Ordinary People Damaged by Fraudulent Experts

Hipster Engineering

The climate change madness continues to seep insidiously into the lives of everyday citizens.  In almost all cases, the febrile effect is to attack the property of citizens by taxing them more, whether through direct government taxes to fund "carbon credits", or by making some things much more expensive, or by undermining and reducing the value of household assets. 

We are told we must all pay our bit in fighting global warming.  Yet, to date, all that has happened is government has grown bigger, government costs and deadweight taxes have increased, and no value  to ordinary citizens has been added.  If one is of the view that the whole shebang is a manufactured crisis the folly and needless suffering is beyond derision.

But every now and again there is push back.  Sanity shows signs of returning.  We have seen just such evidence in the case of homeowners in Christchurch whose houses allegedly were under threat from rising sea levels, caused (of course) by expected, projected, fantasized global warming.

Expert calls on council to abandon climate hazard sea-rise report

Liz MacDonald

Stuff

A new review has slated the sea-level findings used by Christchurch City Council to assess risks to coastal properties.  While council has scrapped fast-tracked plan changes based on the findings, coastal residents want hazard warnings removed from their properties' LIM reports.

The findings were in a report on 50-to-100-year climate change risk, written by consultants Tonkin & Taylor. The report identified 18,000 properties as being threatened by rising sea levels, and 6000 by coastal erosion. LIM reports were amended to match.

The LIM reports contain notification of risks which attach to a property, so that future buyers can adjust their pricing intentions accordingly.  A negative LIM report, identifying risks, reduces the value of one's home.  At a stroke of a legislative pen, global warming becomes the pretext for devaluing the property of citizens.  In this case, the assessment by the engineering firm, Tonkin and Taylor, which justified the Council's attack upon citizen's property, was irretrievably flawed.

Mathematician and policy analyst Simon Arnold has now reviewed Tonkin & Taylor's report. He considers it was statistically flawed, based on outdated law, and exaggerated the effects of sea-level rise.  "Scientists and engineers are good at talking about what is happening, but they struggle with this level of forecasting - it's too complex," Arnold said. "You really need to get a specialist statistician involved." . . .

He sent his review to both the Christchurch City Council and Tonkin & Taylor last month.   A spokeswoman for Tonkin & Taylor said they had already spoken to Arnold about his review, and did not want to wish to comment publicly. No-one was available from the Christchurch City Council to discuss the review.

Not surprising.  A key issue has been the allegation that the Report, and the subsequent actions by the Council which devalued citizen's property, was grounded upon faulty legal argument and misleading statistical analysis.   Here follows the indictment:

Arnold's review questions the statistical methodology of the report, which he calls misleading. He asserts much of it is based on 1994 coastal policy statements in the Resource Management Act, rather than the updated 2010 version.  The review also says while the Tonkin & Taylor report is based on possible hazards, the law requires recognition of likely hazards only when assessing risk.

Arnold concludes the expected sea level rise in 50 or 100 years could only be half or a quarter of what was forecast. He also says the report's figures may be inaccurate as they were based on global, rather than local, climate change forecasts. [Emphasis, ours.]

Herein lies the problem.  Once a speculative scientific theory becomes an accepted and enforced dogma, critical analysis, checking and cross checking, and sceptical peer view are all likely to go out the window in a puff of hot air.  The Council, no doubt believers in global warming, were willingly duped.  The Tonkin & Taylor report justified their attacking and devaluing the property of citizens and that's all they wanted.  Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes.  If the citizens cop the explosion, more fools they. 

On the threat of coastal erosion, Arnold forecast Christchurch coastlines would ebb and flow, and would likely be "in about the same place" in 100 years.  He also pointed the city council towards a report written this year by retired principal Environment Court judge Joan Allin, which criticised how coastal risks were increasingly over-estimated.

Allin's report said she had "developed concerns about what other NZ coastal experts are doing. It seems that a number of them consider that it is appropriate . . . to provide only results that are very unlikely, or overstated."  [Emphasis, ours.]

No doubt willing believers all--driven by a sense of their own self-importance wanting to display their avant guard credentials, and their status as cutting edge global citizens.  Overstatement or exaggeration, in this case, given the politically fabricated nature of the global warming myth, was ever to be a sign of their gravitas and professionalism.

It is the inevitable result when science becomes captive to demagogues, doomsters, and politicians in search of a crisis to extend the burgeoning powers of the State.