Stuff stuff up (another bloody ice age)

There’s a major fail today for the new science section of the Stuff.co.nz news web site — the web portal for Fairfax NZ, home to The Press (Christchurch) and the Dominion Post (Wellington) newspaper web presences. A front page teaser — “Could cooling sun cause ice age?” (see image at left) — leads to a page with a headline that screams ‘Solar minimum’ could trigger Ice Age [Web Cite]. It’s a short piece that originally began thus:

The world could be heading for a new ‘solar minimum’ period, possibly plummeting the planet into an Ice Age, scientists say. Researchers say the present increase in sun activity with solar flares and storms could be followed by this minimum period.

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of global-warming alarmists.

This alarming introduction, helpfully archived by morgue, has since been rewritten to change the final sentence:

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of further global-warming.

Two small problems for Stuff: “scientists” aren’t saying anything at all about a coming ice age, refuting predictions of global warming, or projecting new solar minima. The paper they’ve based the story on is a lot less exciting, suggesting that there may be a plausible link between changes in solar activity and regional climate a few thousand years ago as measured by varves from a German lake. The story — one of the day’s “top stories” on their iPad app — is made up nonsense. And there’s a second problem: it may have been lifted in part from an earlier item in Britain’s Daily Mail…

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2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

The Club of Rome has launched a new report, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, written by Jorgen Randers, one of the co-authors 40 years ago of their famous publication Limits to Growth. I’ve been listening to Randers speaking at the launch this week at Rotterdam. It’s a striking address, delivered with a charm that softens its grim content. It can be viewed on the first 25 minutes of the YouTube video below. I’ll offer an outline here, along with some loose transcription of parts of the address.

He reflects that he has worked a lifetime pushing sustainability without success.

Will the world overshoot and collapse? This was the warning that my friends and I made in 1972 in Limits to Growth… We are now forty years down the line and it is perfectly obvious that world has already overshot.  In 1972 our critics said that the world is not going to be so stupid as to let the world move into non-sustainable territory. Well, we now are in unsustainable territory.

The simplest example is greenhouse gases.

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NZ govt dumps national environmental standard for sea level rise

The New Zealand government has ordered officials at the Ministry of Environment to stop work on the development of a national environmental standard (NES) on sea level rise, enquiries by the Science Media Centre have revealed. Lack of an NES for future sea level increases will force each local authority to make up its own mind about how much to allow for ocean encroachment. A ministry spokesman told the SMC:

At this stage there are no plans to progress the proposed NES. The Minister for the Environment has made it clear that current guidance provides local government with both the information and the flexibility to plan locally for rises in sea levels.

An NES on sea level rise would have simplified sea level planning for local authorities, who currently may choose to rely on “guidance” provided by the ministry, based on work by NIWA. This currently suggests that authorities should allow for 0.5 m rise by the 2090s, and that they should consider the impacts of a 0.8 m rise in that time frame.

There are two major problems here: the current guidance numbers, first published in 2009, are increasingly out of line with the latest research, and the lack of a national standard means that climate sceptics can waste time and ratepayer money by forcing planning authorities to adjudicate on their minority views.

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Energy advice ignores the climate crisis

An extraordinary op-ed headline caught my eye in the NZ Herald this morning. “Oil and gas reserves can be part of low carbon future.” Professor Basil Sharp, director of the University of Auckland Business School’s Energy Centre and Frank Duffield, an Honorary Fellow at the Centre, argue that continuing exploration for oil and gas reserves is entirely compatible with a low carbon future for New Zealand.

Their starting point is that developing a low-carbon economy will take longer and cost more than many people realise and in the meantime we must ensure that we have continued access to the energy we need.  This they claim is a reality which is ignored in debates about mineral resources and could mean that we miss out on significant development opportunities which could actually enhance our environmental credentials. Continue reading “Energy advice ignores the climate crisis”

Zombie ETS infects RMA with climate insanity

Simon Johnson/aka Mr February argues that the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme has become living-dead “zombie” legislation that infects other statutes with its own virulent climate change insanity. The example is a recent decision by the Environment Court that it can’t consider climate change impacts of coal mining as described by James Hansen in the Forest and Bird appeal of the resource consents for the opencast ‘Escarpment’ coal mine.

The other week I watched the zombie genre film 28 Weeks Later. The turning point in the film came when British actor Robert Carlyle kissed his wife and was instantly infected with the ‘Rage Virus’, which of course meant he had to turn into a homicidal-virus spreading-living-dead zombie who would then infect the rest of the surviving population of post-Rage Virus London. A great zombie movie moment!

For me, another much less amusing zombie moment, was last week’s news from TVNZ, Radio NZ, the Otago Daily Times, and the Dominion Post, that the Environment Court had declared that climate change effects from coal mining will not be considered in Forest and Bird’s appeal of the consents granted for the Escarpment Mine Project, an opencast coal mine on the ecologically sensitive Denniston Plateau.

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