Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
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…
Dick Smith to Murdoch: Be a Beaverbrook
In a recent book, Terri Irwin makes this perceptive comment: “In a hundred years, what difference is it going to make worrying about two acres of land. We need to focus on the real change that will make the world a better place for our children and…”
Emissions messiah misses agricultural greenhouse gases
On the face of it, New Zealanders have a light carbon footprint. Even Dr James Hansen, in his open letter to the prime minister, says that: New Zealand contributes relatively little to carbon emissions that drive climate change. Per capita fossil fuel emissions from...
Planet doomed but save the sea and sky
The phrase ‘save the planet’ grates for good reason. Nothing that humankind can currently throw at it, greenhouse gases included, can affect the existence of planet Earth. Even if every nuclear weapon were detonated simultaneously for good…
Storm sidestepped over fewer grandchildren
In one notable respect, he was not preaching to the converted. With the possible exception of the odd journalist, the 350 people who packed the 250-seat Auckland University lecture theatre on Thursday evening had been ready to hear everything…