I have pondered why the term "global warming” reverted to "climate change"? That in itself is confusing because climate change has always been happening in cyclic fashion. There’s scientific evidence.
For example, in scientist George
Gibbs’ comprehensive and fascinating book “Ghosts of Gondwana” there’s
the astonishing revelation that about 15 to 20 million years ago, in
Central Otago there was a large freshwater lake ecosystem that by evidence of
fossils, had crocodiles, turtles, eucalyptus trees and other warm species.
“Their presence is indicative of a sub-tropical dry climate,” wrote George
Gibbs.
The
climate must have warmed to allow sub-tropical species to not only exist but
thrive. Then it cooled to its present day climate of cold winters and hot
summers - again proof of the dynamics of climate change.
Again
as an amateur student of geology, I have noted a glacier once advanced to
the junction of Marlborough’s Branch River with the parent Wairau River about
8,000 years ago.. Journey from Blenheim towards the West Coast and roughly
halfway up the valley, you may notice the distinctive old moraines of rubble
deposited by the river of ice. Today, indeed for centuries, no glacier has been
in the Wairau valley. The climate must have cooled drastically to allow the
glacier’s advance and then warmed considerably to force it to retreat.
There
has always been periods of climate change - off and on.
In the
1980s a hydrologist/botanist Dr Patrick Grant chanced upon early
missionary-explorer William Colenso’s observations of the Ruahine Range in the
1840s. Dr Grant was intrigued. Catchment boards and extreme green groups like
Forest and Bird had long blamed the “extensive land slips” and “creek beds
choked with dead trees and masses of stone” on wild deer. But Colenso’s diaries
clearly showed the land slips and choked stream beds had been there decades
before the first deer were liberated. So Dr Grant set about researching the
causes. The clue was in climate. By 1985 he had defined at least seven periods
of accelerated erosion since the great Taupo eruption,1800 years ago. These
naturally destructive periods “may strike at any time but always greatly intensified
during periods of warmer, windier climate.”
The
warm periods are often accompanied by severe storms such as Cyclone Alison
(1975) and Cyclone Bola (1988). In the Pohangina saddle in the Ruahine
Ranges, during Cyclone Allison, a rainfall gauge recorded a 24 hour rainfall of
400mm (16 inches). William Colenso’s diaries testify tropical cyclones and
extreme weather events are by no means a recent phenomenon.
Dr Grant wrote in
his book “Hawkes Bay Forests of Yesteryear”, published 1996, that the
erosion Colenso saw in the 1840s “was no doubt the effects of gales and heavy
rainfalls.” He scientifically identified eight “warm erosion” periods
stretching back to 350-450 AD. Between warm erosion periods generally being 50
to 100 years each, “are cooler, tranquil intervals.”
“Increased warmth
and storminess — are linked to wide-scale changes in atmospheric pressure —
where increased tropical cyclone frequency has also been recorded.” So much for
tropical cyclone Gabrielle. It was just another of many, over many centuries.
Natural climate cycles with warming and cooling and extreme
weather events have always been.
The
problem I have with the current alarm calls being sounded about climate change
is the lack of distinguishing between natural climate change and human induced
climate change.
In his
article Leo Cooney wrote “the so-called experts are only taking selective
sequestration of carbon into their equation” and went on to add “if all
sequestration was measured, such as from all our plants - including pasture —.”
Bizarrely
the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) ignores the carbon sequestering
value of pasture and in a bizarre, illogical rule, any trees or shrubs under 5
metres tall are excluded from sequestering calculations. Yet many native plants
are, even at maturity, are under 5 metres in height. When at a Federated
Farmers’ meeting I asked MPI officer as to who conceived the strange
exclusion of all vegetation under 5 metres in height, I was told “it’s
international” presumably United Nations.
The
ETS, launched in 2008 by the John Key-led government, seems designed to be
anti-farming and more a political football for the urban-based woke-tending
irrational greenies and many politicians to gleefully kick about.
Hypocrisy
abounds.
Ironically
the politicians and the urbanites leave a big carbon foot-print flying
regularly internationally to places such as the Gold Coast or Bali or as Greens
co-leader James Shaw - with an entourage of eight - indulged in last year to a
climate change talk-fest.
Tony Orman is a former town and country planner, observant outdoors frequenter and author.
14 comments:
Well said Tony. The world needs more sanity like your essay to staunch this Climate Emergency madness. I live in hope that elements of our new govt will kill this climate nonsense once and for all.
When oil is exported from New Zealand, it is excluded from the ETS (when combusted, the CO2 released is not released in New Zealand).
Should farmers not be able to claim CO2 sequestered in meat and dairy for export under the same principles?
And we now know from the latest IPCC report that Methane has been overstated by a factor of 4 so NZ is of the hook largely and able to grow its grass feed meat production to everyones benefit.
I wish to compliment Leo Clooney & Tony Orman on their articles. This Global propaganda campaign has to be stopped. The Earth has warmed & cooled in cycles for ever. I have been farming over 50 years and these cycles have caused years of famine and years of plenty just like in biblical times. The current drought in Tasman District is a repeat of the 1972 drought. The huge hailstorm here was a repeat of the 1904 hailstorm as photos prove, (same day, same district)
During lockdown the scientists declared the atmosphere/air & skys were cleaner than ever. Funny but all animal behaviour hadn't changed. The real pollutor's
are people with travel now days. Also what about our city pollution (sewerage/garbage/smog etc. Blaming farmers for any climate change is ludicrous.
Oh, dearie, dearie me! Now we have someone citing a certain Leo Cooney as a climate ‘expert’, a person whose credentials are as a farmer, a former livestock agent and lab technician. I’m sure I could find some guy like this who asserts the earth is flat!
As for the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’: they’ve been used interchangeably for decades to mean anthropogenic global warming (AGW) = worldwide warming caused by human activity releasing greenhouse gases (GHGs). The terms just have different emphases: the first focuses on warming of average surface temperatures, the second on the impact this has on climate processes, such as precipitation. Even someone with Cooney’s modest credentials should be able to find out this scientific word usage easily. But as it seems with many AGW deniers, he’s more interested in making empty rhetorical flourishes than actually understanding AGW.
The scientific evidence for AGW was solid in the 1990s and has become more robust in the decades since, so it is now well-established. Many major scientific organisations have explicitly supported AGW, including the Royal Society (UK).
And yes (sigh), other things have caused global warming over the earth’s geological history, but the evidence is rock solid for AGW since the Industrial Revolution. It’s a logical fallacy to argue that because one thing causes an outcome therefore another thing can’t cause a similar outcome as well.
So you are wrong, Tony, as is Cooney. The world needs to work together to lower its GHG emissions as rapidly as practical if it wants to avoid serious climate effects. That is clear, and it is why places such as Lincoln University are researching how to lower GHG emissions from agriculture. It is why there is an increasing shift to non-GHG-emitting energy sources. But at the moment the world isn’t lowering GHG emissions fast enough, unfortunately.
As for the best policy settings to achieve this? I’m not sure, though I’m personally doubtful about the effectiveness of the ETS. The last Labour government took AGW seriously, but unfortunately they were a bunch of bumbling incompetents, who couldn’t get themselves out of a wet paper bag, all the while spending millions of dollars in failing to get out of the bag. I’m hoping the new government, who are showing basic competence so far, don’t listen to anti-scientific AGW deniers and come up with some practical policies to get New Zealand on track to lowering GHG emissions and join the international community to work to achieve this worldwide.
LFC
If you only publish comments that are respectful why allow the snide comments about Tony Orman and Leo Cooney that someone, so certain of their scientific credibility, remains anonymous. The comments made are symptomatic of those who have drunk the AGW Koolaid and who presumably is deriving funding from sources which have an interest in maintaining the anthropogenic climate warming farce. The comment writer might like to consider recent findings that earth's increase in temperature preceded an increase in CO2 concentration, a cause and effect that is worth consideration and shows that despite the hubris of many self-titled climate scientists, that the science is not settled.
Will Happer, is a highly distinguished atmospheric physicist from Princeton, who has been involved in climate change science since the mid-1970s. Happer's work, with colleague W.A. Wijngaarden, is complicated quantum mechanics applying to energy and its interaction with molecules. The upshot is a model of energy flows under various greenhouse gas concentrations that matches satellite observations and shows what scientists have known since the early 1970s: that greenhouse gas warming is largely ‘saturated' meaning the addition of later volumes has smaller and smaller effects on warming. There's no chance of a runaway hothouse. Happer and others have stated that you could double the amount of co2 in the atmosphere which would take about 300 years and make very little impact on our temperatures. Growing conditions would accelerate and our world would continue to go greener. Why does NZ, whose total emissions are .13% of the worlds total emissions spend billions of dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
Allen Heath - there will always be comments made during the cut and thrust of democratic debate that some may regard as being over the top. But we don't want to kowtow to the I'm-so-offended crowd who are intent on silencing anyone whose utterings are deemed 'offensive' by certain people (selective morality rules, of course). My policy as moderator is to clamp down on vitriolic ad hominem outbursts, and on material that could be actionable under the libel laws. You might not like everything I let through but bear in mind Voltaire's dictum about defending free speech to the hilt even when one does not agree with the contents thereof.
MODERATOR
Dear moderator,
I'm not sure if you allow right of reply, but here goes. First, nowhere in my response to 'anonymous' did I suggest silencing the writer. That is the sort of thing The Post does. That paper sets out a whole range of exceptions which letters may not contain and yet allows those exceptions in its opinion pieces. I just didn't like the sarcasm penned under anonymity and also I think the writer was not justified in his hubris as pointed out in the science I presented. Second, to refer to both Cooney and Orman by name and denigrate Cooney's qualifications in particular must come close to ad hominem, at least in my lexicon. What is the writer's qualifications that he can be so snide?
I am not against free speech and I bridle at your implied suggestion that I am, or at least that is what came through to me. Thanks for the opportunity to reply.
Allen Heath
Like many others, I find all this information confusing & struggle to see the actual truth in it. Life is not simple anymore unfortunately.
I don’t have a lot of faith in the ETS though after many comments from people that know more than me.
Where does all this end up??
RB: Thank you for the details about Will Happer. I ran out of time today to do a reasonably full search for any commentary on his research papers. I didn’t really find anything readily popping up that critiqued his climate science + quantum mechanics papers, which perhaps suggests it wasn’t a fruitful line of enquiry. There was an interesting non-peer-reviewed Princeton U newsletter from the 2010s that briefly discussed his ideas and influence on other scientists at Princeton back then. I will keep digging.
That said, I found a post on Climate Feedback – yes, not peer-reviewed, but with comments by climate scientists and definitely not MSM – that strongly disagree with Happer’s criticism of climate modelling along with their reasons why: web search for "PragerU post by Happer uses flawed reasoning to claim that climate models always fail".
AH: I apologise for the tone of my earlier comment and I will do my best to try to tone it down in future. I actually want to focus more on the science aspect than being pointlessly ‘snide’ or ‘sarcastic’. In my defence, though, AGW denialists here do often come across as rather belligerent, even as Tony does here in laying down the accusation of “the manipulation by proponents of global warming to any modicum of thought and pondering”. This struck me as being a bit on the nose for someone with modest qualifications *in this context*. It was not my intention to undervalue the contribution of his or Cooney’s life work to NZ more generally.
Also, I confess I’ve got annoyed by posts and comments that claim or insinuate that world-class, highly qualified climate scientists worldwide are intentionally lying, suppressing research and involved in some sort of global conspiracy or are “politically charged propagandists”. And too, some responses to my comments, some in earlier posts, such as my being “a member of a cult”, slavishly following the MSM or, as you have written, “drunk the Koolaid” or personally benefit from AGW mitigation (I don’t). It is telling that no one so far has said that such remarks as *those* are snide or ad hominem, though I think they are.
But you are right nonetheless, and I should word my comments with more consideration.
LFC
LFC, while you're researching Will Happer have a look at what Robert Lindzen has said and also Steven Koonin, both well qualified in the field. And then others like Dr Patrick Moore and our own Dr Kelvin Duncan. I think it's fair to say, a healthy degree of scepticism should be maintained as we still have a quite a bit to learn.
One thing is for sure, all us here mounting bicycles and committing economic harakiri in NZ will make not a jot of difference to what happens to our own climate, yet alone the planet's.
To LFC
it takes a big man to admit he is wrong; well done, I admire your candour,
Allen Heath
I am not a credentialed Scientist, I have been involved in Securities trading that would be on a par with the Carbon credit market so come from a market perception viewpoint and question the underlying rationale of the market.
LFC makes a case for human intervention being a substantive cause for global warming now relabeled climate change. However the global approach has been to focus singularly on Co2 to the virtual omission of any and all over potential causes. This speaks to the greater probability of a political agenda such as control or the justification for political control of the oil and gas industry and coal industry. A long record of statistics indicate the record of increased Co2 is around 400 years "After" the increase in temperature, thus the direct relationship between the two sets is well broken.
I sense that LFC places rather too much intellectual reliability on branded credentials and institutional policies in preference to first principles science. We well know that IPCC is a political body comprising "Consensus" publication where the reality is disguised by ideological perception and opinion. That is not a scientific result worthy of global regulation.
I recall some 65 years ago being taught by certified teachers that our great earth Gaia revolved around the sun. The sun was always portrayed as static. At least I was a bit more informed than Galileo, but my teachers has absolutely no idea that the sun was in fact tracking its own orbit so the earths trajectory was never circular but toroidal. Moreover the earths spin variation referred to a precession continues to vary. Orchardists and viticulturalists understand seasons vary in heat and moisture, a condition naturally generated by the rate of change in the earths precession. Is it that the political globalists have sought to employ the natural change of earth precession to claim climate change from the innocent Co2 in order to effect a cultural propaganda to facilitate a political will to control the Oil and coal industries or the energy sources for a globalist agenda.
Are our largely govt funded low level pseudo scientists being engaged in the low level dispute over which color hue shall be dominant in the rainbow (as if that matters) while a deceit is perpetrated well above their vision. I suspect that LFCs real failing is not misunderstanding the science rather it is failing to see the wider perspective of the greater deceit. Responses welcomed is there more to this. PM
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