New Zealand’s leading business media outfit — the National Business Review — has long dallied with climate denial, providing a platform for former ACT party leader Rodney Hide (amongst others) to push climate tosh. Last week Rodney used his regular opinion column to attack the government’s emissions policies (behind paywall) — fair enough, given that they are rubbish — but his rationale was that it was a waste of time because climate change wasn’t happening:
So what about the temperature record? Where is this being reported? Where is the headline? It’s the easiest question to ask, the best news to report and the only salient fact in an ocean of green wash and government propaganda.
And what’s that news? No global warming for nearly 20 years.
So far, so predictable… and so wrong. Here’s the latest news:
The last 12 months have been the hottest in the long term record. So was the year ending in February. With an El Niño event brewing in the Pacific, 2015 is on course to set a new record for hottest calendar year. 14 of the 15 hottest years have occurred this century. And that’s just if we look at surface temperatures. If we look where most of the heat is going — into the oceans — there’s no sign of any pause at all.
Rodney’s column attracted a comment from another NBR columnist, Lance Wiggs, a man with some real business chops and a respect for scientific evidence. That in turn sparked a battle of the columnists in this week’s NBR: Rodney’s rubbish, versus Wiggs’ wisdom.
A comparison is instructive. Rodney doubles down on his denial, blustering away for all he is worth: taking umbrage at being called a denier, dissing the models, moaning that costly action now will impoverish future generations. Wiggs prefers a more measured tone, provides plentiful references, and on the cost issue makes this telling observation:
Rodney Hide does not want to spend money, but it’s pretty easy to see that if we don’t invest now in combating and mitigating change, then we will be passing an ever-increasing burden on to the future. We advise people to start saving early for retirement because of the compounding effect of interest, and it’s the same with action on climate change – as CO2 emissions increase the job we all have to combat the crises gets harder and harder.
To rub salt into the wound, Wiggs advocates a carbon tax as the best policy to price emissions — exactly the policy Hide advocated in parliament before his Damascene conversion to climate denial.
Wiggs also notes that “the climate damage is already done”, and that we will have to live with the consequences by investing in resilience to climate change as well as cutting emissions. His final paragraph is something I am happy to endorse in full:
So what’s the worst that could happen if we work together to reduce carbon emissions? More business efficiency, lower emissions of the other nasty pollutants and power generation that is driven by free resources. That’s a future I’d like to live in.
Amen to that. In the meantime, would it be too much to ask NBR’s editor at large Nevil Gibson — himself something of a climate contrarian, to judge by the coverage he gives the subject — to ask Rodney to stick to writing about things he understands. Whatever they might be. Ballroom dancing, perhaps.
The graph shows that temperatures have increased since 1998, maybe slightly more slowly than previously, but this is hardly surprising as the climates natural cycles have tended towards a temporary cooling phase recently. Even the most conservative views on the longer term ocean cycles have the cooling phase reversing within a couple of decades, which would result in abrupt and severe global warming. Of course a reversal could happen well before then.
Rodney has been told all this many times, so his scepticism is not very compelling. Rodney has a biology degree and is scientifically literate, so he should know better. Rodney has possibly been trapped by his ideologically libertarian / individualist convictions that conflict with the thought that only a collective effort or government programme can reduce dangerous climate change. With his world view under threat, he chooses to ignore and disrespect the science.
Of course a reversal could happen well before then.
It likely already has – hence the uptick in global surface temperature at the end of the above graph. The changes in ocean circulation bear all the hallmarks of the positive (warm) phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). We’ll find out for sure soon enough.