END GAME FOR WMSA?

And now friends, it seems that we’ve finally come to the closing act of that great Shakespearean tragedy known as the Wailuku Main Street Association (WMSA). At 8:30am on Wed., Sept. 4, Deputy Attorney General Hugh Jones and architect Tom Cannon–the last man standing from the old WMSA hierarchy–are scheduled to appear in Judge Joseph Cardoza’s Second Circuit Court hearing room and end the drama over the now-disgraced non-profit organization and legally dissolve the whole mess (Maui-Time’s Wednesday press deadline prevented us from covering the hearing).

This has been years, perhaps even close to a decade in the making. And Cannon, once the Chairman of the Board (the title sounds more powerful than it was–he was actually, say former associates, a mere instrument for carrying out the will of the Executive Director Jocelyn Perreira), has not gone along quietly. Though he and the rest of the board resigned a couple months ago, and Perreira officially stepped down a few months before that, Cannon is still battling Jones–even on the point that he’s still listed as a respondent for WMSA.

“Mr. Jones has used his position as a State law enforcement officer to wage a campaign of harassment against me personally,” Cannon wrote in a court filing dated Aug. 27. “There was no reason why he did not dismiss the earlier Special Proceeding against me and file an entirely new one regarding only the dissolution of WMSA. This is clear and obvious harassment and the abuse of a law enforcement position that should not be tolerated by this Court. Furthermore, Mr. Jones’ bizarre store seems to be a clear lack of candor towards the tribunal.”

Yeah, he actually used the word “tribunal.” Anyway, Jones wasn’t having it.

“The fact of the matter is that, the only reason that Respondent Cannon is a party to this judicial dissolution motion is that the Petitioner filed the June 25, 2013 motion for judicial dissolution within a pre-existing special proceeding that was initially brought solely to compel Respondent Cannon’s testimony and obedience to an Attorney General Subpoena, and as such, Respondent Cannon remains a ‘Respondent’ for all purposes,” Jones wrote in an Aug. 26 court filing. “Further, at the time the October 12, 2012 special proceeding was commenced, Respondent Cannon was registered agent for service of process for Respondent Wailuku Main Street Association. As the last ‘chairperson’ of the WMSA Board, he remains the registered agent today.”

The emphasized words were all in Jones’ filings. And if he sounds a bit perturbed by Cannon’s attempted maneuvering, it’s possibly due to the fact that late last year Cannon tried to have Jones hauled before the state Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) on charges of professional misconduct. Jones helpfully included a copy of the Dec. 13, 2012 letter from the ODC exonerating him in his Aug. 26 court filings.

“After reviewing your complaint, it has been determined that it does not state a complaint of professional misconduct,” Mark L. Bradley, Assistant Disciplinary Counsel, wrote to Cannon. “The likelihood that Mr. Jones’s statement, ‘Nobody knows where the money is,’ [which Jones said in court in regards to the location of WMSA’s remaining assets, which Cannon later refused to divulge even when placed under oath] will materially prejudice an adjudicative proceeding is not substantial. In addition issues concerning abusive and oppressive discovery must be brought to the attention of the court hearing the matter in the first instance. If the court finds that misconduct occurred, this office will investigate.”

Oh yeah, that would be a fun hearing.

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MORE CLIMATE CHANGE BAD NEWS

So lately it’s become fashionable in the climate change denial circles to say that global warming actually stopped a decade ago. “The global warming crowd has a problem,” Gary North wrote in this July 25 post on the Libertarian blog LewRockwell.com. “Global warming has disappeared. It’s missing in action. The public is cooling toward the idea that we need intervention by governments to stop global warming.”

In actual fact–and climate scientists seem to agree on this–since about 2000 the global temperature rise of 0.13 degrees Centigrade that we were seeing each decade went on “hiatus.” But unlike North and other types who never seemed to believe in climate change in the first place, climate scientists weren’t sure about why such a change had taken place. One thing they did suspect was that some sort of cycling was taking place–the Earth is a big place, after all, and change rarely happens in a uniform way.

Now, it seems, new research from scientists at UH Manoa and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have concluded that a temporary cooling of Eastern Pacific waters has led to recent lowered global temperatures.

“Specifically the model reproduced the seasonal variation of the hiatus, including a slight cooling trend in global temperature during northern winter season,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a meteorology professor at UH Manoa’s International Pacific Research Center and the first Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science at Scripps in a Aug. 29 UH news release. “In summer, the equatorial Pacific’s grip on the Northern Hemisphere loosens, and the increased greenhouse gases continue to warm temperatures, causing record heat waves and unprecedented Arctic sea ice retreat.”

Sadly, climate change is still very complex and very much a part of our lives. It’s also, as UH researcher Richard Zeebe has shown, most likely going to be worse than scientists thought even a decade ago (see our Aug. 15, 2013 cover story for more info).

Then again, here on Maui, the effects of global warming are readily apparent–sometimes, all we have to do is look at the beach. Or rather, what’s left of it.

“Sea-level rise (SLR) has been isolated as a principal cause of coastal erosion in Hawai‘i,” stated an Aug. 30 UH press release concerning an entirely different breakthrough in climate change research. “Results of island-wide historical trends indicate that Maui beaches are significantly more erosional than beaches on O‘ahu. On Maui, 78% of beaches eroded over the past century with an overall (island-wide) average shoreline change rate of 13 cm of erosion per year, while 52% of O‘ahu beaches eroded with an overall average shoreline change rate of 3 cm of erosion per year.”