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Arizona to privatize state parks?

September 12, 2010

According to a report on abc15.com, Arizona weighs privatization for state parks, operation of a couple of Arizona may be turned over to private operators

abc15.com, Arizona weighs privatization for state parks,

Arizona officials might turn over management of two small state parks to private operators so they can reopen the sites that were closed because of budget trouble.

The 28-park state system already uses concessionaires to provide some services but now may go further by turning to the private sector for the actual operation.

The parks system has requested proposals due Sept. 23 for operation of Oracle State Park in southeastern Pinal County and is considering whether to issue a request for proposal for Lyman Lake in southern Apache County.

See abc15.com, Arizona weighs privatization for state parks, for more.

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More state parks in danger of closing.

February 25, 2010

Financial woes of another state budget could result in more park closures.  An Associated Press  report in Business Week says funding proposed in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s budget recommendations could prevent a new state park from opening as scheduled and force the closing of other parks.

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"We’re going to have to make some tough decisions because we don’t want to thin the soup any more," Johnson said. "It will mean shutting down the parks that don’t have as high visitation so we have the resources to maintain those parks that have higher visitation."

Johnson said the cut would mean the state parks won’t be able to hire maintenance workers, rangers, workers for fee collection stations and other employees needed to run all the parks. Johnson said his office would look at park closures and more limited hours, but he said it was too early to say which parks would be shuttered.

Read the Buisness Week article: Parks chief: La. gov’s budget would force closures.

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A lot of hot air on the ice of glaciers

January 21, 2010

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is getting a lot of heat these days on the claim that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035.

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While the information used by the IPCC is supposed to be peer-reviewed and well vetted, it turns out that this gem is derived from a magazine article in New Science several years ago that was based on a single phone call to an Indian scientist.

An IBD Editorial says:

The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It’s their fraudulent claims that are melting away.

We hesitate to call it Glacier-gate, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing was not based on any scientific study or research. It was instead based on one scientist’s speculation in a telephone interview with a reporter.

This issue has been hitting a number of other media sites over the last week or so.

Read the rest of the  IBD Editorial at Investors.com.

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Update: Arizona State Parks to Close

January 16, 2010

According to major news sources, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, major budget shortfalls in Arizona will result in the closure of 13 state parks by June.  Eight others have already been closed.

The Los Angeles Times:

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The action represents the largest closure of state parks in the nation, although several other states are considering similar moves.

“It’s a dark day for the Arizona state parks system,” said Renee Bahl, the system’s executive director.

“We have 65,000 acres around the state and the majority of them are closing.”

The Arizona parks receive about 2.3 million visitors per year who bring about $266 million into the state, Bahl said.

The New York Times:

The Arizona State Parks Board has voted unanimously to close 13 parks in response to budget cuts.

The Washington Post:

The Arizona State Parks Board is closing some of the state’s iconic Old West landmarks, including the Tombstone Courthouse in one of the West’s most storied towns, and the Yuma Territorial Prison, which housed hundreds of Old West outlaws and was portrayed in the film “3:10 to Yuma.”

The decision also closes parks such as Red Rock State Park near Sedona that draw tens of thousands of tourists a year.

The Legislature has cut 61 percent of the state parks budget since July.

In a Huffington Post editorial, Chad Campbell, the House Democratic Whip in the Arizona State Legislature, describes the reappropriation of a quarter of a million dollars meant for state parks:

GOP legislators recently pilfered a nearly $250,000 gift left by an elderly woman – now deceased – for the Arizona State Parks system.

The severity of budget cuts in Arizona is quite disturbing, but the cuts to State Parks have touched an especially raw nerve. In 2003, 82-year-old Asta Forrest left nearly $250,000 to the Arizona State Parks Board. This Danish immigrant’s gift to Arizona was inspired by her love of its beautiful natural surroundings.

It’s ironic that, in today’s rough economic times, state parks are being closed.  During the Great Depression, construction of state parks provided need work for thousands of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

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Arizona State Parks to close?

December 23, 2009

Update – January 16, 2010: Arizona State Parks to Close 13 more parks by June

According to the Arizona State Parks Foundation, a special session of the State Legislature has cut funding for the state parks system to the point all parks will close. The cuts are part of a $205 million budget reduction to mitigate an estimated $1.5 billion budget deficit.

In an Urgent Call to Action, the foundation is asking for help.

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URGENT CALL TO ACTION!
The Arizona State Legislature has acted on House Bill 2001. It eliminates the ability of our Arizona State Parks system to operate. All parks will ultimately close as a result of this action. If you or your children wish to ever visit such extraordinary places like Kartchner Caverns State Park, Tonto Natural Bridge State Park or Tubac Presidio State Historic Park, you must act today. It is our last hope.

Call, email or write (sample letter at right) Governor Jan Brewer and urge her to veto the parks cuts listed in the article below.

Phone: 602-542-4331 or 800-253-0883
Email via Governor’s Contact page at:
www.governor.state.az.us/Contact.asp
Mail: The Honorable Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona,
1700 West Washington, Phoenix, Arizona 85007

Read more at the Arizona State Parks Foundation website.

This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About

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From the Canadian Broadcasting Company: “You wouldn’t accept that at a grade 9 science fair…”

December 4, 2009

“They’ve lost the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts, the graphs and projections, are based.”

“Poor Al Gore”

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Climategate fallout

December 1, 2009

Update: Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

Climate politics continue to be interesting.  Australia’s opposition Liberal Party has ousted its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, after the resignation last week of several senators from their “front-seat” positions.  The Aussie government’s climate change bill is now in jeopardy, raising the potential of an early general election in 2010.

The Climategate emails and documents are being investigated by a number of organizations, including an inquiry by Penn State University, where Michael Mann, creator of the discredited hockey stick graph – used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – is a professor. Inquiries are also under way at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked material.  Government investigations are either ongoing or pending and there has been at least one civil lawsuit filed.

climategateAt a minimum, the emails document the violation of UK Freedom of Information laws.

Many believe that the leaker was not a hacker, but, rather, was an insider acting as a anonymous whistleblower by leaking the emails and documents, including information that had been unsuccessfully been sought under the UK FOI statutes.

The emails are not the only incriminating material.  Computer codes and their documentation show fudged numbers and “blatant data-cooking” that tell a story of twisting reality to a desired view.

Many of the fantastic claims in the media about climate change are likely predicated on the same sort of skewed science.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT gives a more balanced view of the state of climate science.

Al Gore on Saturday Night LiveClaims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

While I have been skeptical of global warming claims for quite some time, this Climategate fiasco appears to show  a conspiracy to doctor the evidence.

In my interest in climate change, I wasn’t looking for a conspiracy, just the truth.

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Climategate update

November 22, 2009

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Click on any of the images to go to the associated webpage.

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While I have spent a bit of time reading some of the emails that were leaked earlier the week, I simply do not have the time – or desire – to delve deeply into the files.  There are many others around the world digging into this.

I think that there have been serious consequences that have resulted from the actions of some of the scientists whose correspondence has been leaked.  In their zeal to “prove” — at all costs — CO2 as the cause of anthropogenic global warming, other potential causes have been marginalized.  Evidence is mounting that changes in land use may have a significantly greater impact on climate change than rising CO2.  If true, mitigation and adaptation to successfully address human impacts on climate could be done at a fraction of the cost of  the drastic actions and expenses that are being called for today.  It may be that efforts could have been started a decade ago, but for an obsession on CO2 as the global warming culprit.

On Examiner.com, Thomas Fuller is writing a series of articles regarding the actions and communications of a group of climate scientists and paleoclimatologists known as The Team. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 , Part 6, and Part 7.

My first post on this was Climategate.

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Climategate

November 21, 2009

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While I haven’t blogged about it for a while, I read material related to global warming climate change every day, so it was with great interest yesterday morning that I read of the release of allegedly stolen anthropogenic global warming climate change correspondence.

I had woken early for some reason and was unable to get back to sleep.  By 4:30, I was up and checking email, blogs and the news-feeds that I subscribe to.

A little over an hour later, I was downloading the files.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going to end up.  Articles are already appearing in the mainstream media.

See new article: Climategate update.

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Does the BBC gives ‘free hits’ to the climate change alarmists?

August 3, 2009

Peter Sissons, a veteran British newsman, left BBC’s Television Centre for the last time in June, without a “pang of regret.”

In The Mail of Sunday, July 15th,  he launched a blistering attack on the BBC, claiming standards have dropped and producers are too concerned about being politically correct to do anything about it.

His article was an interesting read and, given my growing disillusion over the news media and what I believe to be a misrepresentation of the facts on climate change, I was particularly interested in the part of the article that talked about the BBC position on global warming.

Mr. Sissons writes:

Sissons_PeterOn a wintry Saturday last December, there was what was billed as a major climate change rally in London.

The leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, went into the Westminster studio to be interviewed by me on the BBC News channel. She clearly expected what I call a ‘free hit’; to be allowed to voice her views without being challenged on them.

I pointed out to her that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions.

Well, she was outraged. I don’t have the actual transcript, but Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC – the BBC! – should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.

I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change.

The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.

But it is effectively BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard – witness the BBC statement last year that ‘BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made’.

Politically the argument may be settled, but any inquisitive journalist can find ample evidence that scientifically it is not.

I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue. Disquiet over my interview with Miss Lucas, incidentally, went right to the top at the BBC although, naturally, they never sought to discuss it with me.

For me, this is not an issue about the climate, it is an issue about the duty of the journalist.

I suspect the policy of most major media outlets on climate change is similar to the BBC’s.

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