Creating A Serious Climate For Change
This opinion piece from Bunny McDiarmid our Executive Director is published in the NZ Herald today …
When the Emissions Trading Bill passed last week, Greenpeace sighed with relief. Not so much because this particular piece of legislation is now law, but because politicians can finally stop squabbling over it and get on with implementing stronger, more immediate climate policies.
The bill is a small, necessary step towards New Zealand making a valid contribution to global climate change. But it’s too generous to agriculture and other big polluters and won’t result in the deep emission cuts required.
In the time political leaders have been playing politics over the climate and our biggest polluting companies have been campaigning for massive public subsidies, the Arctic ice cap entered a “death spiral”.
The Arctic Ocean could be totally free of summer ice by 2020. For the first time, it’s possible to sail right around the North Pole.
Meanwhile, it was roundly concluded that a string of particularly ferocious natural disasters worldwide is in line with climate change projections.
Niwa chief scientist Jim Salinger told pipfruit industry conference delegates that by 2090 they won’t be able to grow apples in Nelson and that by 2070, a cold year will be like a hot year now.
The British Foreign Secretary’s special representative for climate change said the US and Europe should treat the challenge of fighting climate change more seriously than the threat from the Cold War, and that industrialised countries should essentially put their economies on a war footing.
Things are happening that no one predicted would be happening by now; it’s worse than we thought.
With the bill now law there’s a big risk that New Zealanders will now think the job’s been done. That would be a mistake.
Other countries view their emission trading schemes as one small part of a much wider package of solutions. As we head towards the election, political parties must tell voters what their broader plan is.
Labour’s renewable electricity target is a good start and significant internationally; ditto the partial ban on new fossil fuel generation. The billion dollar fund for energy efficiency and conservation secured by the Greens is also laudable. But beyond that, we’re looking at a policy vacuum. National’s energy and environment strategies barely mention climate change, let alone acknowledge the gravity of it.
Greenpeace wants all political parties to set an emissions reduction target of 30 per cent by 2020 and develop policies to achieve it. This target is within the range of 25-40 per cent agreed to by developed countries - including New Zealand - at the Bali negotiations last year. To reach this target, New Zealand must deal with agriculture’s burgeoning emissions. Agriculture is the elephant in the room, except it’s a cow.
Just to confuse matters, the cow is sometimes referred to as a “golden goose”. But business as usual - golden or not - cannot continue.
The agriculture sector must face up to the downsides of intensification and shift to low input, less intensive, smarter farming. New Zealand is ideally positioned to lead the world with low emission pastoral farming, but instead we’re seeing corporatisation and intensification. Greenhouse gas emissions from the use of nitrogen fertiliser alone now exceed all road transport emissions. This is having a huge impact, not only through rapidly rising emissions but also through increased water pollution and the erosion of the clean green brand.
We’re also seeing unprecedented deforestation for corporate dairying. Thousands of hectares of forests have gone, another half million hectares are at risk - up to a third of the nation’s total plantation.
This “double whammy” on the climate destroys carbon sinks and replaces them with one of the most greenhouse gas intensive forms of land use. What are political parties proposing to address this? National is quick to identify what it calls Labour’s “chainsaw massacre” but fails to link it to corporate dairying. Moreover, it fails to offer a solution.
National proposes an emission reduction target of 50 per cent by 2050. This is way off the mark. By 2050 we need to have our emissions down by 80 per cent. Nonetheless, we’d love to see how National plans to achieve this target, in light of its proposals for more roads, more coal and more gas. Meanwhile, Labour has declined to set any target whatsoever.
Climate change is not a problem we can ignore. At no other time in history will humanity’s fate be so determined by decisions made today. It is this generation of leaders who will be held accountable, because the stakes are so high.
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I am sorry, but where are you getting your information!
A pixel-by-pixel comparison of photos taken between Aug 2007 and Aug 2008 of the arctic region show a 30% increase in arctic ice. We are experiencing cooling across the globle, and this is due to a sharp reduction in sunspots for 2008. Sydney has just experienced its coldest August in 60 years, in New Zealand we have had a very cold winter with near record snow falls and in Britain the summer temperatures have barely got over 16 C.
The climate change we have been experiencing has been a solar system wide phenomenon due to the natural cycle of the sun, and is not related to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In particular it is worth noting that there is a lag of 200-800 years between temperature increase and CO2 in the atmosphere - thus indicating CO2 is a consequence of warming (due to CO2 ocean solubility) and not a cause. There are many scientific papers that support this differing view and I invite you to read the, please visit (http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/global_warming/index.htm).
Why has there been a phony campaign to relate CO2 to earth warming? The goal has been to change the economics of energy production away from fossil fuels, and also to make Nuclear power its most viable alternative.
These carbon markets and international treaties will be used (along with shortages of supply) to price fossil fuels to higher and higher levels… waiting in the wings is the most environmentally dangerous form of energy to man - Nuclear power, which has been rebranded to us as “environmentally safe”.
There are already many new reactors on their way in Britain, Europe and the US, and more are about to follow in other parts of the world which will pose a huge challenge to the environment for hundreds if not thousands of years to come.
So lets not pat ourselves on the back over this one!
You say “Greenhouse gas emissions from the use of nitrogen fertiliser alone now exceed all road transport emissions”.
I’d be interested if anyone could point me to the source for this.
Hi Mark -
Take a look at this re the ice melt
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/090408.html
As for your theories on climate change - for starters you are confusing global warming with climate change.
‘Global warming’ is a general increase in warming of the earth’s atmosphere caused largely our greenhouse gas emissions (co2, methane etc) that results in climate change. Climate change manifests in many ways including warmer weather, colder weather, wetter weather, more extreme storms, dryer weather - all depending on which part of the glob you’re in.
As for your theory about the sun I’m afraid you’ve been misled by crackpot climate sceptics.
Have a look at this
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
odie - those figures come from the Government’s “New Zealand Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990-2005″ report.
http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/climate/nir-jul07/html/
http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/climate/nir-jul07/nir-jul07.pdf
Thanks Nick. I had a look through the inventory and came up with the following figures. Where am I going wrong?
N2O emissions from agricultural soils (direct + indirect): 5,124 Gg CO2-e.
Road transport: 12,795.7 Gg CO2-e.
On page nine of the report, table 1.5.2 (A & B), you’ll see that emissions from agricultural soils - animal production, indirect emissions from nitrogen used in agriculture, and direct emissions from agricultural soils exceed those produced by road vehicles.
Mark Harvery,
While I should respect others right to have different ideas, I find yours hard to grasp. Surely a goal of sustainable energy production is important even if you don’t believe in climate change? Remember fossil fuels are a finite source!
To try and a link global warming conspiracy to people wanting to build nuclear power generation is quite comical. I’d say the majority of people that are concerned about the environment are well aware of the damaging consequences of using nuclear power generation.
Michael
Hi Kathy. Thanks for your reply. What you say is true, and now I see how I became confused.
When the article used the words “greenhouse gas emissions from the use of nitrogen fertiliser” I didn’t realise it was referring to “total greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural soils”.
I had made the mistake of thinking that in the article you were referring to nitrogen fertiliser added to the soil by farmers. I hope other readers did not make the same mistake.
Thanks again.
Thankyou for your comments.
I read this at the bottom of one of the sites referenced!
“However, August 2008 was still 670,000 square kilometers (260,000 square miles) above August 2007, despite the record-breaking rate of decline over the past month. Why would this be? The best explanation for this is that this summer did not experience the “perfect storm” of atmospheric conditions seen throughout the summer of 2007.”
The goal of “sustainable energy production” is totally admirable and I advocate this wholeheartedly.
Please keep an open mind and read alternative perspectives.. Keep differing perspectives on the table and observe events as they occur objectively.
One further response relating to the term “Climate Change”. First we had the term “Greenhouse effect”, which has now been replaced by the far more vague term “Climate Change”, which can used to embrace almost any climatic variation, including warming, cooling and more or less wind, rain etc.
Instead of having somthing measurable (such as temperature increase - relating to the greenhouse effect), we have a term that is immeasurable and cannot be refuted (called Climate Change). This term has been chosen by those behind the peusdoscience, so they can have it “all ways” (temperatures increasing and decreasing, more or less storms etc. ) and so continue to mislead us…
Go back to the science, and read the papers yourself….
I recommend the Channel 4 documentary the Great Global Warming Swindle to help understand an alternative perspective…