At least we’re not in the same boat as Millburn…

Millburn is a pretty nice town, and like Glen Ridge, more and more people with school age children move there, have their children attend school and graduate, then move out since the property taxes are completely nuts.

Good thing that isn’t happening in Cranford on a smaller scale.

Oh, wait.

 

Obama’s Priorities

I liked this quote from Mark Steyn about Obama’s Afganistan dithering:

Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

 

I nominate the Cranford Town Council for a Nobel Peace Prize

Considering that they kept the skatepark meeting from degenerating into fisticuffs, I think they’re a legitmate entry.

Especially with the current criteria for winning it.

Go Cranford TC!

 

Hey! Let’s spend $20 million….on 8 school roofs

In the “How the heck is THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?” dept…

School District discussions are going on with PTA’s about a proposed bond issue for about $12 million in more debt (paid with our future tax payments) and $8 million from the insolvent state to re-roof the eight schools in Cranford.

So while it is obviously more than three guys, some tar and some squeegees up there to fix these roofs, one has to wonder: how could each roof average $2.2 million? Even Deegan on it’s most evil bids is less than $20k for a decent sized house.

Well, since there’s state money involved, the contractor has to pay prevailing union wages and comply with the myriad of requirements in dealing with the state. I gather that the chance of a non-union firm getting a chance to bid is about zero. I wonder if they went without the state money, could they get bids below $12 million in total?

But I have a question: None of the elementary schools are even that old. Why would they need new roofs? (Lincoln and the High School, being older, are more logical). What happened with the maintenance funds for the newer schools? Were the roofs patched or maintained?

Or not?

All I know is, paying back $12 million over 10 years is going to set each household back about at least $2,000 in extra taxes.

Yay.

 

Nature’s Broom is at work…

And blowing half of the town’s litter onto my lawn.

 

Hmmm…how do we make sure exit polling does not cast doubt on actual returns?

By banning exit polling in NJ, of course!

The NJ supremes reinstated a ban on exit polling…so we won’t have anything to compare the election returns against. Don’t get me wrong, exit polls are nowhere near perfect, but if Corzine gets 91 percent of the cast vote, wouldn’t you be curious what the exit polls said?

Not saying that voter fraud will be rampant…okay, I am saying that there will be significant voter fraud…

It IS New Jersey.

 

Review of full set of “Hockey Stick” data shows Global Warming is Bogus

When I log into WordPress to access the blog, they often list popular blog posts. Often, a global warming skeptic site is listed: http://wattsupwiththat.com.

And today he has something really neat: For years the guys who developed the “hockey stick” graph that Al Gore refers to in “An Inconvenient Truth”, didn’t make their full set of data available to others. In science, that is pretty rare as you want other researchers to come to the same conclusion you did, which reinforces the fact that you are correct in your assertion.

But finally (last week even) the full set of data became available and somebody crunched the numbers, trying to come up with the same result.

The conclusion? Turn the hockey stick over, pal.

The original researchers cherry-picked data points to come up with their desired result.

Here is the link to the article, which I admit I couldn’t fully comprehend. Here is a recap in more laymans terms in the comments, which I could:

markinaustin (20:45:26) :

ok…now i feel stupid, but not sure if i follow. someone put it in layman’s terms for me. i think i get it, but i would rather be sure!

REPLY: In a nutshell:

1- In 1998 a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann. Then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.

The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.

See the graph http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/mann/manna_99.gif

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren’t telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the “hottest period in 1000 years”, which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed as the “Hockey Stick” and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous “elevator scene”.

2- Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann’s tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/

3- Years go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.

4- Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann’s co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 trees data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.

5- When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand picked to get the desired result.

These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_chronologies1.gif

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_merged.gif

THAT is pretty cooling.

 

To Skatepark or Not Skatepark

One issue I have not been following that closely is the process for creating a skatepark in Cranford.

Mainly because I didn’t think they’d ever be able to do it.

I understand that teenagers should have a place to go. When I grew up, people inexplicably hung out at the local McDonalds…to the point that they had a security officer there in the evenings.

But I also understand that a skatepark is not something you’d like to live next to. It can be noisy, it would be lit up at night, and while most teenagers are fine, it might attract some mischief-makers that may get a “really cool idea” about your porch light fixture.

Throw in liability from injury, and I figured the skatepark is doomed.

It may be.

 

Finally…A way to get onto 78 West from the Northbound GS Parkway

Too bad we couldn’t write that 30 years ago, but we’ll take it. At least for $121 million, we got something tangible that will actually benefit us.

The other day when we went to PA, we did the usual cut-through of Westfield, Scotch Plains and up into Berkeley Heights to get to 78 West. It took nearly 30 minutes.

I’m not going to miss that.

Besides me, anyone remember when Governor Corzine held up this ramp as bait to go along with the 800% toll plan? And you wonder why I have a “Corzine Makes Me Furious” category?

 

Ruh-Roh

So crime inched up in 2008 here in Cranford. While I wouldn’t say that the town is slipping just yet (for example eight car thefts as opposed to six look bad percentage-wise), it is a concern.

Let’s hope it’s a blip and that the police are knowledgeable enough about broken windows policing to stem any serious outbreaks…as that will be a big problem if it starts to get out of hand.