We basked through the warmest winter in 150 years and shivered through the coldest spring in decades – all during a year of weird weather.
Globally, this year was the fifth warmest in the past 130 years, and capped off New Zealand’s hottest decade on record.
But that would have been little comfort to those stuck in record snowstorms during the coldest October in six decades.
MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said three months stood out as the “weirdest weather”. A chilly May was countered by an unseasonably warm August, before temperatures plunged to record lows in October.
McDavitt said the icy spring weather was caused by troughs stalled over New Zealand because of large anticyclones over Australia – coating Sydney with dust storms while Kiwis shivered in late snowfalls.
The hottest temperature was 38C, recorded in Culverden in Canterbury on February 8.
At the moment all the Climate Change Deniers are carrying on about the massive snow falls as being proof that the world is not warming. However the point is not about a few isolated snow storms (yes the top of the USA and Europe are isolated in the size of the world), they completely missing the point claiming this. While the overall temperture of the world may be increasing becuase of this it will unsettle the weather patterns around the world and we are clearly seeing the affects of this in NZ. Instead of Winter being cold and Summer being hot we are getting dramatically changing weather patterns throughout the seasons and the year. Take a look at Winter this year – May and June coldest in decades – we even had ice and -4c in northern Albany! And then the traditional coldest month of August was warmest on recored. And lets not even start on October.
It is simple. The world’s climate is changing and I find it hard to believe that all this changes in the weather patterns are anything but caused by humans and their direct actions.
I have been watching the whole climategate saga for a few weeks now. So far I have not blogged on it because I was hoping that it would either be shown to be such the stupid smokescreen that it really is, or that there would be some truth to it and there would be some form of outcome. However, as it stands at the moment both sides are claiming victory over a situation that has become very messy.
In a nutshell: sometime in November (or earlier) the computers are the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and a large amount of emails and other data were then selective leaked onto the internet. The right wingers/nutcases/conspiracy theorist/deniers claim that this stolen data shows collusion amongst climate researchers in deliberately trying to prove climate change is man made when the data shows a decline in global temperatures. Of course this is complete and utter nonsense, the content of the emails that have been leaked are damaging to the reputation of a few scientists. However, they completely fail to prove any worldwide conspiracy.
There are two great articles that have been produced dismissing the points that have attempted to be made by climategate. The first is from New Scientist:
We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer
Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.
You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.
Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong? It is incredibly unlikely. The evidence that CO2 levels are rising is irrefutable, and the idea that rising levels lead to warming has withstood more than a century of genuine scientific scepticism.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ’smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
Back in New Zealand we have had our own little mini conspiracy theory with Ian Wishart among others trying to claim that NIWA have deliberately altered their data to artificially create a warming trend. The truth is they have deliberately altered their data but only to adjust changes in the physical locations of weather stations. NIWA has close to a 100 years of data and over time both the way in which you collect data and the instruments use change as a result the data collected by one method has to be adjusted to match up with the data collected through a different method. This is standard scientific practice. In fact if you didn’t do this any analysis done over time would be wrong! But because the scientists at NIWA have done the right thing the crazy climate change deniers are claiming a conspiracy.
So here we have NIWA with this plot of adjusted data:
and the deniers with this plot of unadjusted data:
The most interesting thing about both of these plots is in the end of both of them I can see an overall rise trending!
A few days ago NIWA responded to the nutcases who are claiming conspiracy everywhere by producing a plot of only the 11 weather stations that have not been moved or adjusted (see below) note that the rise is 1C and the P-Value (extremely small this an absolutely confirmed rise there is no arguing with it). Now the conspiracy crazies are claiming the graph should include all weather stations and thus a circle begins.
For more on the stupidity of Climategate there are some good blogs on Open Parachute:
I got an email from the future today. 2020 to be precise.
Hi Bradford … I’m sure this seems weird – it’s not every day you get an email from your future self – but I have something important to say to you.
The year is now 2020 – eleven years, two months and three days after you received this message in December 2009.
It was an important year 2009 – it became a turning point in history.
As it turned out John Key did go to Copenhagen and he did something there that nobody expected, something that changed the world and quite possibly saved us all.
World leaders struggled to reach agreement on how to deal with climate change and the talks came perilously close to deadlock. We were all afraid the chance would be lost and we’d miss our opportunity but the Prime Minister of New Zealand surprised everyone.
He took the floor at Copenhagen and made a commitment on behalf of NZ that was so bold, and so daring, that it seemed for a moment the world went quiet – - and then the tide changed. The big emitters were either shamed or inspired to step up to the plate and accept the challenge thrown down by our small nation and the rest is history.
Historians now agree that the unprecedented move by John Key was due in large part to the Sign On campaign of which you are part, and more specifically to Saturday 5 December – when people around the country demanded action on climate change. People in Wellington and Auckland came out and marched , while people in other parts of NZ showed their support at local events or got together with others and tuned in to watch the whole thing unfolding live.
The part you have to play is an important one.
See you soon,
Bradford
PS. You’re doing great!
The email of course is creative advertising for Greenpeace’s Sign On Campaign. In particular their protest events this weekend.
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.
I am busy this morning working on an article for Satellite on climate change. Researching the topic I came across this extended video of the greenpeace sign on ads on tv at the moment.
I read the snow.co.nz forums quite a bit, and was interested to see a discussion today regarding skiing in the kaimai’s and other areas of the North Island in the past. As part of this discussion one of the forum users posted this image from NIWA showing temperature in NZ over the last 150 years.
Now the interesting thing about this chart is it is not based on predictions of the past. It is based on actual records as noted here:
Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2007 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted line is the linear trend over 1908 to 2007 (0.92°C/100 years).
Further interesting notes are the more recent history.
Points of interest since 1990 include the cool period in 1992-93 associated with the injection of small particles high into the atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and the high temperature in 1998 (the warmest year for New Zealand since measurements began). The 1998 warming was apparent in the Tasman Sea to considerable depth (Sutton et al., 2005; Bowen et al., 2006) and happened to coincide with the end of an El Niño event when New Zealand temperatures are usually below normal.
This whole data set is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that is shows the increase in air temp in NZ over the last one hundred and fifty years as measured – this is important because almost all other charts that you see are based on predicted temp. The second is that it shows quite interesting the end of the little ice age in 1850 and the subsequent heating of the earth.
Now how this relates to global warming is even more interesting. And this is where this chart comes in:
I do not understand why National will not commit to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas levels by 2020 as an attempt to combat climate change. As the Greenpeace ad on tv says “it just makes sense really”.
The Green party spell it out really well over here:
The Government has relied on macro-economic analysis about emissions prices instead of analysing opportunities. Smith had made it clear that it was up to NGOs and volunteers to work out how to meet a target, not the job of the well resourced government departments he controls.
…he attacked the idea of reducing farm animals by a third. That would mean reducing dairy farm stocking rates from 2.83 cows/ha which is the current average to 1.86. Our proposal was to reduce them to 2.3, which is the intensity that research has found is most profitable for the farmer if milk prices are below $5.50. The current price is $5.20, which is also the average price (inflation adjusted) over the last ten years. The extra return from additional animals per hectare just doesn’t pay for the huge increase in urea, bought in feeds, off farm grazing of animals not in milk and animal health costs that are needed to cram more animals on to the same land. Dairy farmers could be making more money and reducing emissions.
So the greens are releasing ideas, good ideas, factual ideas. And how does the Government respond? Like This: Greens want to shoot the cows
…a reduction from the business as usual case of 57%, and that to do this one would need to ban every car, bus and truck in NZ, close down every fossil fuel power plant and on top of that hire vigilantes to shoot every third cow.
…the little fruitcakes are serious. They do want us to shoot the cows. They just use the nice Orwelllian term of “de-stocking” instead.
In 1999 we had around 3.5 million cows. So the Greens policy is to exterminate around 700,000 cows.
I encourage you to read both articles and decide for yourself who is playing scare tactics.
The other really strong part from the Greens blog was this:
Then, he set about rebutting things we had not said – like proposing 100% renewable electricity, which he said would raise power prices 30%. That’s the reason we didn’t propose 100%. When I was leadng EECA’s work under the last government, we had some robust analysis done by EECA and MED to determine the costs of various levels of renewability in the electricity system. We found 90% renewable by 2025 was entirely achievable and hardly raised prices at all, as there is a lot of low cost geothermal and wind energy waiting to be built.
Going to 100% is costly because you have to build a huge amount of capacity which just sits around unused until there is a very dry winter, given that people don’t like power cuts. Much better to have a couple of gas peaking stations that are cheap to build and only run a small proportion of the time. The greenhouse gases are negligible in the scheme of things and the saved capital is much better used to make significant reductions in transport or agriculture which are a much bigger worry than electricity.
So it is really aparent that the Greens are playing with facts while the Nats are playing with fire. Liar liar pants on fire politics.
Whale Oil blogs on Matthew Hooton’s article from todays NBR (I can’t find the article either).
To steal the quotes from the NBR:
The Warehouse is almost certainly New Zealand’s most economically-, socially- and environmentally-destructive company, perhaps explaining why its founder, Stephen Tindall, tries so hard to greenwash it and himself.
Mr Tindall’s latest initiative is to email “everyone” urging support for Greenpeace’s target of a 40% reduction in net carbon-equivalent (CO2) emissions by 2020. In doing so, he contrives not to know that this could only be achieved by butchering New Zealand’s agricultural sector and what remains of our manufacturing base, doubling energy prices, increasing unemployment and cutting everyone’s income by $3,200 a year. Then again, perhaps he knows all this only too well, because his business would benefit.
The Warehouse model is to buy junk manufactured in Chinese sweat shops using coal-fired electricity, burn more carbon by shipping it here, and then flick it to mainly poorer New Zealanders, who often neither need nor even want it. The company has fuelled our ruinous trade deficit, boosting only the fast-growing home-storage sector and TradeMe.
To reach consumers, Mr Tindall’s company dumps its vulgar red sheds in the middle of small towns and shopping centres, destroying the retailers and the culture of entrepreneurship they promote. Audaciously, patriotism is prominent in its marketing, including even the New Zealand flag,
The company also works hard to keep its wage bill low, with an in-house union set up in 2000 with seed money from the employer. When its distribution-centre workers finally saw through that scam and joined a real union, the company immediately and miraculously found it had enough for a $3 an hour pay rise.
Mr Tindall’s echo of Greenpeace’s call for a 40% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020 is all the more extreme because it’s measured against a 1990 baseline. Since 1990, New Zealand’s emissions have increased by around 25%, mainly as a result of population growth, so that the true cut required to meet Mr Tindall’s dream would be in excess of 50%, in just a decade. It goes without saying that no other country in the world is considering anything so stupid.
Neither Mr Tindall nor Greenpeace dare say how they think New Zealand could achieve their goal. The mass planting of new forests might, at a stretch, deliver half of it, but policy u-turns over the last decade make it doubtful that private-sector investors will ever again trust ministerial statements sufficiently to plant even a single tree. With agriculture not yet having the technology to reduce emissions significantly without a mass national cull, only a Kampuchean solution in the industrial and transport sectors could deliver Mr Tindall’s goal.
Not even that, of course, would slow climate change by a single day, and Mr Tindall knows it. New Zealand contributes just 0.2% of net global emissions so even were we to halve them, the total global reduction could be no more than 0.1%. Worse, such a move by New Zealand would in fact increase global emissions and the Warehouse again provides an excellent case study as to why.
Mr Tindall and his ilk have destroyed their own countries’ manufacturing bases, instead buying from the polluting sweat shops on China’s eastern seaboard. In so doing, it’s true they’ve cut their own countries’ emissions marginally but they have fuelled the doubling of China’s emissions, so that one out of every five CO2 molecules that enters the atmosphere now does so from what has become the world’s biggest polluter.
Mr Tindall’s 40% goal would make it worse. With the collapse in economic activity his goal requires, even fewer Kiwis would be able to shop at High St, with its lower-carbon but more expensive goods. More of us would be forced to buy the high-carbon junk he and his suppliers peddle, manufactured in countries with no environmental standards and no intention of following New Zealand “leadership” in slashing their industrial output with suicidal carbon-reduction goals.
Now I am a believer in Climate Change but this is a really strong rebuke of The Warehouse. They need to walk the walk well before they can claim to talk the talk.
