I have been planning on blogging on this for a few weeks but uni work has got the better of me.
A few weeks ago Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor released a report on Climate Change in NZ.
http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/climate_change
Please read the full report but the key details that got me were:
Global warming does not mean that every part of the globe changes temperature to the same degree or rate.
Hence NZ has just experience one of the coldest June months on record, but the warmest ever August.
Measuring global temperatures over time is complex, but there is a general agreement that the world is experiencing an overall warming trend (with year-to-year fluctuations superimposed). The warming trend over the past 50 years is nearly twice as great as that over the previous 100 years. These escalating temperature changes have been reflected in a number of environmental and biological changes. These include rises in globally averaged sea level, shrinking of summer Arctic sea-ice extent, losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, retreat of mountain glaciers, poleward and upward shifts in the range of some plant and animal species, and earlier timing for some species of spring events such as leaf-unfolding, bird migration and egg-laying. That this is happening is not contentious.
That last statement is pretty powerful. This is no longer a contentious issue. This is reality. Get with the program dude.
For New Zealand is a small emitter by world standards – only emitting some 0.2% of global greenhouse gases. So anything we do as a nation will in itself have little impact on the climate – our impact will be symbolic, moral and political.
However just because anything we do may be just political is no reason for not doing it. And regardless like anything else every little bit helps. So whatever we do will make a difference. No matter how small that difference is.
A similar debate occurred about AIDS, where a minority of scientists maintained for a long time that the disease was not caused by a virus. This view was manifestly wrong in the eyes of most scientists, but nevertheless some distinguished scientists, albeit usually not experts in virology, took different views until the science became irrefutable. The political consequences of this denialism had tragic results in some African countries.
On Rapanui (Easter Island) there were no trees left by the time the first European explorers arrived, and the Rapanuians had thereby lost the ability to make canoes and to fish, except from the shore. Their lifestyle and indeed their sustainability were forever radically altered.
The Easter Island story is a fantastic study of what can happen if we change our environment too quickly. The only problem is we are not doing this on a global scale. It really is time to turn the corner. Accept climate change is real. Get with the program and sign on to reduce our emissions. The future of the world depends on it.
