Wall Street Journal

The alarming lead headline and story in today’s SST is nothing but a media beat-up. And who has started this beat-up and “froth”… one Lucy Craymer and Charles Anderson.

Let’s take a real look at the issue.

Thanks to Lucy Craymer’s scaremongering of the worst kind, she has placed New Zealand’s global reputation at risk. Lucy is the stringer for the Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal in Wellington.

Here’s a picture of her for the thousands of farmers who now have their livelihoods at risk and for the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis that have employment thanks to New Zealand’s agriculture sector.

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ᔥ Wall Street Journal

People are starting to very slowly wake up to the fact that the calamity predicted hasn’t happened.

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, complied at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned. The burning of fossil fuels has been one reason for an increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to around 395 ppm (or parts per million), up from preindustrial levels of about 280 ppm.

Pretty soon there is going to be some very angry people searching for the perpetrators of the fraud.

hat tip Not PC

Fran Tarkenton (Former NY Giants and Minnesota Vikings quaRterback) makes an observation in today’s Wall Street Journal that I’ve translated into New Zealandese for you:

Imagine NZ Rugby in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been playing in the Super 15 or the All Blacks. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s a three-time winner of the IRB’s Rugby Player of the Year or the man who regularly never makes it off the bench until the seventieth minute. But for every year a player’s been in the Super 15 or ABs, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Dan Carter and Stephen Donald is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

From the original article at Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We’ve destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, “You don’t get vast results with half-vast efforts!”

The results we’re looking for are students learning, so we need to reward great teachers who show they can make that happen—and get rid of bad teachers who don’t get the job done. It’s what we do in every other profession: If you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work. It’s fine to look for ways to improve the measuring tools, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn’t working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards.