Author: Gareth

No matter who you vote for the government always gets in

We have an election date – November 8th – and an Emissions Trading Scheme on the statute books. The next eight weeks are going to be fascinating, probably messy, and certainly noisy. Hot Topic will be watching the campaigns, focussing on what the parties have to say about climate change, climate policy and the ETS. More when the campaigns get into gear.

Meanwhile, this weekend’s edition of RNZ National’s Focus on Politics (stream, download) looks at what might be in store for the ETS after the election. National insist they’ll be able to get amending legislation in place within nine months (Nick Smith sounded intent on saving Fonterra money…), David Parker reckons they’ll struggle. But will they get the chance?

Good weekend reading: No Right Turn’s take on the true cost to the NZ economy of reasonable emissions targets. I really must get my thoughts on targets onto the blog soon – but there’s much afoot in the Arctic (and I have a vineyard to finish pruning).

Busy doin’ nothin’

Global warming is a difficult problem for our society to deal with, because our brains are not equipped to cope with this class of danger, argues Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert in this short talk. Well worth 15 minutes of anyone’s time. [Hat tip: Desmogblog]

Part one: [youtube]uiz3XARUNeM[/youtube]
Part two: [youtube]VTnkT2pcV3s[/youtube]
Gilbert lends some weight to my suspicion that the global community won’t fully appreciate the seriousness of the issue we confront until there is some sort of climate disaster that can be unequivocally laid at the door of global warming. Or until we give climate change a face… preferably a puppy’s.

Here come de judge

judge How does an intelligent layman decide between the competing claims of the climate cranks (including Rodney Hide), and the position presented to us by scientific institutions and the IPCC? It’s easy to assume that there are “two sides” to the story, and that both should be heard. This is the idea that Avenues – a glossy freebie magazine in Christchurch – decided to use for a series of articles earlier this year. The editor, Jon Gadsby (who has since left), lined up NZ C”S”C veteran Gerrit van der Lingen to take the crank side, while Professor Bryan Storey, director of the University of Canterbury’s Gateway Antarctica programme took the IPPC position. In his introduction to one of the pieces Gadsby said:

This whole project is a major one, and something Avenues has not entered into lightly. We are though, if one side is to be believed, facing the single greatest threat to life in the history of humankind. If the other side is correct, we are in the midst of the single greatest, stage-managed deception in recorded history.

Nicely put, Jon. The final judgement appeared in the magazine’s August issue, provided by the recently retired High Court judge, Justice John Hansen. His summing up is interesting for the approach he took, even if his finding comes as no surprise.

Continue reading “Here come de judge”

I’m wrong about everything

rodenymorph.gif It’s official. ACT is the party of climate denial. Not only have they been endorsed by the NZ C”S”C for their rejection of the ETS, but Rodney Hide has confirmed his status as a full-blown crank in an astonishing speech to the ACT Upper South Regional Conference in Christchurch on Sunday. The errors he makes and the ignorance he displays are so egregious that the speech amounts to a public suicide note from a politician with aspirations to a role in governing this country.

Continue reading “I’m wrong about everything”