Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
CO2 psychology not rocket science
As I said at the time, the psychology of climate change isn’t rocket science; it is far more complicated than that. At December’s Mahurangi Club, I shared a few ideas around psychology, climate change, and climate change denial. Here I will share a bit more…
Actions after election make history
It should probably start with the less-important issue. In this hypothetical ‘operation hymn sheet’, the leadership of the National and Green parties have been whisked away, their respective election celebrations still ringing in their ears, to a nice quiet place in...
Prime Minister asking for it but oblivious to criticism
New Zealanders have been told to put up or shut up: “Show me how you’d go faster? Show me how you’d do anything different?” Told by their Prime Minister, John Key, no less—in response to widespread incredulity that a ship with 1700 tonnes of…
Party-vote green growth for a richer Aotearoa
In Australia, the party is simply called Australian Greens, or The Greens for short. In Aotearoa it is ‘The Greens, The Green Party of Aotearoa/New Zealand’, which at 51 characters including spaces and punctuation is just one short of the 52-character maximum....
Global warming gets chapter to itself
It is all the royal commission recommended and more. The recommendations made by the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance two and a half years ago, cite global warming, and sea-level rise in particular, as a significant…
Nuclear power fan-death phobia
It will shortly be four years shy of half a century. In November 1965, the United States president’s science advisory committee warned: “Carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at the rate of…
100% pure space mission or motorway madness
It would cost about 7% of the planned Pūhoi–Wellsford motorway. But rather than generate more greenhouse gases and trust to luck that its ministers will never have to face an international climate court, the government could fund an urgently…
No time to lose picking winners
Dogma continues to dog civilisation. An example is the market-forces mantra that governments should resile from picking winners, because they invariably get it wrong. Such dogma flies in the face of the wealth of examples of governments getting it gloriously and...
Shweeb and/or rail-saving trail-with-rail
Aotearoa must urgently re-invent its tourism model. Currently it is heavily dependent upon air travel, which will increasingly become cripplingly expensive thanks to peaked oil and user-pays for greenhouse gases. Aside from the obvious need for more…
Mahurangi not an island
It would be safer, to stick to the knitting. Despite its ever-increasing readership—3643 visits last month—there is no knowing what percentage of the Mahurangi Magazine’s visitors would prefer to not read about anthropogenic global warming and the imperative for...
No reason to distrust scientist as opposed to politician
Every catchment issue is set to become more acute. Scientists and economists are warning us with increasing urgency of impending environmental and social calamities—damage, ozone depletion, and energy depletion caused by humanity’s excesses. Politicians…
Advantage of green pure genius
The concept’s catching on like wildfire. Since Pure Advantage launched on Thursday evening, the number of registered supporters has shot to more than 1000—responding to the call: The greater our numbers, the greater our influence on business…
Paleoclimate implications for human-made climate change
Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1°C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar warmth in…
Much-needed storms of our granddaughters
Dick Smith writes entirely eloquently. Which should mean that Dick Smith’s Population Crisis gets to be read by a usefully broad audience. It also helps that his just-published book, at 198 pages, is not too dauntingly lengthy, given the inherently daunting…
Regional sea-level rise chapter revisited
North Carolina has gone one better. Aotearoa merely curtailed work on a national environmental standard on sea-level rise, in a calculatedly cynical strategy to oblige each local territorial authority to run its sea-level rise policies by a gauntlet of…