I’m still on watch

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Hi everyone,

Sorry I’m not much present these days, but there’s an election in about 13 weeks in which we really must dismiss this incompetent, divisive and destructive Labour government before we lose our last shreds of democracy. And it may already be too late for that.

I’m lending a hand as best I can but, just as with global warming, there’s more and more to read.

Many Kiwis are calling this a battle for our nation, though you won’t hear about it from our lamestream journalists, bribed off by the Public Interest Journalism Fund. I hope shortly to produce a website that features some of the behind-the-scenes thinking and strategy.

In the meantime I’m watching the Climate Conversation, and I promise to post some interesting climate news soon. I must say, you go a long way off the path at times, but it’s all interesting.

Cheers.

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Developments under way

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Just to let you all know I’m still around but a bit busy and still eager to save the world.

There have been exciting developments in climate science, with many new confirmations that human activity is not dangerous but it’s taking politicians a very long time to get it.

The country’s democracy is being torn apart by the government’s constitutional vandalism but people are waking up to it. Some other democracies are being challenged too.

More later. Good luck.

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New comments editor

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I’ve just installed a slick new editor for writing comments that gives easy access to formatting, blockquotes, links and some other things. Should make life a bit easier without interfering with the delayed editing—or anything else. Let me know of any questions or problems. Hope you like it.

Cheers,

Richard T.

UPDATE 11:45 am NZDT Friday 4th November

I’ve deactivated the new editor for a while. I’ve now seen what RC is talking about and I haven’t found a solution yet. I’ll keep looking. Thanks for all the feedback! – RT

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Moving the blog

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Trying hard not to lose a call

Trying hard not to lose a call

When I started this blog over ten years ago I decided to host it temporarily on a subdomain of wordshine, just to see how it worked out. Well, it seems to be working fine so I’ve bought a permanent home for it. There could be glitches before we’re settled in, so pray patience, friends, while we make the move. When I say ‘we’ I refer to the nice boffin who hosts my domains in Hamilton.

The new domain is named simply climateconversation.org.nz, and I’ve owned it for several years (mustn’t hurry these things). Don’t change your links just yet, though; I’ll let you know if and when you have to. I want you to know we’re doing all we can to avoid losing any of you even for a moment.

Thanks for your patience.

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Post on no posts

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Around October or December last year, when we took possession of our house in Te Puke, a hot water leak began in the downstairs kitchen, soaking the wall, cabinets and floor unseen. In early January the leak was discovered and stopped. The insurance company settled our claim for thousands less than we hoped and we quickly agreed that our plans for renovation had to be brought forward. Continue Reading →

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Open thread

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open thread

A few weeks ago we put an offer on a nice big house in Te Puke. We’ll share it with our daughter, her partner and three children, and it couldn’t go through without selling our present house. It’s been a bit difficult keeping the house in pristine order as buyers streamed through at odd hours to inspect it but now an offer is about to go unconditional, which means we will move out in two weeks. But not into the new house until it is vacated, so our lives are still unpredictable. It’s frustrating having so little time to contribute to the blog and I apologise for apparently paying little attention to the flurry of climate activity ahead of Paris; well, not really climate activity but activity concerning the climate—the climate itself is no more chaotic than usual. Anyway, here’s a fresh open thread. I’m watching, and I’ll have something substantial for you soon. A special note to the fourteen thousand patient, unseen readers every month from all over the world: thank you very much for visiting.

UPDATE 2230, Friday Nov 6

The deal went unconditional late this afternoon. So, we’ve sold the house, hurrah! Two weeks to get out. Another adventure.

UPDATE 0955, Friday Nov 13

Late last Tuesday, we finally made our offer on the Te Puke house unconditional. So we have a house to go to! We just have to wait until the 8th of December to take possession. We are all such happy campers!

Just six days to go before the truck arrives here to take everything into storage.

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Personal tidbit

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Sorry I’ve been all but absent.

We’ve put our house on the market, it’s all been a bit of a rush and we’ve been battling to fix a few things and make it look nice. First open home is this Sunday. The intention is to buy a house in Te Puke. Yes, that place a few kilometres from the coast recently hit by a small (practice?) Chilean tsunami and shortly thereafter by a 5-point-something quake.

Ah well, seemed a good idea at the time.

But seriously, we’re chasing grandchildren. Again. We moved to Waiuku only a year ago. I’m putty in their hands.

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Fog of the Blog

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Expressed sometimes as State of the Nation

The Chinese hackers have been battering on the blog door until a couple of days ago but have now given up and gone away. The technical team at the web hosting company (nzwebhosting4u.com) have dealt to them. Turns out the high traffic figures I’ve alluded to over the past months were spurious.

The blog will be moving away from WordShine soon, to climateconversation.org.nz.

This writer is becoming busy with editing work, as the academic year gets under way.

Thank you, my loyal readers and friends, for keeping up the conversation in my frequent absences of late. I especially like the mentions of breaking, noteworthy stories. I’m now catching up and will post new comments shortly.

The unfinished analysis of the report from the Commissioner for the Environment has not been forgotten. It is at the top of the list.

It looks to be an exciting year ahead; my belated Season’s greetings to you all, a Happy New Year and may you each find in it that which opens your heart.

Peace and blessings.

Richard Treadgold.

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Cyber attacks continue

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malicious hacker

Malicious hacker.

But we’re winning

Well, last weekend was a washout. I got nothing done that I’d planned, dealing instead with electronic warfare and the extensive site disruption it caused. There were glitches turning up everywhere, caused either by the attack itself or by the methods required to combat it.

Almost two whole days were slowly eaten up, but there was no alternative, for exposing climate change misinformation is more important than anything else. Continue Reading →

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A DDOS attack takes CCG down

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If you tried to access the blog this morning but were blocked with the message

This Account Has Been Suspended

please accept my apologies.

My web site host explains it was a DDOS attack on this and other sites which brought down their network. We’re back online and on my host’s recommendation I’m looking into CloudFlare, which might bring an end to the malicious inconvenience. Continue Reading →

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Posting delayed

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A personal note

I’ve been laid low for the last three days by a virus (according to my ever-accurate wife it’s a virus, though it might be a bacterium; when I asked her why she calls it a virus, she was nonspecific—so it left me unsatisfied but ended the conversation) which has gone through the family from one end and out the other from babies to grandparents. Nobody said life would be easy.

Your host is back with reduced but reviving vigour.

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Chinese cyber attack thwarted

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The Climate Conversation web site has been under determined attack by cyber criminals over the last two months. Over 5.5 million web requests and 1.3 million spam messages deluged the server during September and October. I wondered at the persistently slow responses and recently complained. My web host provider was already diagnosing the problem and yesterday brought the attacks to an end, though at the cost of isolating China. Sorry, China!

Our web traffic, already busy, had soared to three times normal, 80% to 90% of it from China, enormously inflating our log files. The SysAdmin told me:

Your logs have been much larger than normal for months, but only caused the server to stop all processing in the last few weeks. Your logs haven’t processed for over a month but others on the server only stopped when yours hung for a week.

Continue Reading →

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Plug pulled on extraordinary site activity

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I may never know what caused the outage, but much of the activity originated in China.

Checking on the blog late last night, my heart sank when I saw a notice in garish colours (that was bad, but it wasn’t the worst part) saying “This account has been suspended.”

Both my sites were down, along with the email. I imagined people around the world contemplating undeserved doubts about my ability to pay the bill.

Today, after webmail discussions with my hosting provider (they don’t accept telephone calls, but they are wonderfully inexpensive) and puzzling over my email settings, everything was running again.

The server software automatically suspended my sites (wordshine and fastproof) after the activity spiked to over 13 GB in just a few hours. The sites were moved to another server. What were they up to in China?

I’ll probably never find out, but I’m sorry for the disruption and it’s all back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

Well, my additional apologies!

After posting this piece explaining the outage, I went to read it online, as I usually do, just to make sure it worked properly. What further horror to discover that it and all the other posts gave a 404 Not found error!

The gremlin lay in the way WordPress codes its title links and fortunately was the work of moments to rectify, but I apologise to those who might have been frustrated all afternoon.

Well, back to the writing again!

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Housekeeping: can we control the conversation?

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Huub Bakker admonished us, saying:

Guys,

Much as Brandoch may throw unsubstantiated statements and ad hominems around, the responses are also laden with ad hominem attacks. This hardly does anyone on this website any favours.

Richard Treadgold, I see that you slapped Brandoch over the knuckles for calling people liars but then didn’t do the same when Richard C accused Brandoch of lying. [although Richard C made the point that his “accusation” was merely a spoof of what Brandoch had said, it’s a fair point that I rarely admonish “friends” – RT]

I enjoy reading a good discussion of the facts and putting people in their place using facts and references but we really could do without the abuse from both sides. Please enforce politeness and respect on both sides, Richard. People coming to this site to be informed would be horrified with the slanging that is currently going on here and might conclude that sceptics are no better than alarmists.

I agree with him. But with one enormous caveat: I have no wish to rule the world. One reason there are no “Rules of conduct” posted here is to avoid adding to the rules we already endure. Courtesy is enough. Continue Reading →

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Ava is very cute

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It was Ava’s birthday yesterday (she’s one year old). There is a party tonight at Diana’s place. Afterwards some of us – probably not including Ava – will watch the Super Rugby 14 final.

Go the Chiefs!

I’ll see you tomorrow some time.

UPDATE: Some time tomorrow today

How were you to know that Ava is alleged to be my grand-daughter, one of an alleged six such lucky children. It was great to be hosted so well at our daughter Diana’s place in Pakuranga, with her fiance Carl, and staying overnight let me imbibe an extra glass of wine and tankard of ale while watching the climax of the Super Rugby competition.

And it was of course terrific to celebrate Ava’s birthday – go the Chiefs!

To prove beyond doubt Ava’s extremely high cuteness factor, here’s one of the pics I clicked yesterday.

Ava's first birthday party

Ava captivating at her first birthday party. “It was a wonderful ball, the prince was fabulous!
Somehow I lost a slipper…”

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Personal update

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I’ve been sick in bed for the week with a watery head cold. My wife took very good care of me while trying to keep her distance — nasty and painfully spluttery, it was. Much sleeping, reading and eating went on, all in bed, some of it at the same time.

I’m still not fit for polite company but I’m now catching up with work and trying to catch up with this writing. There’s so much to say, and I still like to pass on some current stories to help keep readers informed, such as today’s on black carbon.

I hope you visit other sites, too, just as I do, but putting stories here gives us an opportunity to converse about them and inform local communities. And somebody has to mention the latest sceptical climate news, since the MSM aren’t doing it, are they?!

Thing is, I just cannot cover them all, so I’m sorry if I left something out or haven’t touched on your favourite topic lately, but I’ll get round to it. Drop me a line, if you like, to remind me or to make a suggestion.

There are some things I want to say about NIWA, our legal case and the abortion that is their latest temperature record.

I hope all this will be accomplished soon, with your help and patience.

Cheers,
Richard T.

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We’ve moved

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A hard disk drive

WordShine moving tomorrow today

Saturday 14:50: Done. Whew!

After spending two days studying the database material I last looked at about six years ago, altering files, moving files and creating and deleting databases, I’ve finally managed to migrate the WordPress installation without breaking it.

Hurrah! This calls for a celebration!

I’m sorry for the interruption to normal service, and I’ve missed you all! But the advantages of moving to the new hosting company include accommodating all the conversations you could ever want to have, even inviting the rest of the world! And if more disk space is needed, it’s fantastically cheap to add it.

Please tell me of glitches

I should ask you (please) to let me know if you come across errors or anomalies on the blog, because I can’t be everywhere.

Thursday 21:56: Still waiting.

I love it that computer equipment is getting cheaper by the month and competition makes the leading entrepreneurs more creative in attracting customers. Because after being hit with an extraordinary invoice for over $2000 for next year’s hosting, I knew I must change web hosts.

That’s when I discovered how inexpensive web hosting has become!

Annual hosting of the Climate Conversation Group (plus WordShine itself) will cost less than half what it did last year. At the same time, we get unlimited bandwidth! Instead of biting my fingernails as the bandwidth rose inexorably and the end of the month approached, I can forget paying for extra bandwidth and concentrate on research and writing. Continue Reading →

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Off-line again, sorry

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The doctors wanted to give me a life-saving procedure in the hospital tomorrow (Monday) and I decided to let them. Hope to be home again on Tuesday.

Please don’t worry, I’ll be fine — I’ve done this before. I think the surgeons have, too.

UPDATE 14 JUNE

I’m back with more health than before.

The kind thoughts you wrote here gently overspoke my fears of what could be and my heart lightened.

You didn’t have to do that — thank you.

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Briefly in hospital

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I’m having tests for the good of my health and regrettably cannot contribute as usual. North Shore Hospital doesn’t provide public Internet access and I don’t have the right gear to connect the laptop to the phone.

I’m obliged to type this on a teensy keyboard little larger than a postage stamp, which makes contributing wearisome.

My apologies, therefore, for a seeming absence. Be assured I am here in both body and spirit, carrying a watching brief with the doctors briefly watching.

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Happy Easter break

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I’ll be out of town over Easter, visiting the latest grandchild who is to be christened. I expect to be back to the computer on Tuesday night, but don’t expect much out of me until later in the week. If anything crops up, feel free to use this “Easter” thread or use the famous Open threads set up by Richard C.

Good luck to you all.

Richard Treadgold.

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