Global warming and the future of New Zealand
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Here’s an excellent new video from Peter Sinclair, contrasting the recent weather disasters in the USA with the “we’ll adapt” line recently run by ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson. It’s a powerful message, to which I would only add one thought: this is only the beginning.
John Roughan has a theory. The New Zealand Herald‘s columnist and leader writer waxes lyrical this week about the discovery of the Higgs boson bringing excitement back to science — science having been made dull by being “dominated by environmentalism” for too long. Others may wish to make fun of Roughan’s somewhat incoherent take on particle physics:
The glimpse of the ‘Higgs boson’, or something like it, allows minds to boggle on the existence of “dark matter” and the possibility there really is a dimension to the world that is beyond human sensory perception.
Who knows where that knowledge will lead? Next they will work out how to control the particle, then they will remove it to enable things – people – to travel at the speed necessary to explore the galaxy.
But bring it on, I say. Let’s get the Roughan-Higgs drive patented. That’s a new technology that could really drive the economic transformation of New Zealand. Truly ground-breaking stuff from a political columnist.
Roughan’s real theory, sadly, is much more mundane, and amounts to little more than an extended and ill-educated rant against environmentalism.
One wearies of lamenting the government’s inability to view proposed paths of economic development from the perspective of climate change. But as they continue to trumpet economic solutions which are inimical to facing the challenge of global warming there is little option but to keep reiterating that they need to take a longer term view.
What has provoked this post was the news in the NZ Herald on Thursday of the pleasure the Prime Minister has expressed in the results of a Herald-Digipoll survey suggesting that most New Zealanders back the Government’s plan to increase exploration for oil, gas and minerals. In welcoming the poll result John Key commented:
Extreme weather events are where the climate change rubber hits the road, and if events over the last month are anything to go by, global warming is currently doing doughnuts and burnouts on tarmac right round the globe. Kevin Trenberth put it rather nicely in an interview with PBS Newshour in the US: “This is a view of the future, so watch out.” John Vidal in The Guardian sums up the situation rather well:
…how much more extreme weather does it take for governments and individuals to act, or for the oil companies to withdraw from the Arctic, or the media to link global warming with the events now being witnessed around the world? Must the sea boil, the Seine run dry, New York flood and the London Olympics be consumed by fire before countries are shocked into taking concerted action?
Damn good question.
I listened sadly on the news last night to the conviction with which the Climate Change Minister Tim Groser announced “This is not the time to put the foot on the accelerator”. Admittedly he followed immediately with “nor, as the climate change sceptics would have wanted us to do, to back the ETS truck up the drive”, but the unfortunate image remaining is of the ETS truck sitting idling at the foot of the drive waiting, or at best crawling at snail’s pace along the road.
Groser is not a climate change sceptic. He claims to fully accept the science. But he obviously does not accept the science when it says that it is already past time when we should have begun reducing emissions, and the window of opportunity is near closing. In other words this is the time to put the foot on the accelerator if we place any value on the human future, or have any care for those already enduring the adverse effects of warming.
Continue reading “Government confirms NZ ETS to be watered down”
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