Tag: Rodney Hide

Don’t Hide your love away: Don Brash, climate and a very particular kind of coup

The most right wing political party in New Zealand that is represented in parliament is the Act Party. This blog post by Bryce Edwards, a political scientist at the University of Otago, is a little long and a little out of date now (November 2009) but it gives a reasonable summary of the state of play in New Zealand. For the impatient the guts is that parties can be positioned on xy axes of left-right and libertarian-authoritarian.

Lib cons

Positions of New Zealand political parties as of 2008. Figure by Doug Mackie, drawn from the mean data at Bryce Edwards’ blog. Scale converted from 0-10 in original to -5 to +5 here. Edwards gives the caveats and all errors and distortions are mine.

Until just after the 2005 General Election the ‘centre right’ National Party was lead by Don Brash, an ex-governor of the Reserve Bank. The arguments will go on but most think Brash lost the election for the National Party as he was too right wing.

National won the 2008 election without Don Brash. But it seems Brash and his mates have ‘unfinished business’. Brash gained infamy in 2004 as leader of the opposition for suggesting to a US Congressional delegation that if he were elected in the 2005 election then New Zealand’s nuclear ship ban would be gone by lunchtime. And as leader of the National Party Brash was vocal about his extreme scepticism of climate change.

Continue reading “Don’t Hide your love away: Don Brash, climate and a very particular kind of coup”

NZ regions planning for climate change

I opened the latest Environment Waikato news update to discover that a Regional Policy Statement (RPS) is due, ten years after the last one. As I thumbed through the publication a heading leapt out at me: “Our climate is changing, so we must too.” Underneath came this statement:

“Even if all greenhouse gas emissions were stopped now, we will still be affected by greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere, and will need to adapt to changes for generations to come.”

 

Following paragraphs mentioned some of the specifics for our region.  It was comprehensive. Agriculture and forestry, our major commercial land uses, could be directly affected by climate change and climate policy. We can expect rising sea levels, more extreme weather, more droughts in the east, more intense rain and increased winds in the west, warmer, drier summers, milder winters and shifting seasons, increased risks from natural hazards such as river and coastal flooding, coastal erosion and severe weather.

Examples were then given of the kind of responses Environment Waikato will focus on. Flood management, the use and development of natural resources, planning, building regulations, infrastructure design and location. All sensible and appropriate.

I was pleasantly surprised by the prominence being given to climate change in the policy statement. It is listed as the second of six key issues facing the region, the first of which is the pressure being put on natural resources.  The third issue is energy sources, and here again reference to climate change and the need to cut carbon emissions figures strongly. Even in the fourth issue, land use, the question of carbon footprint gets a look in.

Encouraged, I went looking for other regions’ ten-year plans. Not with a great deal of success.  However I found Greater Wellington’s which was approved last year. It too identifies climate change as a key issue (page 29). It was more discursive than Waikato’s, and introduces mitigation more prominently. What it seeks:

“A resilient community that, as far as possible, is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the effects of global warming, but is also adapting well to any changes caused by climate change.”

Among the likely changes it points to are increasing drought in the Wairarapa, increases in storm intensity across the region, increased fire danger and the serious implications of sea level rise for coastal areas.

In relation to mitigation measures it finds space to respond to the argument that because New Zealand is so small Wellington shouldn’t worry about reducing its emissions but simply concentrate on adapting to whatever results from the rest of the developed world’s activities:

“The countering argument is that if, to achieve a liveable future, we wish to persuade the rest of the developed world to mitigate the effects of global warming, we only acquire the moral right to do so by doing our bit.”

The counter argument seems to have won out, for the document goes on to set out the response of the regional body to the climate change issue:

“Greater Wellington is currently working with the city and district councils in the region and around New Zealand, and is leading the region’s planning for dealing with climate change. Local authorities have agreed to work collaboratively on developing goals and a shared plan for the region to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. We will also take the opportunity to develop strategies to support our communities to be resilient and adapt to the effects of climate change.”

It details steps which are under way or planned. Prominent  amongst them is the identification of potential renewable energy options for the region, such as marine and solar, and the intention to make Greater Wellington-owned land available for private developers to construct wind farms at Puketiro in the Akatarawa Forest and Stoney Creek in the Wairarapa.

Whether these two regional councils are representative of the long-term thinking of all the regions is unclear. Auckland’s planning is on hold pending the new governance set-up there. Canterbury, the other major centre of population, surprisingly doesn’t seem to address climate change specifically in its draft statement or identify it as a major issue. However, the major attention given to the matter in the Waikato and Wellington statements indicates that it is becoming integrated into their thinking and that they are being guided by the predictions of the science.  The Waikato draft notes that New Zealand’s response in terms of actions to reduce climate change is primarily a central government rather than a local government role, but nevertheless expresses some interest in emissions reduction within its bailiwick, particularly in relation to renewable energy generation and more climate-friendly transport. Wellington is quite bullish on the contributions it can make to mitigation as well as adaptation.

It is clearly worth keeping an eye on local government while agonising over the continuing evasiveness of central government.  Engagement with adaptation issues locally must surely impress people with the reality of climate change and the need to mitigate further damage. There’s an irony that the Minister of Local Government, Rodney Hide, should be a vocal climate change denier who laments what he describes as the massive costs inherent in climate change policy. He even goes so far as to say that the policy is designed to upend society and stifle industrial processes and progress. Fortunately there are limits to his authority.

The man don’t give a….

Rodney Hide’s warm-up act for the launch of Bob Carter’s new book Climate: The Counter-consensus — a Scientist Speaks in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago took the form of a remarkable speech, now available at the ACT web site. I know that it’s customary on these occasions to be nice to the author, but Rodney seems to have gone just a tad over the top:

Professor Bob Carter has written the best book on the science of human-induced global warning I have read.

 

Par for the course. Hardly likely to say that he preferred Plimer’s book, was he?

It’s a very significant book. It will save countless lives.

It will also save trillions of dollars in resources, natural, human and physical. Precious resources that the human race striving to provide every human being with the means for them to reach their full potential can ill-afford to lose.

In the strange version of reality being explored by Carterist science, everything is upside down.

His book stands in stark contrast to the dry and boring and politicised IPCC tomes. And so in this book Bob Carter rescues both the world and science and what could be a more valuable contribution than that.

Bob rescues the world! And science! Hurrah!

Some truth here, though:

We are easily fooled. That’s why Prof Carter’s work is so important.

Too true, but not perhaps in the way Rodney intended.

Science doesn’t deliver truths down from on high by consensus.

Pardon? If real science doesn’t do consensus, how can Carterist science offer a counter consensus?

I know that if “Climate: The Counter Consensus” had been published two years ago New Zealand would have been spared its wealth-sapping Emissions Trading Scheme.

And much more in the same vein. Risible, if it weren’t coming from an associate minister of education in the New Zealand Government. But it is, and that makes it tragic.

[Super Furry Animals]

Hide’s Aussie holiday: warming up for Carterist science’s new consensus

Rodney “The Hood“ Hide is taking an Aussie break during the current Parliamentary recess — popping over to Melbourne and Sydney to act as warm-up man for Bob Carter at the launch of Carter’s magnum opus, Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks. And it appears Hide is as happy to allow his hosts to misrepresent his qualifications as he is to mislead Parliament. The flier for the “Quadrant dinner” in Sydney says:

Rodney has a degree in environmental science, and is a powerful and well-informed public speaker.

He may be a powerful speaker, but Hide does not have a degree in environmental science, and he is woefully ill-informed on climate matters. Hide has Masters degrees in economics and resource management (Wikipedia, NZ Parliament bio), and as this comment at Hot Topic two years ago suggests, he could have completed the latter without encountering any science at all. But he’s good for a bit of rabble-rousing, and I expect his “ditch the ETS” rhetoric, liberally laced with attacks on NIWA’s stewardship of the NZ temperature record and chanted lines from the climate crank catechism will make the Quadrant dinner worth every cent of the A$74 being charged…

Meanwhile, Carterist science is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and the Heartland climate con is on its way to Sydney. Carter’s been appointed Chief Science Advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition.

 

Here’s Carter welcoming his appointment:

“Working with ICSC as Chief Science Advisor is a welcome opportunity to counter the widespread but erroneous belief that dangerous global warming is occurring, and that it has human causation”. Professor Carter continued:  “Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring.

So, do we have ambiguous evidence of problems caused by that unmeasurable warming, or is Carter just repeating standard climate crank nonsense? I think we know the answer to that one…

In one sense, however, Carter is breaking new ground in crank thinking. The title of his book (Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks) suggest that a “counter-consensus” is assembling. For there to be a counter-consensus there first has to be a consensus in mainstream climate science to counter, but for years sceptics, deniers and cranks have been claiming loudly that there is “no consensus“. Indeed, point 5 of the “core principles” of the organisation that has just appointed Carter its chief science advisor says:

Claims that ‘consensus’ exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists.

But if there is no consensus, how can a counter-consensus assemble? Does Carter support the ICSC’s core principles? And what about that modest warming? According to Carter it’s not measurable, or not happening. At this point, dear reader, you will forgive me if I pour another glass of wine and ponder the many contradictory things you have to believe at the same time if you are to be a true climate septic…

Finally, the Heartland Institute is holding a one-day climate sceptic conference in Sydney next Friday, October 1st. Carter’s talking, of course, and Chris de Freitas is popping over to talk about Developments in Climate Science: Potential Drivers of Emissions Policy Beyond 2012 (at a guess, wishful thinking will be involved). Interestingly, the climate day follows on from two days of “workshops and brainstorming with free market advocates from the Pacific Rim” at the Pacific Rim Policy Exchange: chief sponsors Heartland, Americans for Tax Reform (a Koch & Scaife funded lobby group), the Property Rights Alliance (an ATR spin-off), and Australia’s free market Institute of Public Affairs. And NZ’s pulling its weight on the agenda, with the Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr on a panel considering free trade, and (somewhat more surprising, to me at least) Kiwiblogger and National party stalwart David Farrar taking part in a “working lunch” on “getting the message out”. Interesting to see he’s happy to take the Heartland shilling…

When asses go to law

In a bizarre twist to the tale of New Zealand’s climate sceptics and their strange obsession with the minutiae of the history of temperature measurement in New Zealand, it now emerges that they have lodged papers with the High Court [Stuff & NZ Herald, via NZPA], seeking to have the court rule that the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) should:

  • set aside NIWA’s decisions to rely upon its Seven Station Series (7SS) and Eleven Station Series (11SS), and to find the current NZTR [NZ temperature record] to be invalid
  • to prevent NIWA from using the current NZTR (or information originally derived from it) for the purpose of advice to any governmental authority or to the public
  • to require NIWA to produce a full and accurate NZTR [text from their press release]

The mind boggles. Just what is an “invalid temperature record”, and how on earth is a judge expected to rule on that? Given that NIWA has received funding to do a thorough re-working of the long-term temperature history of NZ, mainly as a result of the earlier kerfuffle, why are the cranks so keen to go to court now? Science is not done in law courts. Then there are questions to be asked about the organisation and funding of this legal effort, as well as questions about possible abuse of process and waste of taxpayer funds…

 

The genesis of this story goes back to November last year, when Richard Treadgold and the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition trumpeted the release of a “study” that showed (in Treadgold’s words):

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2 – it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

It was a shonky study, as I showed conclusively at the time, in what has proved to be the most widely-read Hot Topic post to date. NIWA’s response was to develop a new temperature series, using data from places where adjustments had either never been required or were very minor, and it demonstrated that warming was unequivocal — if anything slightly greater than in the original “seven station” series. Since then, Treadgold and the C”S”C have — with their friends in the far-right ACT Party — tried to turn the affair into a scandal, with no success. This latest legal ploy is a transparent attempt to get some more mileage out of what should, by all sensible measures, be the deadest of dead horses.

The case is being brought not by the NZ Climate Science Coalition or Climate Conversation Group, but by a newly-incorporated charitable trust, the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust. The trustees are NZ CSC stalwarts Terry Dunleavy and Bryan Leyland, together with relative newcomer Doug Edmeades. An application for charitable status was made at the end of July and it was granted on August 10th. The Deed of Trust can be read at the Ministry of Economic Development’s Societies and Trusts Online site: search for “2539286 – NEW ZEALAND CLIMATE SCIENCE EDUCATION TRUST”. The stated aims of the trust (section four of the trust deed) look innocuous enough, but include a standard “do what you like” clause: 4.2.8: Such other activities and enterprises to further the charitable purposes of the Trust as the Trustees may decide. The documents sent to the press over the weekend can be read, in lightly edited form, at Treadgold’s blog.

It’s clear that Dunleavy, Leyland and Edmeades have some questions to answer. Their “charitable trust” was registered on August 10th, and within days they had lodged their legal action with the court. Was the trust formed specifically to bring the action? I understand that using a trust to bring a legal action provides some protection for the litigants if they lose their case and find costs awarded against them. But if that is the real reason for the trust’s existence, then surely it cannot be regarded as a charitable trust? Whatever the law may say — and I am sure that Dunleavy and co will have had legal advice (C”S”C chairman Barry Brill is a retired lawyer) — it cannot be morally or ethically acceptable for them to hide behind or misuse a charitable trust in this way. It also demonstrates rather nicely that they have no confidence that their case will succeed…

There are also questions to be asked about the funding of this legal effort to discredit NIWA and its scientists. Legal advice isn’t cheap, especially when seeking to bring a case before the High Court. The NZ C”S”C has always been rather coy about its funding, maintaining that it’s just a group of interested individuals who volunteer their efforts. Nevertheless, it has strong links with the US think tanks organising and funding campaigns against action to reduce carbon emissions, and has developed close ties with the Rodney Hide’s ACT Party — one of whose most generous supporters is climate sceptic and multi-millionaire Alan Gibbs. Of course, the NZ C”S”C might just have had a sausage sizzle outside a North Shore New World, and a bit of a whip round their membership, but on Radio NZ National’s Morning Report this morning [at 8:13am] Bryan Leyland admitted that Gibbs was “one of our friends”.

The question of funding is particularly important, because any reasonably objective assessment of their statement of claim shows it to be highly unlikely to succeed. The summary attached to the NZ C”S”C press release is pretty tedious, but it’s worth taking a look at the second paragraph:

The official NZ Temperature Record (NZTR) […] the historical base for most Government policy and judicial decisions relating to climate change, wholly relies upon a “Seven-station series” (7SS), adopted in 1999.

You don’t to need to read any further, to be honest, because this is sufficient to establish the statement of claim as nonsense. As I’ve said before, the NZ temperature record is interesting, fascinating even for those of a meteorological or climatological bent, but there is no such thing as an “official” temperature record that has formed any sort of “historical base for most government policy and judicial decisions relating to climate change”. No NZ government of any flavour has ever relied on NIWA’s temperature series for anything much, certainly not used it as the basis for any policy. NZ government policy in this area depends far more on the international scientific and diplomatic context than it does on the temperature in Hokitika in 1890.

So if the case is pretty much certain to fail, why go to the expense of bringing it in the first place? It’s a waste of good money, surely? Dunleavy et al, and their mysterious backers, clearly disagree — and the reason’s obvious. This is not about science, or improving the NZ temperature record, it’s about attention seeking. Having failed to get the government to delay the introduction of the ETS at the beginning of July, the C”S”C and its “friends” are getting desperate. Like spoilt children, they’re pouting and screaming and throwing toys out of the pram.

The results of this hissy fit are predictable. My guess is that the court will refuse to consider the case — which will give the CSC another excuse for a loud public whinge. Questions in Parliament by Hide and Boscawen? A racing certainty, I reckon. But much judicial time and public money will have been wasted in the process, and the NZ temperature record will continue to show what it always has and always will do — significant warming over the last 100 years. Meanwhile the world will continue to warm…