Tag: John Roughan

Roughan’s relaxed, world drowns

rising seaInsouciance is the new face of climate change denial. John Roughan’s column in Saturday’s New Zealand Herald was a typical example. Half a metre sea level rise by the end of the century? What’s there to be concerned about in that, he scoffs. A bach at the water’s edge might no longer be a good idea, but that’s about all it amounts to.

At a century off, the predicted disaster of climate change is a slow burn.

“It is plenty long enough for people to move if necessary, for crops to change, fresh water to be managed much more efficiently. Human life will adapt if it has to…”

It’s hard to credit the nonchalance, let alone the implicit inhumanity. Roughan settles for the lower sea level rise estimates, I notice.  No mention of the metre or more which is now commonly advanced by scientists. But there’s not much need to be too closely acquainted with the science if you can brush it all away with the assertion that humans will adapt if they have to.

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Roughan’s ready theory

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.

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