BIGGEST HOAX OF THE DECADE?

Well apparently the tide is turning , people are starting to get more sceptical as more absurd claims are made about the impending doom we face as the planet does or does not get a bit toasty.

So it is with great delight that we find that The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen sounds a sensible word of caution about the growing hysteria and stunts...

Supposed "facts" like this:

" Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide."

Errr yea - so what about beer? And anyway who cares.... its fluffy inconsequential stuff.

But its the stunts and the lies that Albrechtsen really takes issue with.

Just like the small island nation of Maldives where, last month, the president conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to remind the world that his country would be rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Kitted out in full scuba-diving outfits, Mohamed Nasheed and his ministers sat at a table underwater off the coast of the capital of Male.

As planned, the president’s stunt made headlines across the globe. Send us money - and lots of it - is his message. The media love stunts. They are so easy to report.

Sadly, the media is not inquisitive enough to report those who question the circus acts of climate change. A week after the Maldives underwater show, Nils-Axel Morner - a leading world authority on sea levels - wrote an open letter to the president telling him that his stunt was “not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments”.

Morner is a former professor who headed the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University and past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research commission on sea level changes and coastal evolution. INQUA was founded in 1928 by scientists who aimed to improve the understanding of environmental change during the glacial ages through interdisciplinary research. In other words, the Swedish professor has gravitas when it comes to sea levels.

Alas his letter did not make headlines. That is a shame. Morner says there is “no rational basis” for the hysterical claims that the people of Maldives - or the rest of the world - are threatened by rising sea levels. And he sets out some facts.

Fact number 1: During the past 2000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6m to 1.2m above present sea level. Fact number 2: From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were about 20cm higher than today. Fact number 3: In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cm to its present level. Fact number 4: Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years “implying that there are no traces of any alarming ongoing sea level rise”. Fact number 5 (and I am paraphrasing here): The notion presented by the President of the Maldives that his country will be flooded is bunkum.

We prefer to call it bullshit... Even if it does warm up the globe a bit....

And for a fragile economy like ours we dont want to see the decision makers put the probable fiction of climate change ahead of the definite imperative to keep our economy safe..

JOHN KEY GETS MORE INTERNATIONAL PLAUDITS

The Australian has a great column on the business nous of three world leaders - John Key, Kevin Rudd and Obama. She reckons Key has got it sorted. she even thinks that he should have a place at the hallowed table of G20.

She has picked up on the factthat Key is the only one who understands commercial realities because he is the only one of the three who has any real business experience.

Heres an excerpt from Jane Albrechtsen.

Key, on the other hand, understands what is needed to make businesses hum: lower taxes, smarter regulation and a flexible labour market. He has recognised that a one-off sugar hit - or cash splash - won’t help business employ people for any longer than it takes to spend the cash. Permanent tax cuts help business employ more staff - permanently.

He told The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Kissel a few weeks back that he is determined to stop the slide that has seen NZ fall to the bottom half on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s per-capita gross domestic product rankings. “We have been on a slippery slope ... so we need to lift those per capita wages, and the only way to really do that is through productivity growth driving efficiency in the country.” Key is cutting taxes, reforming regulations that inhibited foreign capital and tackling environmental legislation that has been misused by green groups to stop private sector investment. Oh, and he is undertaking a line-by-line review of every government department as part of his Government’s commitment to capping spending.

No wonder Key is the odd man out. And it is a shame that NZ will not be attending the G20 meeting in London next month, the latest effort by world leaders to confront the global financial crisis. Spend big and all will be in order is Obama’s resounding theme. It’s all stimulus this and stimulus that. Is it too much to hope that G stands for growth, not group-think?

We agree - they only problem is that its going to take a year or two to see who was right. Key, Rudd or Obama. Our money is still on Key.

NOT A BAD FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR FOR A SHEILA

This Aussie woman writes wise words

This is a sample of Janet Albrechtsen's very well read column in The Australian

THE Prime Minister is back in the business of building up myths to justify policy intervention. In 2006 he was peddling the myth of “brutopia” under John Howard. It was a flagrant falsehood but it won Kevin Rudd the election.

Now Rudd is using the financial meltdown in the US to flog a nightmare on Wall Street. It’s all the fault of “excessive capitalism” and unregulated markets, home to the 21st-century children of Gordon Gekko, he says.

Rudd’s myth-making is dangerous if it presages an era of misconceived regulation. Alas, listening to and reading some of the local reaction to the $US700 billion ($973 billion) bailout in the US is to step into an uninformed parallel universe.

On ABC radio last Thursday afternoon, Jennifer Byrne offered her take on the crisis. She was furious about the bailout, given that chief executives had pocketed millions of dollars. Sensing an opportunity to push their anti-market ideology, the uninformed have a simple and alluring solution: rein in unregulated greed to build a more socially progressive world.

But here’s the rub. Socially progressive regulation caused much of the mess that has enveloped the US. In pursuit of the perceived social benefits of home ownership, the mortgage dice has been ridiculously loaded in favour of American borrowers. The American dream of home ownership for all is a fraud. Not everyone can own a home. But politicians pimped this dream, creating an unsustainable mortgage industry whose collapse is surprising only because it didn’t happen sooner.

The US mortgage industry will not recover, or deserve to recover, unless someone somewhere is prepared to challenge that politically unpalatable reality. Eager law-makers in Washington are as much to blame for the financial crisis as the unregulated suits on Wall Street.

Wrong regulation, rather than deregulation, is the problem.

Those genuinely interested in understanding the causes of the meltdown could start by comparing the US mortgage industry with Australia’s. The stark differences explain why our central banker, Glenn Stevens, said a few weeks back that Australian banks were “light years away from what’s happening in other banking systems around the world”.

And why Australia’s four leading banks sit among the 20 AA-rated banks across the globe. And why the most recent International Monetary Fund country report concluded that Australia’s banking sector was sound, with stable profits, high capitalisation and few non-performing loans.

Unlike the situation in Australia, the American dream was founded on a house of legislative cards that deserved to topple. Take non-recourse mortgage loans. When Australians borrow money to buy a house, they know that if they default and the mortgaged property doesn’t cover the debt, they will be responsible for the shortfall and the lender will chase them for it.

It’s a neat way of reminding Australians to borrow responsibly.

In the US, where populist post-Depression laws in many states have mandated loans be non-recourse, the opposite is true. Americans can take out a mortgage loan more or less as a one-way bet.

If you can’t afford the repayments and can’t refinance, you just send the keys back to the bank. The banks collect the jingle mail. Borrowers wipe their hands of liability. So, naturally, an American in financial strife will pay off debts that carry personal liability, such as credit cards, before they pay off their mortgage.

The rest of this very good summary of the financial ills of America is here