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Climate action

With three decades wasted, everything now has to be about climate
Climate-powered atmospheric river alters algorithm

Climate-powered atmospheric river alters algorithm

Mahurangi Regatta 2023, or rather its cancellation, has added an important loop to the loose algorithm that has been run 46 times since Mahurangi Action revived a regatta for which only scant clues remained as to how it was run. Initially, the sailing and shoreside events were…

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Thinking outside the three-bedroom breeding box

Thinking outside the three-bedroom breeding box

Good for absolutely nothing, war is now preoccupying the every waking moment that should be fiercely focussed on the climate emergency. For those born into the post-war optimism of the United Nations, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sharply increased the struggle to…

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Every action equal and apposite climate action

Every action equal and apposite climate action

As a catchy climate-action-mobilisation call-to-arms, equal and apposite is a pun too far. An incisive shorthand phrase to convey the imperative that every action be a climate action is, nevertheless, in desperate need of coining. Glasgow’s overarching message…

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Honest cop preferable to climate Pearl Harbor

Honest cop preferable to climate Pearl Harbor

Globally, writers are giving their best shot to the imperative of persuading the Glasgow conference parties that, this time, they must mobilise meaningful climate action. One such writer, the Guardian ’s re-wilding guru, George Monbiot, in his masterly eve-of-cop 26 article…

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Te Muri access dictated drop-in location

Te Muri access dictated drop-in location

Was it not for John Darrach’s 1880s activism, Saturday’s coffee-and-croissants drop-in day, in Mahurangi West’s former school, would have been held in Sullivans Bay. John Darrach was so exercised about the danger to the 23 Māori and 14 Pākehā children living at school-less…

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Mahurangi West land restoration planting Sunday 11 July

Mahurangi West land restoration planting Sunday 11 July

Officially, the West is East, but in practice it is neither, nor is it in the Mahurangi hydrological catchment, it being in that of Te Muri. First planting day under the Mahurangi Land Restoration label appears to be an echo of the first under the $3 million Mahurangi Action…

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Imperative for private-vehicle-free Te Muri future

Imperative for private-vehicle-free Te Muri future

Not everyone supports the proposed Te Muri crossing. Nor does everyone who supports the proposed Te Muri crossing, support every aspect of it. For example, many Mahurangi West people would have preferred that development of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail began…

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covid-19 didn’t mobilise but climate must

covid-19 didn’t mobilise but climate must

Fifty-one weeks ago, the Mahurangi Magazine warned: “The eventual toll of this pandemic could be in the order of 3 million deaths.” At the time, the reported global toll had only just exceeded 100 thousand, but the calculation wasn’t complex. Subtract the population…

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Act now and Aotearoa could own Democracy Day 2021

Act now and Aotearoa could own Democracy Day 2021

With Donald Trump’s best prospects now being immediate resignation and prompt a Mike Pence pardon, the United States’ flawed democracy might now survive long enough to face redemption. Shy seven weeks, it is 20 years from the United States election that…

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25% less democracy doesn’t equate to 25% less can-kicking

25% less democracy doesn’t equate to 25% less can-kicking

Blamed for everything from the lack of climate-action mobilisation to the lack of a capital gains tax, to the failure to raise the retirement age, the three-year parliamentary term—it is persistently opined—must go. Evidence for the efficacy of longer parliamentary terms….

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$30 million Mahurangi action plan

$30 million Mahurangi action plan

$3 million over 5 years seemed, for a moment there in 2004, as though all the Mahurangi Harbour’s Christmases had come at once. Even in today’s money, $9.06 million is more than twice the 2004 amount, but nor, back then, does it mean that the Mahurangi’s sediment woes…

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Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains

Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains

What should have been no worse than a four-thousand-death epidemic is determinedly on its way to becoming an at-least-four-million-death pandemic—a cruel and unnecessary global demonstration of the nothing-to-see-here-folks instincts of bureaucrats and…

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Democratic climate-action mobilisation or martial law

Democratic climate-action mobilisation or martial law

That which should have been one of the most influential books of all time ranks 302 209 places behind Nevil Shute Norway’s On the Beach in Amazon’s best sellers, speaks volumes. Comparing Shute’s fiction with Dr James Hansen’s non-fiction Storms of My Grand…

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Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example

Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example

As the epitome of physical distancing, Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the global project to survive the covid-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic global heating. In respect to climate, after petulantly insisting cop26 must proceed, on 1 April it was finally postponed…

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Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation

Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation

Having wasted two months of preparation time, the challenge for civilisation now is to break its determined habit of wasting every crisis in its entirety. Aside from abiding by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s succinct advice to act as though one had covid-19, and stay strictly…

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Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet

Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet

That government of the people, by the people, for the people, has perished from the earth, has placed all earth’s creatures in existential peril. All too foreseeably, the half-billion creatures and counting destroyed by wildfire this globally-heated Australian summer will later…

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Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy

Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy

Epically ironically, salvaging a survivable climate and a free society possibly now depends upon a one plutocrat deposing another plutocrat, turned dictator. Far preferably, Republican Party senators would suspend self-interest for the survival and dignity of their once…

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Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets

Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets

It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…

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Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote

Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote

It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…

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ipcc-understates-threat understatement

ipcc-understates-threat understatement

Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…

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On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches

On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches

Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…

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Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise

Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise

Permanent ice sheets are a misnomer. Ages involving alternating glacial and interglacial periods are ephemeral, occupying only a small percentage of geological time. Humankind’s greatest—although certainly not in any laudatory…

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Wasting storms of the grandparents

Wasting storms of the grandparents

When Dr James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren nine years ago this December, he lambasted governments for greenwashing while doing nothing meaningful to curtail fossil-fuel use. But despite, by that time, having already seen his…

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With every fibre and electrified-transit solution

With every fibre and electrified-transit solution

Aucklanders once took an average of more than 400 public-transport trips per year. In 1945, with a sixth of the population, Aucklanders were taking nearly 120 million trips, compared to today’s paltry 90 million boardings. Not that all Aucklanders should be…

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Future Mahurangi transport network feedback

Future Mahurangi transport network feedback

Mahurangi Action’s feedback pro forma on Warkworth’s future transport network is good to go. Members, and readers generally, are warmly encouraged to use the pro forma as-is or as a starting point for their own feedback, and to put their oars in…

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This might have been one more for the roads

This might have been one more for the roads

September’s town-hall talk is now cancelled, and possibly the balance of this year’s. The September slot was pencilled in for the topic of paedophilia awareness—apparently paedophile networks operate locally—but no subsequent response was…

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One billion trees and bugger the science

One billion trees and bugger the science

In 2004, $3 million over 5 years sounded like all Mahurangi’s Christmases had come at once. But a back-of-a-seed-packet calculation strongly suggested that the $3 million the former Auckland Regional Council had budgeted would barely touch the sides, when it…

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Faith in the 1% and fighting the 80

Faith in the 1% and fighting the 80

Photovoltaics have a huge future and have grown enormously, to about 1% of global energy use. Banking heavily upon it, Germany has plunged it’s poor into energy poverty, by shuttering nuclear, not because of the risk or impact on health, but to pander…

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Forlorn futility of faith-based climate action

Forlorn futility of faith-based climate action

One person’s demagogue is another person’s saviour, and, for many, the Elon Musk credibility needle will have finally flicked from where it has been firmly stuck on f, to e. For most students, in this age of social-media-supercharged celebrity, learning…

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Proposed zero-carbon bill submission

Proposed zero-carbon bill submission

Comment on the proposed zero-carbon bill closes at 5 pm on 19 July. The following pro forma is provided by the Mahurangi Magazine in the earnest hope that the resultant legislation is exponentially more substantive than a zero-carbon-by-2050-target…

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Proposed carbon bill zero-action

Proposed carbon bill zero-action

Generation Zero is ecstatic. But over a proposed zero-carbon bill that clings cravenly to the ineffectual, at best, emissions-trading-scheme approach. To be fair, Generation Zero’s enthusiasm is primarily for having succeeded in selling, to the new…

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Thirty years later, what needs to change

Thirty years later, what needs to change

Thirty years ago, while the Midwest withered in massive drought and East Coast temperatures exceeded 100°F, I testified to the Senate as a senior nasa scientist about climate change. I said that ongoing global warming was outside the range of natural…

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stv supercity shake-up, then Wellington

stv supercity shake-up, then Wellington

Mayor Goff was elected by barely 18% of registered voters. Len Brown at least, won 47.8% of votes cast, but only because voters were then still in the dark about his grubby use of Auckland Council property. But the bigger crime of both men, and of the Royal…

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Visiting Aotearoa for all the right reasons

Visiting Aotearoa for all the right reasons

Neither of New Zealand’s two main industries is currently sustainable. Its once-vaunted agricultural industry, a proud part of the green revolution, is now a climate delinquent, due to the white gold-rush. Tourism, which continues to outdistance dairy as…

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Nothing stopping Labour unequivocally claiming climate

Nothing stopping Labour unequivocally claiming climate

His frustration was palpable. Following his party’s first electoral foray, when more than 98% of the populace proved to be impervious, the Rodney candidate declared: “What we need is a decent nuclear accident, then they’ll vote Values.” Sadly, the statement…

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Reimagining the roads of Mahurangi

Reimagining the roads of Mahurangi

Roads, historically, were not about cars. They were not even about private vehicles, until the last 100 of human civilisation’s 5500-year existence. So perhaps the Labour Party’s pandering to Penlink is understandable, as it seeks to wrest more of the...

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Climate-reaction rubber meets the road

Climate-reaction rubber meets the road

New Zealanders have just demonstrated the perfect problem, perfectly. After three decades of denial and procrastination, including nine years of Clark-led Labour government inaction, Jacinda Ardern has announced transport policy timidly…

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Odds against tomorrow without ultimate sacrifice

Odds against tomorrow without ultimate sacrifice

As if its bureaucrats needed any encouragement. Trump’s America now has its Environmental Protection Authority peddling the equivalent of Lisa Simpson’s Ignorital©. The agency requires its officials to lace their public utterances with phrases contrived to…

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Triggering automatic change to green

Triggering automatic change to green

Most Warkworthians are unhappy that their town is now a satellite growth centre. Had a concerted campaign been waged against it, and unlimited funds spent fighting it, Auckland Council may have been forced to rethink. But that would not have…

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Tidal-river power and grid electricity

Tidal-river power and grid electricity

Most public transport in Aotearoa is fossil-fuel powered. But that would not excuse the key component of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail, the ferry, being fossil-fuelled. Fortuitously, as described in Minimum Impact 100% River-Powered, a fossil-fuel-free…

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Democratise coalitions and lists now

Democratise coalitions and lists now

Half voted for change, and half for the status quo. The 44.4% who voted for the New Zealand National Party, and the 0.5% who voted for what remains of ex-Labour-finance-minister Roger Douglas’ rebel act party, are now represented by 57 opposition…

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Mahu youth has National munted

Mahu youth has National munted

If the local Kids Voting result is any indication, New Zealand’s youthquake is going to visit most damage on National. Mahurangi College students, their Kids Voting coordinator has reported, gave the Labour Party a clear majority: 35% versus the National…

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Jacindaquake and Kids Voting curtain-raiser

Jacindaquake and Kids Voting curtain-raiser

There’s no reason to imagine Aotearoa will be spared its youthquake. In the United Kingdom, it was a 68-year-old Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who triggered the tremor. The quake unleashed by the youth-adjacent Jacinda Ardern, who has just rocked…

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Courage for more than a cuppa

Courage for more than a cuppa

It’s 30 years since David Lange belatedly called taihoa. His Labour Party caucus cohorts had unleashed the neoliberal onslaught that, amongst other tragedies, precipitated New Zealand’s ongoing youth suicide epidemic. Throughout the…

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Last call for climate action commission

Last call for climate action commission

Dr Jan Wright’s last report is also her least likely to ruffle feathers. Until now, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s refreshingly evidence-based reports have probably unsettled more Green Party supporters than the balance of…

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Paris climate accord not the half of it

Paris climate accord not the half of it

Not all agree it’s a bad thing Trump’s made good on his campaign promise to pull the United States out of Paris. One climate researcher argues that the Trump circus could do less damage outside of the tent, than in it. But regardless, a bad-tempered…

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Loyal opposition reaches oblivious conclusion

Loyal opposition reaches oblivious conclusion

It was a stroke of unintended brilliance, which has blighted democracy ever since. When John Cam Hobhouse coined the term loyal opposition, in jest, he could’ve had no inkling he would help dignify 190 years of two-party parliaments, where…

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If it’s democracy that’s broke, fix it

If it’s democracy that’s broke, fix it

From Day One he’s wanted a better slogan than ‘the World’s most liveable city.’ For his trouble, and even before hearing what that slogan might be, Mayor Phil Goff is being rubbished and ridiculed for wanting to replace the city’s tragically generic branding, with…

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Make Aotearoa egalitarian and great again

Make Aotearoa egalitarian and great again

His timing is impeccable, and his mission merciful. Immediately mocked by the mainstream media, Gareth Morgan’s launch of a party dedicated to eliminating poverty and closing the inequality gap is a cause worthy of wholehearted support, even by…

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How Savage would have salvaged a survivable climate

How Savage would have salvaged a survivable climate

There is an alternative to you-first-no-you-first. Aotearoa, like pretty much every other country, is fearful of getting too far ahead of the pack in respect to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the fear, paranoia even, is of becoming…

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Loose affiliation of billionaires and moratorium babies

Loose affiliation of billionaires and moratorium babies

Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a lot of unwelcome attention. They are bearing the brunt of the Guardian’s otherwise well-meaning fossil-fuels divestment campaign. To paint Bill and Melinda Gates the face of divestment reluctance is a bit rich. For starters…

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Mainstream ignores novel climate-action mobilisation

Mainstream ignores novel climate-action mobilisation

Story-telling goes back at least as far as the 200 000-year-old species itself. Yet humanity’s biggest story ever, how Homo sapiens sapiens learned how to exploit fossil fuels, and thus placed itself on the one guaranteed path to extinction, is neither a major…

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Zero-carbon energy ultimate nuclear waste solution

Zero-carbon energy ultimate nuclear waste solution

In the last 6 years and 8 weeks of published measurements, global sea level has risen a whisker more than an inch. At least that is the raw, seasonally adjusted data from the incredible, and credible, Jason 2 satellite, however, the El Niño…

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Nation with least need for nuclear has most to gain

Nation with least need for nuclear has most to gain

Even the pro-nuclear-power Dr James Hansen doubts Aotearoa needs it: “You happen to be very fortunate and be very wealthy in terms of renewable energy.” But New Zealanders’ future prospects now directly depend upon an unprecedented international…

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Best understood by least represented

Best understood by least represented

Cohort that best understands the enormity of anthropogenic global warming is that which is least represented in Parliament. It is also the age-group that is least enrolled, and votes least. But given the great gulf between the awful reality of global warming…

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Short open letter to environmentalists

Short open letter to environmentalists

As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article Key Role for Nuclear Energy in Global Biodiversity

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Breakfast brainstorming on the next bit

Breakfast brainstorming on the next bit

What John Clarke said of the neoliberal de-democratisation of Aotearoa, in the New Zealand Listener, could equally be said of fossil-fuel use: “Complaining about what’s wrong but not taking action, has the same effect as not noticing what’s wrong…”

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Carbon tax and election could be left to the Left of Rodney

Carbon tax and election could be left to the Left of Rodney

Corrected 22 June 2014 Aotearoa’s Green Party is in exceptionally good company. With its proposed carbon tax and ‘climate tax cut’, the party is finally in sync with the carbon ‘fee and dividend’ that Dr James Hansen has relentlessly promoted, at least since 2008. Dr...

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After 26 years of climate inaction pull plug on IPCC

After 26 years of climate inaction pull plug on IPCC

It is unstoppable, and it has possibly doubled. And while that is only the disintegration of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, the same is probably true for global warming generally. Three years of the most detailed satellite measurements yet, to the end…

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Only honourable option to oppose in full

Only honourable option to oppose in full

The best strategy might have been to support the proposal in full. That way, the Pūhoi–Warkworth motorway board of inquiry might have been more receptive to the opportunity for a large-scale trial of open-ground indigenous plants. Realistically…

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Only with nuclear is there time to feed the world

Only with nuclear is there time to feed the world

Forty years ago this year, Band Aid released a single that in its first week became the fastest selling track in all time in the United Kingdom. Co-written by Bob Geldof, Do They Know it’s Christmas went on to sell more than three million copies, and led to…

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Mahurangi Action motorway condition 36c‍ ‍viii

Mahurangi Action motorway condition 36c‍ ‍viii

It’s not, in fact, the harbour’s biggest threat since deforestation. The proposed Pūhoi–Warkworth motorway is only the biggest proximate threat. The biggest threat of course—the existential threat—is rampant global warming. The entire litany of…

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Renewable energy, nuclear power and Galileo

Renewable energy, nuclear power and Galileo

Climate scientists have long warned of potential catastrophic effects of unchecked fossil fuel use. Public awareness of the climate threat has increased. Yet growth of carbon dioxide in the air, the main driver of climate change, has accelerated…

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Mahurangi headwaters estimated not measured

Mahurangi headwaters estimated not measured

In a straight line, the stream would run from Mahurangi to Palmerston North. That is, if all the streams in the Mahurangi catchment were laid end-to-end, and assuming, of course, that there was sufficient head to cause this hypothetical stream to run. Then…

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Mahurangi Harbour urgently needs to sign her friends

Mahurangi Harbour urgently needs to sign her friends

Paid-up ‘friends’ of the Mahurangi once numbered 300—on the back of the launch of Jade River: A History of the Mahurangi. The society titled Friends of the Mahurangi, now Mahurangi Action Incorporated, published Ronald Harry Locker’s masterly 416-page work in…

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Coast clear for Labour as the climate action party

Coast clear for Labour as the climate action party

Aotearoa’s major political parties share a broadly similar stance on anthropogenic global warming. In contrast, climate action in Australia and the United States is a deeply partisan business. The ‘invisible substance’ reference of Liberal Party leader and prime...

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Not just century, warming moral issue of millennium

Not just century, warming moral issue of millennium

More mud, fewer oysters, and galloping foreshore erosion. This is the forlorn future faced by the Mahurangi Harbour. Just how muddy, how few oysters or fish, and how quickly higher and higher tides carve into soft unprotected shorelines depends…

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Can’t afford to solve one problem at a time

Can’t afford to solve one problem at a time

When the Alpine Fault goes, it will probably take Wellington with it. Wellington, now Aotearoa’s second largest city, is staring down the barrel of the Alpine Fault, which is primed and due to jump eight metres horizontally and four vertically. In both 1220 and 1450…

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4 or 40 years late climate thrust to front page

4 or 40 years late climate thrust to front page

George Monbiot declared 28 August 2012 as the day world went mad. Writing on the following day, the Guardian’s respected environmental journalist asked readers to remember that date. It was the day that scientists announced the record Arctic ice melt, unnoticed…

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New unitary authority not going to plan

New unitary authority not going to plan

Len’s in danger of loosing it. As was all too apparent halfway through the term of Aotearoa’s first mayoral office to enjoy significant executive powers, Mayor Brown has bet the farm on a project for which he has little to show, come local body election year. Had...

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Unprecedented struggle yet story with no name

Unprecedented struggle yet story with no name

For two decades it was the Great War. Then, with the outbreak of World War II, it became the First World War. As a descriptive title, First World War says a great deal more than Great War. It would be even more descriptive, but less eloquent, as the First...

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Fourth-estate help to forget everything

Fourth-estate help to forget everything

By its very definition, global warming is a world issue. Global warming is also, inescapably, the world issue—the only one on track to take and to shorten billions of lives, and the only with the potential to extinguish life worldwide. Yet the New Zealand Herald’s new...

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Arguable beginning but Anthropocene definitely here

Arguable beginning but Anthropocene definitely here

Cold has forever staked humanity. The Ice Age—or more formally, the Pleistocene glaciation—began 2.58 million years ago, and genus Homo just a whisker after that. Ostensibly, the Ice Age is ongoing, and the present interglacial period, during which…

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Survival in the hands of generation 10‍ ‍001

Survival in the hands of generation 10‍ ‍001

Sustainability could be the death of us. Bursting beyond the seven billion milestone, and with two billion poor and one billion poor and hungry, the global population is projected to swell to between 10 and 16 billion by the end of the century. In 2011, human…

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Only way forward for Labour seriously green

Only way forward for Labour seriously green

Green Party energy spokesman Gareth Hughes describes it as unhelpful. But when the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment finds that subsidising smart meters would make a significant contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, in…

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Manifest evidence suggests science not an option

Manifest evidence suggests science not an option

When Professor Sir Peter Gluckman recommends a title with such seemingly marginal appeal as The Geek Manifesto, it’s a sure bet rather more New Zealanders will be inclined to give the book a second glance than would otherwise have been the…

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Urgent need for nonpartisan Brown transport plan

Urgent need for nonpartisan Brown transport plan

There are mandates, and mandates. The mandate fairly claimed by the newly created Auckland Council’s inaugural mayor, Len Brown, was for building the city rail link. However, since Len Brown’s election, a National-led government has been…

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Another speech spiked of another true patriot

Another speech spiked of another true patriot

It is clearly not working. Oil still flows thickly and the Earth disgorges myriad other minerals in unprecedented abundance, yet the wheels have fallen off the global economy—unemployment and underemployment are at record highs. Global oil…

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