The Ardern Doctrine: Flim Flam and Fluffery

New Zealand's Year of Style Over Substance

In 2019, politics was dominated by spin doctors PR professionals and talented communicators while a ‘Year of Delivery’ failed to do just that

Bryce Edwards
The Guardian

[Editor's Note: there is an old cliche that runs something like this.  "If you want to influence people for the long run, you should under-promise and over-deliver."  If a political leader is successful in living up to that standard, over time integrity becomes a hall mark of an administration or a regime.  If, however, a leader fails, but instead over-promises and fails to deliver, the game is all over, Rover.  That is precisely the situation faced by our present government.  It now represents a deadly combination of fluff and dross.  Columnist Bryce Edwards sees the problem.  However, he believes our PM, Jacinda Ardern can redeem herself and turn the ship around.  We, to the contrary, suspect it is, indeed, "all over, Rover."  She risks being type-cast as a slightly older version of Greta Thunberg.]

Style isn’t always a bad thing in politics. There is a lot to be said for a politician who can channel emotions and values in a way that salves the soul or mobilises the masses. That’s the type of powerful leadership that makes history. Jacinda Ardern has been an exceptional world leader in this way. In 2019 the New Zealand PM responded to the 15 March terrorist attacks with an emotional and thoughtful response that was a lesson in leadership.

Understandably Ardern’s strong and appropriate statements made her the “politician of the year” in nearly every political pundit’s end-of-year summary. Similarly her pronouncement about the Muslim victims that “They are us” was clearly the quote of the year.

For all that, there are an enormous number of New Zealanders who need more than hugs from their prime minister. They voted for the parties of government because they wanted to see a promised “transformation” rather than business as usual.

It was supposed to be the government’s “Year of Delivery” – or so Ardern declared to the press at the beginning of 2019. It was a neat line, because 2018 had been the “year of the working group” in which little reform was carried out, on the promise that the experts would hand the government some major new policies to implement.

However as 2019 rolled on and key promises such as KiwiBuild’s 100,000 affordable houses, a capital gains tax and alleviating child poverty failed to eventuate, the “Year of Delivery” line became a stick with which to beat the government at every turn.

We have now learned that Ardern’s “Year of Delivery” promise was only ever a slick catchphrase dreamed up by a speechwriter, not Ardern herself.

Last week Beehive insiders told leading political journalists that the “Year of Delivery” promise was actually a spin-line produced on the fly by the PM’s top spin doctor to get his boss out of a tight situation when she needed something memorable to say at the start of 2019. The explanation from the Beehive was to convey that it’s not actually fair to hold the PM to account for a catchphrase that was never intended to be taken so seriously.

It is extraordinary that something presented as a solemn promise to the electorate is now being explained away as nothing more than a manufactured PR soundbite. But, in fact, this episode perfectly epitomises the year in politics – showing how PR has come to dominate.

More Sensationalist Codswallop

Shock! Antarctica Still Doing Just Great

James Delingpole
Breitbart

Antarctic melting faster than evah!

This has been the global warming scare story of the week, heavily promoted by the usual suspects, including Time, CBS, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Timesand, inevitably, the BBC.

Here is the BBC version:

Antarctica is shedding ice at an accelerating rate.

Satellites monitoring the state of the White Continent indicate some 200 billion tonnes a year are now being lost to the ocean as a result of melting.

This is pushing up global sea levels by 0.6mm annually – a three-fold increase since 2012 when the last such assessment was undertaken.

Scientists report the new numbers in the journal Nature.

Governments will need to take account of the information and its accelerating trend as they plan future defences to protect low-lying coastal communities.

The researchers say the losses are occurring predominantly in the West of the continent, where warm waters are getting under and melting the fronts of glaciers that terminate in the ocean.

“We can’t say when it started – we didn’t collect measurements in the sea back then,” explained Prof Andrew Shepherd, who leads the Ice sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (Imbie).

“But what we can say is that it’s too warm for Antarctica today. It’s about half a degree Celsius warmer than the continent can withstand and it’s melting about five metres of ice from its base each year, and that’s what’s triggering the sea-level contribution that we’re seeing,” he told BBC News.

So it’s over, right? The Warmunists were right, the deniers were wrong and global warming is a super serial crisis we need to deal with NOW not the day after tomorrow…

Actually no.

When Evidence Does Not "Fit", Shout Louder

Climate Zealots Cool-Shamed

As an icy winter spreads over the continental United States and Antarctic sea ice is growing, a deep chill has settled over the climate "scientists".  The only shred of credibility to which they still cling is "climate change".

Since global warming is far too tendentious to maintain in the face of data like this, the cognoscenti created a new term to describe global warming--a term deliberately intended to put the global warming theory beyond any possibility of being proven false.  Since every climate changes and varies all the time, any--we repeat, any climatic conditions now "prove" global warming.  They "prove" climate change, and climate change is aka global warming.  Ergo, the science is settled.  The world is definitely warming up.

There are at least two lines of argument that potentially falsify global warming ideology.  The first is to research temperatures one hundred or more years ago.  If these can be shown to be as warm, or higher, than today's temperatures, then the hypothesis that temperatures are rising (due to man's rape and pillage of the earth's environment) would be falsified, or proven wrong.

The second line of argument falsifying the man-caused global warming hypothesis is to prove or establish that the climate has not been warming in recent times when compared to older records.  Hence, record cold temperatures in the United States this year are a pain in the proverbial for global warming ideologues.  According to their pet theory, this should not be happening.

In this great debate, historical temperature records are significant and important data.

Cherished Poster Child Soiled

The Doggerel It Deserves

 The warming that models projected,
Was flawed, as the skeptics expected,
With Antarctica cooling,
The warmists were fooling,
With data which must be corrected.

– Ruairi

[James Delingpole reviews the latest global warming embarrassment.  The West Antarctic is cooling, not warming.  However, a slight, temporary increase in global temperatures was recorded--which consensus puts down to red faces in Global Warming Glory Land and the slew of articles published in staccato machine-gun fashion to explain what should not be happening. Ed.]

The West Antarctic has become yet another victim of global cooling.  According to the latest study, in Nature, it has experienced

“an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s”

while

“The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the most rapid cooling during the Austral summer. Temperatures have decreased as a consequence of a greater frequency of cold, east-to-southeasterly winds, resulting from more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet. These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects.”

What all this means, in plain English, is that the climate alarmists have just gone and lost one of their most cherished poster children.

The Real Threat

Our Doom Is Sure

Catastrophism is a peculiar state of mind which sees the end of life as we know it drawing near.  Whilst the phobia is certain that the end is coming, the precise form of the threat can change.

In the 1970's Paul Ehrlich was warning us that overpopulation was going to destroy the planet.  The decade before that, Rachel Carson was solemnly declaring in Silent Spring that DDT was going to poison us all.  Nevil Shute was sketching out nuclear Armageddon in his dystopian novel, On the Beach. And then, in the eighties, there was the threat looming of a new Ice Age which would devastate the planet and see us all off to frozen graves.  But by the end of the next decade in the nineties the end of life as we knew it would come about through global warming.  The planet was going to cook to death.  And, of course, there was the multi-decadal threat from space asteroids hitting earth.

Now a new catastrophic threat is emerging.

Letter From Australia (About Antarctic High-Jinks)

In The Icy Grip of Fear . . . 

. . .  that global warming is claptrap 

ROGER FRANKLIN
The Daily Telegraph 
January 02, 2014 12:00AM

IF you are going to get yourself marooned, the Seychelles or some palm-fringed Pacific atoll would seem to be the shot. Caressed by balmy winds and encircled by golden sands, they are warm and pleasant places with bars, duty-free shops, clean sheets and room service. 
 
Just the sort of spots, in other words, for an academic to hole up with his latest grant and contemplate the ravages of global warming.

But go to the Antarctic?

Let's just say that making the South Pole your destination implies a great disadvantage from the start.
Arrive in Kiribati, one of those islands frequently reported to be sinking beneath the waves, and local politicians will greet you at the airport with ready quotes about how it is all the fault of the industrialised West's carbon emissions.

Much easier to predict than global temperatures, the next sentence from their lips is sure to be a cup-rattling plea that large sums of UN-administered cash be transferred to the island's treasury without delay.
After those formalities the climate caper is a piece of cake.

Irony

Global Warming Tourists Face Cold Hard Truth

We recently published a piece on the epistemology of global warming protagonists which made mention of the Russian icebreaker caught in Antarctic ice to illustrate how that epistemology rolls.  Several commentators have exposed the irony of this event.  It turns out that the expedition had the objective of going to Antarctica to find evidence of global warming.  It was part serious science, part "scientific" tourism.  That's why green politicians and Guardian journalists are on board.  Unfortunately, it has been so cold the ship has got stuck in pack ice.  Sea based rescue attempts have been abandoned, so thick is the ice and so cold the temperature.  Now it is over to helicopters. 

The occasion for the trip was to retrace the expedition of explorer Douglas Mawson who visited Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica in 1912--a century ago.  Mawson made observations of the climate, the conditions, and the topography.  He apparently encountered no difficulties with sea ice because he sailed down at the height of summer.  The modern expedition wanted to compare Mawson's findings with their own observations to track the effects of one hundred years of global warming upon Antarctica.  We are not making this up.

In January 2013, National Geographic published an account of Mawson's expedition.  He was lucky to survive.  At least one of his colleagues did not.