NZCPR Newsletter: Labour's Deliberate Deception

“There is this huge fraction of the population that has been brainwashed into thinking climate change is an existential threat to the planet… They are being deceived.” – Princeton University Emeritus Professor of Physics William Happer, former director at the US Department of Energy, at a hearing of Congress in 2023.

Over recent years there’s been a noticeable increase in alarmist climate change news coverage around the time of the United Nations’ annual “Conference of Parties”. This international talkfest attracts tens of thousands of climate activists from all over the world, who jet in to discuss how to reduce human emissions of carbon dioxide.

We now know that in 2022, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government contributed to the hype using taxpayer funding to disseminate climate propaganda as news. The Official Information Act has revealed that half a million dollars of advertising was bought during that period from two major news outlets - TVNZ and Stuff.

The $300,000 worth of advertising purchased from TVNZ generated a wide range of coverage. It bought an hour-long prime-time Sunday climate special on TV1 – along with 12 months of on-demand hosting on TVNZ+ - a dedicated web page, digital banners, logo placement, and pre-roll commercials. In addition, five articles appeared on 1News.co.nz, five social media posts on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, a week’s worth of interviews with Government influencers on Breakfast TV, and a Seven Sharp interview with an “ambassador” for the Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority.

The $200,000 worth of advertising published by Stuff also delivered wide coverage. Five articles were posted on the Stuff website, along with display and video advertising across their site. There were five newspaper articles in their Sunday magazine, Your Weekend magazine, and Life magazine, five stories in Neighbourly, and a dedicated “Digital Hub” for all the content.

Given the significant influence the media has on public opinion, the revelation that Labour has been paying media companies to promote their climate agenda in such a way that it appears like news instead of advertising, raises serious questions about the integrity of the media.

In response to queries from journalist Chris Lynch, TVNZ is reported as saying, “it was standard practice for governments to advertise with media companies – but channelling those advertisements inside of programming – on-air time – as news content in television shows was unorthodox.”

NZME’s Editor-at-large, Shayne Currie, revealed that TVNZ admitted sponsorship logos were missing from some of the content they ran, and he outlined the editorial code of conduct put in place for the Herald and their other companies: “Sponsored content will be clearly marked as such, with agreed parameters between senior editors and the commercial team”.

For media companies to publish sponsored material as news, without tagging the content as “sponsored”, is deceptive. It cannot in any way be justified or excused. It undermines everything we expect from an industry that claims to have professional standards.

Equally as bad is the Labour Government’s willingness to manipulate the media – and the public - to advance its alarmist climate agenda.

Since Kiwis are being deliberately deceived over climate change, let’s examine the truth.

First of all, it’s important to remember that while the Government maligns carbon dioxide as a dangerous greenhouse gas, it is necessary for life on earth.

Through photosynthesis, plants convert carbon dioxide, into the food and oxygen needed to sustain life. If carbon dioxide levels were to fall below 150 parts per million, life would eventually die out.

Current levels of CO2 are 420 parts per million. The higher they are, the greener the planet, and the more food that’s produced. When CO2 levels were around 2,000 parts per million, plant growth was so vigorous it could sustain the dinosaurs.

When carbon dioxide increases - as it has many times during the earth’s history - temperature does not increase in proportion.

The reason is that the relationship between carbon dioxide and air temperature is logarithmic, not linear. That means that large increases in CO2 lead to ever-smaller increases in temperature.

As Princeton University’s Emeritus Professor of Physics William Happer explained, “It is important to understand radiation physics… CO2 becomes a less effective greenhouse gas at higher concentrations because of what is often called ‘saturation’. Each additional 100 ppm increase of CO2 in the atmosphere causes a smaller and smaller change in temperature.

“Doubling CO2 concentrations from 400 ppm to 800 ppm, a 100% increase, would only diminish the thermal radiation to space by about 1.1 percent… This means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little impact on global warming. There is no climate emergency. No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like, with little warming effect. Saturation also explains why temperatures were not catastrophically high over the hundreds of millions of years when CO2 levels were 10-20 times higher than they are today.”

It's a similar story with methane, New Zealand’s other main greenhouse gas. As British climate researcher Dr Wilson Flood explained more than a decade ago, due to “the fact that absorption of energy diminishes logarithmically as concentration increases”, methane is not dangerous. The quantity in the air so small that even a doubling would not produce any appreciable warming. Furthermore, the rate of increase of the gas in the atmosphere is so slow that it would take almost 360 years to double!

Dr Flood also pointed out that since the warming ability of methane is only seven times that of carbon dioxide, cows and sheep “cannot contribute to global warming in any conceivable way”.

In spite of basic science revealing that human induced greenhouse gas emissions cannot threaten the planet, in 2020 Jacinda Ardern declared a climate emergency. She claimed climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time – that it’s not only a threat to life, but is also responsible for increased droughts, floods, and storms.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, has found insufficient evidence to prove any long-term increase in the frequency of extreme weather events – a conclusion also reached by Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, who found the number of such events around the world is falling.

Undeterred, the Labour Government’s claim that every natural disaster - including the January floods and Cyclone Gabrielle - is ‘evidence’ of man-made global warming, has continued.

Sky News Meteorologist Rob Sharpe expressed a different view. Late last year he explained that a key factor driving our region’s wetter weather was the eruption of Tonga’s powerful underwater volcano. In January 2022, it blasted such vast quantities of water into the upper atmosphere, that it increased water vapour in the stratosphere by around 20 percent.

Since water vapour - our most common greenhouse gas – reflects the sun’s radiation back into space, while reflecting the earth’s radiation back to the surface, it cooled the stratosphere ‘strengthening the polar vortex’: “By the time we get to the end of summer I’m expecting this event to go down in the history books as the ‘Flooded Summer’.”

Despite such realities, Labour and the Greens continued to misrepresent science and manipulate media coverage to promote their socialist agenda.

Their false modelling and alarmist narratives are now so deeply embedded in New Zealand’s legislative and regulatory framework, that nothing short of a major overhaul of climate policy will be able to fix it.

Two changes, in particular, must be prioritised.

The first is the continued use, in all of New Zealand’s climate modelling, of an assumption called RCP 8.5, that’s been discredited by the UN. Based on the impossible scenario that coal is used for all energy needs – not only for generating electricity but for transportation as well – it has led to predictions that by 2100 global temperatures could increase by up to five degrees Celsius and sea levels could rise by over a metre.

Although the UN has now dropped RCP 8.5 from all policy making, Labour has not had it removed from New Zealand’s climate models. This means predictions of impossibly high emissions and massive sea level rise are still impacting on the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Climate Commission, NIWA, the Ministry for the Environment, Local Authorities, and every government agency.

As a result New Zealand’s carbon prices are far higher than they should be, with households paying the price through elevated costs for petrol, food and all other goods and services within our economy.

For farmers, the situation is even worse. While the UN has finally admitted their prediction that livestock methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide by a factor of twenty-eight is wrong, and now agree it should be seven, this mistake has not been corrected by Labour either. That leaves farmers still facing the threat of penalties that are four times greater than they should be.

Labour’s continued use of discredited measures for methane, sea level rise, and temperature increases, within their Zero Carbon agenda, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the work of the Climate Commission, amounts to a deliberate deception of New Zealanders – and an unaffordable cost to the country.

Since up to 70 percent of Labour’s climate targets will need to be met by purchasing carbon credits through offshore mitigation schemes, Treasury’s Climate Economic and Fiscal Assessment 2023 estimates that by 2030 the cost will be an eye-watering $25 billion, it will consume “28 percent of new operating expenditure through Budgets 2024 to 2030”, and it will be a “significant financial risk” to the country.

If instead, our climate models used realistic scenarios and the correct value for methane, New Zealand would not even need an emissions trading scheme, a carbon tax, or any of the myriad of other climate regulations that have been imposed onto the country.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, power systems engineer Brian Leyland outlines the way forward:

“If New Zealand accepted the latest information from the IPCC technical reports that tells us that RCP 8.5 should be replaced by a more realistic scenario, current predictions of future rapid sea level rise and a rapid rise in temperatures would be replaced by more realistic scenarios that can be managed by adaptation. The IPCC also says that the climate effects of methane have been overestimated by a factor of four. If this was accepted, farm emissions would no longer be a problem. We should also take note that, according to Article 2 of the Paris Agreement we should not be doing anything that reduces agricultural productivity. So why are we doing just that?

“This leads us to a commonsense option: review man-made climate change! All the research that my friends and I have carried out demonstrates quite clearly that there is no scientific evidence based on real world data that supports the belief that man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. None! No one has been able to disprove the hypothesis that the climate changes naturally and man-made global warming plays only a small part.

“Which leads to the obvious solution: abandon net zero, abandon the emissions trading scheme, stop subsidising electric cars, forget about agricultural greenhouse gases and rejoice that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide are making our plants grow better and making us all more prosperous. It would also save the billions of dollars we are squandering on a totally futile effort to change the world’s climate.”

The upcoming election provides voters with an opportunity to press candidates for answers regarding climate policies.

They need to be asked firstly, whether they are aware that New Zealand’s climate models are based on alarmist measures that have been discredited by the IPCC; and secondly, whether their party intends ignoring the errors and continuing on with Labour’s climate deception, or whether they will pledge to correct the errors and fix the climate models.

The media too needs to start asking the hard questions that should have been asked long ago: Why did Labour fail to correct their climate models, once the assumptions on which their projections are based were discredited by the IPCC?

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Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. The NZCPR website is HERE. We also run this Breaking Views Blog and our NZCPR Facebook Group HERE.