Natural Disaster

Sometimes google is not your friend…sometimes it is. When someone rarks up in the media it is always a good idea to find out all about them, what their motivations are or aren’t.

Clearly the “decent journalists, trained and skilled” at the NZ Herald haven’t yet found it necessary to become “trained and skilled” in using Google.

If you have a quick flick on google, go back to 2011, and you get a useful insight into the motivation of the “concerned citizen”  Bryan Staples who has put the arm on the EQC over the accidental emailing of claims to his account.

Turns out our concerned citizen is making a living out of putting the slipper to EQC

“Advocacy services are emerging up to help quake-stricken Christchurch residents resolve disputes with EQC and insurance companies.

EQ-East, founded by former EQC employee Bryan Staples, has carried out 150 independent assessments of quake-damaged homes for property owners unhappy with EQC reports or the standard of repairs managed by Fletcher EQR.  Read more »

via Vice

California based pro-surfer Alek Parker travels the globe in search of the kind of monster waves caused by hurricanes. This time he visits Japan to catch the big waves that happen only once a year during the typhoon season. So what did Alek make of Japan and the people he met on his journey?

Despite the glorious rainfall today there are still claims by many that the drought currently being experienced by most of the country is somehow linked with climate change and that we should get used to this. Perhaps we should stop listening to NIWA, the assorted climate alarmists and start listening to Princeton and Australian National University:

Released late last year (November) by Princeton and ANU:

A series of recent droughts from Australia to the United States has led some scientists to warn that global warming has already begun to increase worldwide drought. But new research from Princeton and the Australian National University in Canberra has found that this might not be the case…..

…A new analysis of drought conditions over the past 50 years has yielded a nuanced view of global trends. Red areas have experienced increasing levels of drought while blue areas have become less prone to dry conditions. Overall, there has been less of a trend toward drought globally than previously thought, Princeton researchers have found. (Image courtesy of Justin Sheffield)….

….The greater detail of the Princeton model does mean it is more difficult to use and requires a far greater amount of data than other estimates. In fact, the researchers said the data requirements precluded its widespread use by climate scientists until relatively recently, when better satellite coverage and improvements in global data from ground weather stations provided more extensive and reliable estimates of meteorological variables such as precipitation, humidity and wind speed…..

So two questions:

When did Salinger leave NIWA?

Does NIWA used the discredited Palmer Drought Index or are they using the new Princeton Model?

I suffer from depression, I am open about it, I have blogged about it, I help people understand how depression affects them…but one thing is consistent in everything I have written about it and everything I have explained to people and that is that depression is not an excuse..it simply is what is happening to you.

I have never used it for an excuse. Look at this scumbag and pathetic excuse:

Depression triggered by his teenage son’s death in the Christchurch earthquake was behind a man’s descent into the world of child pornography, a court has heard.

John Andrew Howland, 38, moved to the West Coast soon after the earthquake and now lives in Greymouth, where a police raid on September 25 revealed he had thousands of images of children, some just toddlers, engaged in sexual acts with adults, stored on his computer.  Read more »

NZPF’s Paul Drummond is home from his state funded junket to Melbourne but not much better informed.

Directly from his latest update. World news: New Orleans suffered a Tsunami and not a Hurricane.

“I am mindful of what happened in the US in the wake of the ‘Katrina’ tsunami. The Government took advantage of the disaster to establish charter schools which have been found retrospectively to be performing poorly compared with the system prior to the tsunami.”

Not afraid to politicise human suffering – he cannot be bothered being accurate (surely he must publicly apologise for this). There are many reasons schools in New Orleans are not doing was well after the Hurricane and the place is still massively damaged. He clearly is researching nothing.

He does thoughtfully tell the Principals who have just been in Melbourne (while the children are at school) to:

“Enjoy your holiday break, take at least some of the time out for yourself and recharge for the final term.”

This came in via the tipline. It is from someone I know and is not a government source, they reside in Christchurch.

It seems that Big Gerry may well have been justified with his intemperate language. It seems the reporters Kurt Bayer and Kate Shuttleworth haven’t fact checked as thoroughly as they could have.

I notice this in the Herald:

Mrs Holmes, who is still living in her badly damaged red-zone home in one of the worst-hit streets in Christchurch, was disgusted.

“Brownlee is an absolute idiot,” said Mrs Holmes, who is still forced to use a portaloo in her front garden more than 18 months after her house sunk, snapped, and cracked in the February 22, 2011 quake.

“With the way he’s acted, and by making comments like this, he must be the most disliked man in Christchurch.

“I only hate two people in this world – my ex-husband and Gerry Brownlee.”

I’ve met Mrs Holmes (I won’t say in what capacity), and of all the hundreds of people I’ve met who were affected by the earthquake, she would be the one I respect least.

1. It is not true that she has had to use a portaloo – she has a chemical toilet and a large bathroom she can put it in. After she made the same complaint last year the street’s poraloo was moved onto her driveway, right beside her front door.
2. Their financial problem is not because of Brownlee – it’s because they cancelled the sale of their house after the September 2010 earthquake and lost their deposit on the section they were buying. This was the honorable thing to do, but it is also not Brownlee’s fault.
3. She has, on her front door, messages expressing their hatred towards Brownlee. Asking Sue Holmes to comment on Gerry Brownlee is like asking Bomber to comment on John Key.
4. Sue Holmes has consistently courted the media (not hard in Seabreaze Close), complaining about her lot – while admitting when asked that she has done nothing herself to improve it (such as calling one of the agencies who are doing makeshift repairs). She’s even complained that melting snow would come into the house – which is quite a feat since their house is uphill from the road!

Gerry Brownlee must be feeling the pressure a wee bit:

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee has backed down from comments he made about frustrated residents in damaged Christchurch homes and apologised.

“I’m sorry people are having to wait, and having to live in uncomfortable conditions – we’re getting on with the job and doing our best to provide enduring certainty for everyone”

He said he empathised with the people who were still facing difficulties but said he was extremely angry at the way some people were characterising the Government.

His intemperate words were:

“I’m a TC3 resident myself and I’m sick of these people carping and moaning,” Mr Brownlee said.

He said the survey wasn’t a true reflection of the problem. It was “self-selecting” because it was accessible only to those who had internet access and time to “buggerise around on Facebook all day”.

When asked to clarify the minister’s comments, made to The Press newspaper, Mr Bryant replied: “They were pretty clear, weren’t they?”

There was much scaremongering in the wake of the tsunami and the shut-down of the Fukushima reactors. Most of it media driven and most of it drivel.

Have read of what Richard Muller has to say about it all at the Wall Street Journal:

Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue.

The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends evacuation of a locality whenever the excess radiation dose exceeds .1 rem per year. But that’s one-third of what I call the “Denver dose.” Applied strictly, the ICRP standard would seem to require the immediate evacuation of Denver.

It is worth noting that, despite its high radiation levels, Denver generally has a lower cancer rate than the rest of the United States. Some scientists interpret this as evidence that low levels of radiation induce cancer resistance; I think it is more likely that lifestyle differences account for the disparity.

Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site.

But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The “hot spots” in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver.

Right so Denver, Colorado is more radioactive than the area surrounding a major nuclear accident.

If you are exposed to a dose of 100 rem or more, you will get sick right away from radiation illness. You know what that’s like from people who have had radiation therapy: nausea, loss of hair, a general feeling of weakness. In the Fukushima accident, nobody got a dose this big; workers were restricted in their hours of exposure to try to make sure that none received a dose greater than 25 rem (although some exceeded this level). At a larger dose—250 to 350 rem—the symptoms become life-threatening. Essential enzymes are damaged, and your chance of dying (if untreated) is 50%.

The hotspots were just .1 rem…and no one even got close to a life threatening dosage. To put this in perspective let’s look at some numbers. Estimates of likely death caused by the reactor failures vary from Richard Muller’s 100 deaths all the way up to 1,500 deaths estimated by Richard Garwin, a renowned nuclear expert. The tsunami killed 15,000 people.

The media has a great deal to anser for in panikcing people.

ᔥ Ars Technica

You often hear people say “I remember when…” and then they regale how they used to walk 10 miles to school and a quick check of Google maps shows it to be 800 metres…or that things were colder back then, or hotter or whatever.

Well,  new study has looked at how ideological and political beliefs affect people’s perceptions of the weather. The authors of the study surveyed 8,000 people across the U.S. between 2008 and 2011 and found that while floods and droughts were remembered correctly, temperature changes were a different story.

In fact, the actual trends in temperatures had nothing to do with how people perceived them. If you graphed the predictive power of people’s perceptions against the actual temperatures, the resulting line was flat—it showed no trend at all. In the statistical model, the actual weather had little impact on people’s perception of recent temperatures. Education continued to have a positive impact on whether they got it right, but its magnitude was dwarfed by the influences of political affiliation and cultural beliefs.

And those cultural affiliations had about the effect you’d expect. Individualists, who often object to environmental regulations as an infringement on their freedoms, tended to think the temperatures hadn’t gone up in their area, regardless of whether they had. Strong egalitarians, in contrast, tended to believe the temperatures had gone up.

The authors conclude that climate change has become perceived as a form of cultural affiliation for most people: their acceptance of it is mostly a way of reinforcing their ties to the political and ideological communities they belong to. And, since temperatures have become the primary thing the public associates with climate change, people now interpret the temperatures through a filter based on their affiliations, a process termed “cultural cognition.” In other words, we tend to interpret the temperatures in a way that reinforces our identity, and our connections with others who share similar political persuasions.

So people think temperatures are hotter because they are constantly bombarded by media and warmists telling us that the earth is boiling and  we are all doomed.

ᔥ NZ Herald

They should auction the rights to push the button. I might go down just to watch.

A multi-storey office block will be blown up in quake-hit Christchurch’s first controlled demolition next month.

The 14-storey Radio Network House building in Worcester St, which housed Newstalk ZB, will be razed with an explosive implosion.

The controlled demolition, which has been approved by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Cera), will be the first of its kind in the city since authorities began the massive task of bringing down the hundreds of quake-damaged buildings.