he continues with the obvious bluff, some miracle may still save him.
A man of great blindness of faith and twisty-turniness of character is our Kevin "to infinity billions and beyond" big spender ...
As this whole thing comes unstuck and the knowledge of the truth continues to grow and spread throughout this nation and the world as to how complicit in utter fraud some of our elected have become in relation to building nation destroying sovereignty robbing policies (and accompanying taxes and laws) around the AGW environmentalist religion, I wonder if we are going to see a repeat of the Oz Governer General vs Gough, and USofA "watergate" type thing.
Hmmmm, no, prolly not. Our current GG is too into herself to ever do what is required in relation to dismissing a PM and government that has betrayed its country and should no longer be in office, and I suspect that the USofA would still be more inclined to make it easy for some nutter with a gun to take care of such business than do the whole impeach thing again.
Actually, speaking of nutters with guns, I couldn't really see the Obamanation delivering the kind of address our desperate "the sky is falling, but I can save you" KRudd just gave.
Well, at least not on USofA soil ... they shoot at the very table those who seek to cheat and defraud, don't they ?
In closing, I'll quote the tiniest bit more of KRudd's sickening address. He mentioned a certain collection of names quite a few times (even Lord Monckton's ... but our Kevvy didn't say anything about the absolutely disgusting draft treaty the UN are pushing. The little Judas probably helped put the draft together anyway ...)
Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future. You’ve got to know when to fold ‘em – and for the skeptics, that time has come. The Government I lead will act. - Kevin Rudd, 6/11/09
Ooooh, I wonder what new laws our desperate little weasel of a PM is busy cooking up to see the likes of Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen silenced ?
Re-education camps where "arbeit macht frei" ?
I don't reckon MSM is going to be in much support of Kevvy for much longer. Interesting recent news is that Rupert Murdoch reckons KRudd "is delusional". You can read about that here: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26316630-2,00.html
"If Rudd thinks we can set an example for the rest of the world with a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions - the ETS - all it would do is push up the cost of living in Australia and the rest of the world will laugh," - Rupert Murdoch 07/11/09
How's that for a fair shake of the sauce bottle in the fullness of time, Kev ?
You'll be needing that job in the UN by the time all this is over, coz no one is going to want you in Oz.
Anyway, you should fit in well over at the UN. They aren't all that big on "due diligence" either.
regarDS
Want to know more ?
Put "climategate" or "cru emails" or "climate change fraud" into your favorite search engine. "bing" at http://www.bing.com will return nearly over FOUR times the results that "google" does ... and with less bias towards the side of Climate Change Alarmism !
The short of it all is that thanks to a whistleblower who released 1000s of emails and documents into the internut, CRU (Climate Research Unit) scientists who have had the ear of the IPCC have been caught out colluding in quite the criminal manner in order to help promote the lie of Anthropogenic Global Warming in order to no doubt protect their public funding and reputations.
More to follow ... but in the mean time, I'll let the moving pictures do the talking.
regarDS
Despite what the blog date claims (I've backdated it exactly a month to Oz day), it is actually very nearly March 2010. Dunno where the last couple of months got to but rather than launch into some inane waffle, here are some newtubes of some of the outdoor activities and travels that have helped make 2010 fly by so far.
Okay, perhaps a little waffle before the tubes ...
Not long into January, LSCP (for those who came in late, that's "Life Style Choices Partner" ... so chosen because I'm not allowed to say her name on the internut in blogland), and I embarked upon a coastal trip from Perth to Dunsborough, Margaret River, Walpole, Albany, a week in Esperance, then cut back diagonally to Perth again via Hyden/Wave Rock.
Along the way we did a couple of scuba dives on the HMAS Swan (in about 25m or so of water off Dunsborough), and a couple of dives on the HMAS Perth (in about 30m or so of water off Albany). If you're interested in what that might have been like then search those names on youtube as plenty of other folk have filmed their below water experience at those wreck locations.
Okay, first up is a wander around the Tree Tops walking near Walpole:
Next up is a bit of this and that filmed from around Albany:
And you knew I wouldn't be able to get through a blog post without having yet another sneer and poke at the AGW environmentalist religion, so here tis ... a newtube rant on location in Esperance at one of those all but useless ugly noisy white-elephant "wind farm" thingos:
But here is a far more prettier side to Esperance. A beach drive to the Cape Le Grand National Park:
I might get around to including a newtube of our Hyden/Wave rock visit another time, but for now I'll finish up with some footage taken of the 2010 Oz day we spent on the Swan River:
So there was but a tiny glimpse into my January ... and it all seems so long ago now. :(
regarDS
"Today I ..." wanna post a view on the latest bureaucratic rent-seeking being suggested for the once fair CBD of Pert.
They wanna put a toll on car access.
(sigh)
Aside from a crap road system as it is (shouldn't a riverside road follow the river all the way in both directions ? shouldn't a coast road actually follow the coast all the way ?), the city is basically already DEAD compared to how it used to be back in the late 1970s early 1980s.
Back then, the city was the Place To Be near every night and especially on Thursday nights.
Rather than lifeless malls we had things called ROADS and PARKING SPACES where everyone would cruise in on/in their hotted up cars and motorbikes and park all in a row. The first bikers in on the evening would reserve half a dozen bays and before long there would be 30 or more motobikes backed in against the curb and angle parked.
There were people everywhere doing a strange thing called TALKING with each other. Lasses would be displaying/modeling their latest clothing purchases to leather and denim clad blokes and everyone would turn to watch the latest polished chromed and crimson red painted V8 hotrod to burble past in one of endless "bog laps".
There were Hari-Krishnas to harass as they gave out vegan books with weird art-worked covers and Potter's House God Botherers to troll, uh, argue with as they frothed in your face about hell. There was a smell of a couple of dozen different food places in the air and the sound of buskers and laughter.
The city was alive and useful.
Then the bureaucrats got in with their endless and ever expensive to administer "regulation".
The city died.
People like me eventually just gave up on the place ... and these days we are all far more inclined to plug into the world of skyrim or halo or an ipod.
Pert needs LESS regulation and MORE reasons to actually go to it.
Trying to make people pay to drive into the city is neither of those things.
It is just more bureaucrat cholesterol slowly choking the heart to death.
And what a healthy, vibrant, and beautiful heart it USED to be. ... but no more.
Still, Pert-ites, do yourselves a favour and get yourselves up to Kings park one early evening. While you are still somewhat easily and freely able to, that is.
It is kinda a shadow of how things used to be in the city centre once upon a time. IE, there are just people walking around doing nothing in particular.
Just Being.
Kinda like how it used to be once upon a time in the actual city before they took away Murray Street and made it a soul-less mall.
Oh, and has it really been over a year since my last post ?
"Today I ..." would just like to publicly convey my thanks to one and all, both seen and unseen, near and afar, living and passed on, who has ever had anything to do with my life and times and the long and winding path that has amazingly seen me reach the utterly unexpected age of 48.
You all know who you are and regardless of individual levels of input/care/love and all that, I couldn't have done it without yas, so Cheers !
As for Mr Fawkes, well here is hoping that something explosively big (though not the kind of explosive that Mr Fawkes endorsed) happens soon and Oz is at last rid of the sad joke that is our current PM and her wedded-to-the-Nazi-Greens utterly inept and wastrel minority political party, along with her abominable and ridiculous tax on life bringing CO2 that she is trying to inflict upon us all as part of her Fabian Socialist agenda.
Today would be a good day for such a hope to come true.
"Today I ...", in the "offline world", got to share a social occasion at "Little Creatures" in Freo with somebody who (if I understood the job title correctly) earns their bread and butter by not only supporting and promoting the Grand Lie of AGW/MMCC (Anthropogenic Global Warming / Man Made Climate Change), but also via the Great Fraud/Scam of our era, "Carbon Trading".
We had only known each other for prolly less than 5 minutes when The Discussion got underway, and all because LSCP ("LifeStyle Choices Partner" for those who have come in late) asked him what he did for a living and he foolishly answered "Carbon Management".
Can you image my glee and the tingle induced to my erogenous zones upon hearing such a thing ?
At one stage we had to turn things back down to about 11 (refer to The Amp on "This is Spinal Tap" ) coz he didn't like me talking about public funded professional scare-mongerers Karoly and Flim-Flannery in disparaging terms.
By the time I got to drop the name "Andrew Bolt" at our drinking table (the great names of James Delingpole and the award winning science blog "wattsupwiththat.com" already having been mentioned), my warmista drinking companion was calling me "satan" and I was calling him "gullible". :-)
LSCP's take on the evening is that this poor fellow just simply could not believe that I was serious in my rejection of the mythical "consensus" he Truly Believed in, along with the utterly failed hypothesis of global climate change being caused by levels of atmospheric CO2, let alone mankind's pitiful contributions to the near to starvation (for flora) levels of atmospheric CO2.
To be fair and on the flip side, I just simply could not believe he was serious when he suggested that the quality of life I was enjoying thanks to relatively cheap energy generated by plant-food creating coal, could not possible be making me happy and that I would actually prefer to live without all those wonderful things cheap energy brings me.
My LSCP's view was that he thought I musta been just taking the p!ss, even though I said I had been part of a grass-roots letter writing movement that produced over 400,000 items of corro to pollies about the nation and that in turn helped see Malcolm Turncoat ousted as Liberal Party leader which in turn saw KRudd, Killard (so renamed because of her "roll out the red carpet to queue jumping economic opportunists" border control policies that has seen who knows how many wannabe illegal immigrants drown at sea), Turncoat, and Penny Wrong's ETS/CPRS stopped in its tracks.
Anyhoo, twas all fun (well, from my POV), nobody lost an eye, and I just had to LOL at his end of the evening compliment to me of "they say satan always takes an appealing guise".
I told him to put "derspatz" into google or "Hitler" + "AGW" into youtube. ;)
Actually, it has been a while, so here again is my take on Hitler's reaction to Briffa's Yamal tree ring data and all it implied.
I'll only include the youtube link because for some strange reason embedding mucks up the captions.
... and for good measure, here is a favorite youtube of mine from the "JollyGreenWatchman": http://www.youtube.com/embed/-esLrrqGKkE (linked coz of caption issues when embedding)
Anyhoo, cheers, ummm, "Gullible" (name changed to protect the identity of a modern day peddler of what is akin to the useless Roman Catholic "Indulgences" ala "permissions to sin" system of old :-)), it was all fun, and I'm sure that lump of cow you ate for dinner was raised a vegetarian. :-) :-) :-)
Oh, and on the subject of carbon trading, here is an idea that might even tempt this little so called "satan":
OTOH, going to bed for money is called prostitution isn't it ?
Oh, and here is yet another youtube I found interesting. All about the Bias of the BBC (much like Oz's "ABC") and "The Guardian" (much like Oz's "The Age"), particularly in relation to the Big Lie of our era, "Man Made Climate Change".
My parting comment today is something I informed a iPad carrying drone for Bono's "One" activist/fake charity group at a 360 degrees concert late last year.
"Left wing politics is the problem, not the solution"
Something which painfully apparent here in Oz at the moment.
And here is an excellent youtube series that should give a good hint as to why the above are favoured by me ... and further clue you in as to what my politics are:
Intro: Collectivism vs Individualism
Part1: The nature and origin of human rights
Part2: Group Supremacy
Part3: Coercion vs Freedom
Part4: Equality and Inequality under law
Part5: Proper role of Government
No prizes for guessing what I am in favour of and give my support to ... and what I am against, oppose, and denounce.
"Today I ..." was astounded at the resilience of a local humble Oz magpie.
There I was, happily internutting, when all of a sudden there was an Almighty bang from outside down the street and my internut connection dropped out.
"That sounded like overhead powerlines shorting or a step-down transformer blowing its knives and/or its guts" thinks I.
Strangely enough though, my notebook power supply stayed on, but a test of the lights revealed exceeding dimness ... a sign of a brownout/reduction in mains voltage.
Considering it was a clear blue sky without a puff of wind to blow lines together or trees into them, my next thought was "oh sh!t, the work-dudes building a house a couple of doors down, have accidentally hit the step-down transformer next to the building site" so I rush outside in my PJs to make sure everything is ok and if I could be of assistance.
Sure enough, the work-dudes ARE shouting at each other and pointing to near the transformer enclosure, but they all appear to be ok and no errant gear is near it.
Well, except for a limp black and white form and another more active one stalking around looking concerned at it.
Yeah, a pair of magpies, and prolly the two that were unhomed and used to play around the tree featured in the youtube in my last blog post which includes a clip of them chasing each other around between the branches.
Okay, here is the clip again:
Anyhoo, the work-dudes fuss around the downed magpie that had managed to arc/short-out the overhead 25kv AC supply to the step-down mains supply transformer with an Almighty Bang.
One of the work-dudes flips the unfortunate creature over and you know what ?
It gets back up to its feet.
I kid you not. I'm standing there in my PJs in the street watching from about 40metres away, and this creature that should be, for all intents and purposes, the pre-cooked filler for a magpie pie, gets back on its feet and just stands there looking like it is thinking the magpie equivelent of "WTF" ... which was clearly what we were all thinking.
So one of the work-dudes gets it a container of water and puts it near the stoned crow wannabe and before you know it, it stepped over to investigate the container contents.
Then its friend hops over to say "WTF mate, you ok ?" in magpie (yeah, it does the "do do do doodle doodle do" thing similar to what I captured in the youtube in my last blog post), and the recently mega-zapped tells it to bugger off for the moment coz it still has its buzz on ... IE, it zots its beak at it as if to say "don't stand so close to me".
Within about 5 minutes, it is wandering about the verge on which it crash landed from about 6 or 7 metres up to, so I go back inside to unplug things like TVs and fridges which don't like brownouts that much (underpower is WAY worse for electrical stuff than blackouts), and when I come back out, the magpie had wandered off completely and its mate was gone too.
I wonder if it, or its chicks, are now going to develop super powers ?
I'm also just simply amazed that it was able to survive being a living short-circuit to such a high voltage AND the concussive bang that happened when it pretended to be a switch. A short-circuit that took Western Power around two and a half hours to fix !
"Today I ..." am also LOLing at the irony of "der spatz" (the sparrow) being "booted" offline by a magpie getting a 25kv AC boot.
I mean, when it comes to little birds vs bigger birds, its usually the former that chase the latter off, yes ?
Oh, and one more.
"Today I ..." was also pleased to learn that a bull in a bullring in Spain decided it didn't want to play the game of being tortured to death for the amusement of a sick in the soul audience but instead decided to join them where they sat and teach some of them and their children a deserved lesson they are not likely to forget in a hurry.
Here are some youtubes of derspatz proving that you're never too old to learn new things ... and for me and LSCP, that meant trying out Snowboarding at Coronet Peak, Queenstown in New Zealand in the July school holidays just gone.
For a slobbish "likes to hang loose" cool and froody bighead like me, I discovered it came kinda a natural ... and I don't think I'll ever go back to skiing now. :)
But don't take me at my word, not while there are long and boring youtubes to be endured ! Most of the following were taken using a tiny webcam thingy I had clipped to my beanie, so where I look, you see !
First up ?
Me and LSCP riding the fast lift DOWN the mountain:
Next up, a long and boring (coz, let's face it, I was going pretty slow) run down "Meadows Express"
Here is a similar run to that except I take a detour and include some footage of LSCP doing pirouettes on a snowboard. ;) :)
And now for a spill so daring and dramatic that it took me clean off the mountain !
Excellent fun which I well recommend ... and the fact that I appeared to be some mad old man talking to himself while zipping(ish) down the piste (hey, I was giving camera commentary !) tended to keep living obstacles away. Heh.
Snowboarding. Try it some time ... but if your butt bruises easily then I would recommend that you get some padded pants first.
See http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/butterflies-linked-to-climate-change-20100317-qfm4.html (with the utterly misleading and inaccurate headline of "Butterflies fly early as planet warms" ... since when is Melbourne "the planet" ?) for how Melbourne Uni's AGW alarmist and publicly funded MMGCC (man made global climate change) advocate and lobbyist, David Karoly, has boldy attached his name to the gob-smacking latest lunacy being used to prop up the AGW religion.
Yes, if you visited the link, you just read how butterflies in Melbourne are to deemed a direct proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Yep, David Karoly basically wants you to believe that Melboreds Urban Heat Island Effect (thanks to it being a growing city) equals Man-Made Global Climate Change.
ffs, the study revolves around studing creatures in A CITY, you know, a place where populations, buildings and roads increase and spread, and the UHI effect generally increases, ... so should any of us be surprised that the growth and changes of/in a city should have an effect on the flora and fauna found within ... and who would deny that it happens anyway ?
Sheesh, what next ... another look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth ("The Peppered Moth") and a revision to say it wasn't the amount of evil coal dust around that determined which colour varieties were "the fittest" for survival re: predation, but actually the amount of CO2 in the local atmosphere ?
Anyhoo, I've heard that Melboredites like to see themselves as the whole world, but isn't it getting a bit ridiculous to claim that the city's UHI equals Man-Made Global Climate Change ala Anthropogenic Global Warming ?
Aside from that, can you also now think of a better way your taxes should be spent than on the likes of Karoly and Co ?
Oh, and how is the collecting of data on breeding cycle of butterflys OUTSIDE Melbored's UHI going ?
Did the so called "scientists" bother to study that, or where they all just too busy pushing a barrow (one that also serves to carry the grant funding back to the lab) and providing Karoly with the subject matter for his next bit of advocacy and lobbying on his chosen religion, AGW ?
Hmmmm, let's look at that article provided in the link again. Oh, here we are:
"Dr Kearney said the study, which relates specifically to Melbourne, would prove a practical tool to forecast the impact of climate change on the city's biodiversity."
Nope, just Melbourne.
But it gets worse (or better, depending on which side of reason you are).
Look what has happened to the news item once it made its way out of Oz and on to the rest of the world.
Whatever happened to this being a study of the life cycle of butterflies in MELBOURNE !?
Butterflies emerging earlier due to climate change
Published: 7:20AM GMT 17 Mar 2010
Butterflies are emerging from their cocoons ten days earlier than 65 years ago because of climate change, experts warn.
The finding represents the first concrete evidence of a link between greenhouse gases and the timing of a natural event, according to researchers.
The team found that on average, the Common Brown butterfly (Heteronympha merope) has emerged earlier and earlier over the last half century, with an average of 1.6 days per decade over a 65 year span.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne said that the findings tally with a corresponding increase in temperature of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade over the same period.
This warming is shown to be human-induced, researchers say.
Lead author of the study Dr Michael Kearney, from the Department of Zoology, said the findings could help our ability to forecast future impacts of climate change on biodiversity.
He said: "Shifts in these seasonal life cycle events represent a challenge to species, altering the food and competition present at the time of hatching. Studies such as ours will allow better forecasting of these shifts and help us understand more about their consequences."
The study, funded by an Australian Research Council grant to Monash, Melbourne and Wisconsin Universities, is due to be published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
The team looked at catterpillars raised in the lab and compared their development to increases in temperature and climate change models.
Professor David Karoly said: "Scientists have previously observed that biological events are happening progressively earlier in spring over the past few decades.
"This new work has tied the earlier emergence of butterflies directly to a regional temperature increase, and has tied the temperature increase very strongly to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by humans."
If you hadn't already read the original report that specifically says the study was limited to Melbourne, a city, would it be fair to suggest that the above article would tend to have you think that researchers from the three listed universities had studied "the common brown butterfly" all around the world, and determined that all around the world, where ever it was found, it was hatching out 10 days earlier than it did around 65 years ago ?
Now ask yourself, why are the likes of Karoly and the Telegraph so keen for the natural cycle of climate change to be seen as being man made, global, ... and bad ?
[edit] About a month later now, and here is something else on the topic, this time from the award winning science blog "Watts Up With That" and commenting on "Confirmation Bias". See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/23/butterfly-study-a-case-study-in-confirmation-bias/#more-18856
[edit++] Tis now June 2010, and here is the latest on the topic, this time from the Royal Society Publishing. See: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/07/rsbl.2010.0053.short/reply ... and wonder if Karoly et al should be subjected to a rigorous public conducted enquiry in relation to grant funding, etc.
The long and short of the Royal Society published article is that both Kearney and Karoly are just plain wrong, wrong, wrong, and probably fraudulently so.
Anyone really surprised that this would prove to be the case ?
A quick break from talking about the natural cycle of climate change and how certain folk seem dead keen on making a religion about it and other folk just wanna rob us blind over it.
Time to go boating. Yeah, apologies to readers from the Northern Hemisphere who have got loved ones stranded under the English Channel, or stuck in a London or Paris train station or in a New York airport at the moment ... hey, howz that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" thing working out for ya ?
Here is my tube of my maiden voyage in the new old (built in the 1960s) water toy on her way to be dry-docked for some repairs and antifouling (ie, painted with special stuff to stop other stuff growing on it):
Howz all those Mussels on the stern drive legs, eh ? Mmmmm, where is a pot of boiling water and some chilli or garlic when you need it ?
That was Part 1. Short and sweet eh ? Well stay tuned for Part 2 ... it ain't so short, so hang on to your life-jackets, this is going to get rough !
Here she is a week later on the planned quicky excursion back to the mooring that actually turned out to be a mini-odyssey. Once again, apologies to snow-bound folk unable to travel or get home over in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment.
Somebody elsewhere asked me earlier: "Oh and about your boat, what happens if she's leaking again, I guess that means she won't get looked at again til after x-mas new year? Be a bummer to your holidays if that happens."
The following is my response to that:
See for yourself and note the lack of concern in my voice.
"Today I ..." shared a surprise adventure with LSCP that we could have prolly done without but all things considered, better that it happened when it did rather than later.
Today was the day the new old water toy went back into the water after a week in dry-dock getting her bum sanded and anti-fouled (cheers Adrian & Daniel at Aquarama) and a new steering helmet put on her starboard leg and having the leg bolted down (a common "fix" for older volvo penta legs and their reverse retaining clamp of suspect design), the old Ward 32'er is back on the water again and ready to get up and go.
What a difference a week and a whole bunch of work and money makes, because "get up and go" she now does !
After paying the bill and visiting the fuel jetty to pay for go-juice at expected standard extortion rates, LSCP headed off in the car and I back to the mooring. All was good and well and the salt air soon made the smile on my face set harder than pelican poo on the aft deck.
I easily solo navigated her up to Claremont jetty where LSCP (who had driven around there from the slipyards downstream on the other side of the river) jumped onboard and soon took over Skipper duties.
Yup, LSCP not only stands for "Life Style Choices Partner", but also "Lady Skipper, Cute n Pretty".
As the newtube shows, she made skippering look easy. Tis much easier to steer now that one leg isn't flapping around in the chop. As for the water in the bilge, that's no worries and quite a normal thing to happen in a wooden boat that has been out of the water for more than a couple of days. The timbers dry out and shrink a bit and in leaks wet stuff, but I found even just a couple of hours later on the mooring, things seemed to have already swollen up again and the bilge contents back to more or less what they were before she was taken out of the water a week ago.
Besides, just like with Witches, Ducks, and Very Small Rocks, wood floats.
Ah, but on WHAT mooring "a couple of hours later" ?
Well, that's where the Adventure began.
After LSCP took her for a burn, she then assumed "grab the pole and hook up the mooring rope" position up forward. We idled up to the mooring and she deftly hooked up the mooring rope and slipped it over the thingumy on the front of the boat wot such things attach to, and I did my bit and turned off the engines and batteries.
Picture perfect, with no swearing or shouting at each other. Quite amazing really, especially considering the stiff breeze we were working against that was busy trying to push us ashore.
Then a strange thing happened.
Another mooring passed us.
WTF ?
How can that happen ... we're attached properly to our mooring !
Uh, yup ... but what was our mooring attached to ?
A long line of heavy duty chain that wasn't attached to anything other than algae and the wet stuff we were floating in.
fcukity fcukity fcuk ! (which is French for "oh bother, the train has stopped in the middle of the Chunnel")
Before I could get to the anchor, we had drifted aground ... well, the nicely newly antifouled/painted stern drive legs had. Meh.
So, then began the telephone ring around.
First up a call to Freo Sea Rescue (I'm a member and both boats registered with them for rescue attention ... well worth the $35 a year considering that they would tow me all the way back from Rotto at no cost).
Then a call to the owner of the mooring to tell him that it was no more and that the contractors employed to check it may have stuffed up because at the end of the chain there was a massive shackle missing its pin. A pin that holds it to the trio of chain linked concrete blocks at the bottom or whatever it is that is down there. A pin that is supposed to be wired to the shackle to prevent it coming loose like it just had.
Then a call to the DPI (Department of Planning and Infrastructure - all moorings are registered/licensed with them).
Then the owner rang back to say he had contacted the contractor but they wouldn't be able to attend until Wednesday (so what were we to do until then ?) and he suggested I get back onto the DPI again as they have access to some emergency moorings. Good to know !
Then the Freo rescue called to confirm our predicament (that we needed pulling into deeper water so we could start the engines and motor elsewhere).
By this stage another boaty on a nearby mooring had noticed our situation and rowed his tender over. LSCP and I were in the middle of sorting out a long rope to go from the bow to a nearby mooring with the idea of hooking it up and pulling ourselves into deeper water. I was in my Jesus boots and shorts and up to my waist in (thankfully warm) water (so much for Jesus boots allowing walking ON water) holding the bow into the wind. Anyhoo, the boaty rowed the rope out to the mooring and tied it on then came back and he and LSCP sat up forward and hauled on the rope while I put my back to the stern and heaved up while pushing and before you could say "ewwww, a jelly fish, and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT SQUISHY THING I STEPPED ON" we were in deep enough water again.
So, time to call Freo Rescue again and say "thanks, but we're ok now" (I intend to send them an online donation later tonight for their troubles), and also call the mooring contractors who had called while we were hauling.
They confirmed they couldn't get there until Wednesday but wanted to know where they could pick up the recovered mooring equipment from. I told them they would know once I knew where I was going to end up.
Okay, where were we ? On somebody else's mooring, wondering.
We decided to go back to Claremont Jetty, tie up there, then walk up to the club to see if they had temporary/short term pens or moorings available.
No such luck ... especially seeing as we weren't members. Still, they were very helpful with what they could do, which was to lend me their phone to sit through "on hold music" until an obviously Very Busy DPI were able to offer a rescue by registering my port-less vessel to one of the emergency moorings they have.
Excellent, even though it was around 9km away in [deleted for now]. So, after "merry festivus"es were exchanged with the DPI and the Claremont Club staff, LSCP headed off in the car and I in the boat. Talk about having an unplanned workout ... and so much for the plans of getting her back in the water and back to her mooring in about an hour !
Still, what better way to get used to skippering her alone ... especially seeing as this was only the second time I'd actually skippered her since purchase. On the way around to [deleted for now] with the salt spray slipping by the middle window and helping with setting my smile again, I got to thinking how blessed it was that the mooring should go when we were there to attend to it rather than in the middle of the night and have the boat smashed up on shore.
Yeah, I'm a glass half-full kinda guy.
Are we there yet ?
Almost there ...
So after having a laugh with Poseidon and telling the Sirens (I did say "Odyssey" earlier) they were wasting their time coz I already have all the lurv'n'comfort I need with my LSCP, etc, etc, I made it into the still waters of [deleted for now].
Now WTF is that DPI mooring ... and how am I going to tie up on it without LSCP to help ?
Couldn't find it ... but I did find a complementary temporary mooring and was able to pull up my fine craft along side and hook onto it by myself. Then it was a simple matter of paddling ashore using one of the waveskis and towing the other one, then LSCP returned with me.
Another call to the DPI and the lovely and patient lady explained exactly where it was and yeah verily what other numbers were nearby ... and instructed me to call back when we were safely tied up there.
The instructions proved instructive and after a bit of mucking around making our own multiple mooring ropes, we had a new temporary home.
Yes, we are now "there yet".
All that remained was to secure the wayward mooring for the contractor team, paddle ashore with me singing LSCP's praises all the way for her patience as well as apologising for the one (maybe two) occasions I, uh, "failed to effectively communicate" and did an exasperated naggy whinge thing.
The poor girl is now horrible sun-burnt as she wasn't expecting to be in the sun much at all for what we originally planned ... but seriously (and as I said multiple times throughout the long afternoon) "you wouldn't read about it" (let alone plan for it !)
And yet here you are doing that very thing ... and well done if you made it this far.
Anyhoo, I get home to hear about cyclones up North and folk stranded under the English Channel and New York snowed in, etc, etc, and so how can I think of our afternoon's troubles and inconveniences being anything other than an adventure ?
Merry (good natured) Bah Humbug to one and all and may all your travels be adventures ... rather ordeals. Grin.
Above image from: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/jo-nova-finds-the-medieval-warm-period/#more-13698 It shows the Real Story of the climate cycle as opposed to the one Michael Mann fraudulently wanted the IPCC (et al) to believe in ... one with no prior warmer-than-now time called "The Medieval Warm Period" that helps prove that humankind is NOT the cause of global climate change.
I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.
Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).
Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.
As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.
As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.
We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by “peer review” is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.
We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science “settled”, refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional “overwhelming evidence” continues this anti-science activity.
All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word “trick”. Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only “value added” data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).
But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.
If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, “peer review” was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the “global warming believers” to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.
Contrary to Prof. McCarthy’s assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no “consensus” exists. The “2500 scientists agree” number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).
The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.
Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains “overwhelming support” for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.
What the hell was Phil Jones and the rest of his colluding CRU crew using for raw data anyway ?
... The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect.
At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data. "What a bloody mess," he concludes.
In another case, 30 years of data is attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS [automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!"
In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering." ...
Wow, weather station data from a weather station not established until 32 years later ... now THERE is a "trick" !
Seems to me that the only thing holding up AGW now is religious blind faith and wishful thinking ... and why would anyone want it to be true anyway, hmmm ?
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