Thinking About Tomorrow

The trend continues...

2006-12-15T00:15:00.000+13:00

I am writing this post outside in the December sun in jeans and a shirt. This would be normal enough in NZ, but I am in London and temperatures here this time of year should be freezing. 2006 is set to be the UK's warmest year on record. And the honour(?) of 'warmest year on record' is particularly impressive in the UK because they have been recording tempratures for longer than anywhere else in the world - the first measurements were taken in 1659! Worryingly, 2006 was not just a little bit warmer - it was over 0.2 degrees celcius warmer than the next hottest year (1999) and autumn temperatures this year were a whopping 0.8 degrees warmer than the next warmest autumn. After a wet and gray September, October was so warm that the apple tree in our garden thought it was spring and started blossoming!

Whilst the debate about global warming has moved on from whether it is happening to what we can do about it, this year's UK temperatures suggest that the effects of global warming are going to be felt sooner rather than later. That means we need to act sooner rather than later.

I can hold my tongue no longer

2006-10-31T12:36:00.000+13:00

I recently saw "An Inconvenient Truth" and sent an article to Scoop.co.nz - who published the following guest opinion:

I have just seen "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore, and I can hold my tongue no longer ...

Science tells the truth dispassionately. But often it it the role of business to be gate-keeper to those truths.
Science told us that tobacco was dangerous long before business accepted this and moved to change anything.
Science told us the ozone layer was a problem. After years of denial, business followed.
Science told and is telling us that global warming is a problem. Out of 928 peer-reviewed articles, not one of them disputed the global scientific consensus on global warming.

There are those who will say it is not the role of business to get involved in politics, for this is business-suicide.
There are those who will say that if we want to save the world, then a business is not the right vehicle.
There are those who will say that businesses are part of the problem.

But business is part of the solution too, climate change is no longer a simple political issue but a moral one, and it is the role of business to follow the scientific truth in changing times. That means making sure that issues of global catastrophe are not only talked about in scientific circles, focus groups and green party meetings - but throughout the entire community.

If all I can say in 20 years time to my daughter who asks me what I was busy doing while the polar icecaps were melting was "making money" - then I have failed as a father, as a businessman and as a human being who understands the basic concept of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Why does business not speak out on this issue more? I believe this will change. Perhaps it is fear of ridicule from our peers. Perhaps it is because the shareholder structure of companies leaves us in a position where anything other than maximizing profits tomorrow is greeted with cynicism from shareholders. Perhaps it is just because we are not yet used to speaking out on things that really matter, and are vocal chords are a little rusty.

So if you think this blog-entry is out of place, I challenge you to first watch "An Inconvenient Truth". If you still hold the same opinion - then email me and let me know why you don't think this is worth shouting about.

If you think this blog-entry could be better and more scientifically put by a scientist - then you are undoubtedly correct. Forgive me, for the vocal chords of my conscience are a little rusty, but they will improve with practice

If you think that this message resonates, then let people know about it, particularly to people who are not already thinking about this, or who believe because of media mis-reporting that there is debate in the scientific community about whether climate change is real, when this is categorically not the case. Send it on, not because it is remarkable in its content, for it is not, but because the message and the mouth behind the message are an unusual combination that suggests the whole world, even the ardent entrepreneurs and business minds like myself, are starting to get concerned about what we are participating in allowing to happen to our planet.

We have just started an initiative to make the company carbon neutral, starting with announcing a policy of 3/2 work/home tele-working to reduce carbon emissions, provide more flexibility to employees, and allow a better balance of team-time and solo-working on a focussed project. This is just the start.

Daniel Batten

Concerned human, father
Chief Executive Officer, Biomatters Ltd
Auckland
New Zealand
http://www.biomatters.com
http://www.geneious.com

Economic damage due to climate change could dwarf the Great Depression

2006-10-30T22:43:00.000+13:00

This article in the Australian reports on the soon-to-be-released Stern Report that global warming could cost more than either of the world wars or the Great Depression of the 1930s:

Leaked portions of the report from former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern warn that global warming could cost trillions of dollars to address.

UK treasurer, Gordon Brown, who commissioned the report, will accept the report's primary recommendation, which calls for the establishment of a global market to trade carbon emissions.

I am currently listening to BBC Five Live which will broadcast Sir Nicholas Stern's official summary of his report later tonight and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will also comment (don't you love the internet?).

Not all carbon offset companies are equal!

2006-10-30T00:41:00.000+13:00

Mike Mason, one of the founders of Climate Care, and environmental activist George Monbiot debated the benefits of carbon-offsetting schemes on Radio Five Live today. They were both discussing an investigation by one of the program's journalists into the Carbon Neutral Company which uncovered that the company in question invests in forests that would have been planted anyway! Thankfully Climate Care appears to be made of better stuff and Mike Mason gave a very good account of his company's activities.

One of the other interesting things uncovered by the investigative journalist was that the money the UK government spent offsetting the emissions of the Gleneagles G8 meeting would almost all go to monitors (auditors from big accounting firms like PriceWaterhouse) that would ensure the savings have actually occurred. In other words the bureacracy was far too unwieldy and expensive -- and it had put off many of the people involved -- not least the South African city council that was to be the benefactor of the energy efficiency improvements. They said they would think twice before getting involved with the same kind of scheme again.

George Monbiot had the last word by commenting that the carbon-neutralization companies that have sprung up in recent years were the "priests of the 21st century" that you could "pay a little money to them in order to atone for your sins". He argued that these companies were actually detrimental to the global environmental cause because they relieved the pressure for real political change which he said was the only real way of tackling the problem of climate change. I can definitely see his point. And I agree with him that I would dearly love the governments of this country and others to make the political changes necessary - however painful. But considering that they have known about the science for 20 years and not acted, it is likely that they will delay a little bit longer. So what am I suppose to do in the mean time? If nothing else the discussion helped me to realise that Climate Care is better than the Carbon Neutral Company (which appears to be little better than a brokerage).

The Living Planet Report #2

2006-10-26T13:53:00.000+13:00

This picture, in which the size of each country is scaled to represent its demand for natural resources gives a pretty graphic suggestion as to the reason that Americans are facing an obesity and type-2 diabetes epidemic, whereas most of Africa is living with chronic malnourishment and starvation. Does anyone else think there is something obviously wrong with this? Why isn't this grotesque global injustice an election issue?

The Living Planet Report

2006-10-25T18:15:00.000+13:00

New Zealand has about 6-7 hectares per person (15 people per square km) and is the 193rd country by density. In other words, there is virtually nobody living here compared to our land mass. Only 4 of the 30 OECD nations have lower population densities: Australia, Canada, Iceland and Norway. All of these countries have large areas of desert or tundra that are almost uninhabitable. So basically no other developed country has as much usable space per person as we do.

The Living Planet Report shows that if the world was shared out equally, each person would have 1.8 hectares at their disposal. However the report also shows that the material demands of the average American requires more than 9 hectares per person (even though they only have 3.2 hectares each in USA). So that means that the average American is using 3 times more resources than could be produced within their own country. It also means that if New Zealanders lived like Americans we couldn't even sustain ourselves in the most spacious western country on the planet: New Zealand. Go figure....

The decline and fall of civilisation as we know it?

2006-10-24T23:41:00.000+13:00

The western world has amassed a huge ecological debt over the last 30 years according to the most recent WWF Living Planet report. In 2003 the global human population used 25% more natural resources than the planet could replenish. However in western countries like the UK and NZ the per capita figure is more like 200% (i.e. we would need 3 planets for all of us to live like the UK population does in perpetuity). This growing ecological debt will eventually lead to a catastrophic collapse of the entire world ecosystem -- and according to the WWF's biannual Living Planet Report that could happen as early as the middle of this century.

Of course the exact length of time an ecological breakdown on a global scale may take to unfold is very difficult to estimate, but the fact of global over-consumption seems clear. The timing of ecological collapse may be uncertain, but at the rate we are consuming, the end point is inevitable unless we begin to consume in a sustainable way.

There have been five previous mass extinction events in the history of life on Earth. The last was 65 million years ago, bringing to an end the age of the dinosaurs. Right now, in our lifetimes, the activities of the human population could well bring about the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's billions of years of history.

According to the Living Planet Report, terrestrial land species have declined by 31% between 1970 and 2003. In the same period the human population has almost doubled from 3.7 billion to over 6 billion people. There is no doubt that many of these species will recover is we learn how to curb our demanding appetite for resources. The question really is whether we will be able to agree that a solution to this problem is necessary and worthy of our undivided attention.

Read this BBC article for more information about the Living Planet Report.

Its virtually impossible to report on this kind of thing without feeling depressed. We are living in a time of amazing scientific and technological breakthoughs, unprecedented access to information and despite these facts the global population exhibits an even more amazing collective denial and wishful distrust of the growing body of scientific evidence. There was a previous time in human history when the population grew fat, lazy and blind to their own shortcomings. It was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Here is a short quote from one set of theories about what brought about this decline:

The Roman economy was basically Raubwirtschaft, plunder economy, which was based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion)

This theory seems plausible to me, but for alternative theories about the decline of the Roman Empire feel free to check out this article.

Extent of Arctic Ice receding by 8.6% per decade

2006-10-20T13:09:00.000+13:00

Estimates of the rate at which the Arctic ice cap is receding are increasing every year. In 2004 the estimated rate of loss was 7.7% per decade, in 2005 it was 8.4% and in September this year the National Snow and Ice Data Center revised the estimated slope to 8.6% per decade. This current figure suggest that the Arctic Ice cap will disappear completely this century. Scientists think that this estimate is conservative and that the Arctic ice may disappear much sooner as increased global warming will speed the rate of loss.

New Zealand should join the EU!

2006-10-20T12:50:00.000+13:00

This article on the BBC website reports that the European Union has established a goal to reduce Europe's energy consumption by 20% before 2020.

A range of measures including improved energy standards for appliances aims to net reductions of:

Households - 27%
Businesses - 30%
Transport - 26%
Manufacturing - 25%
(Source: European Commission)

These goals show concrete means to not only save money but also provide better longer lasting goods for consumers while at the same time curbing our emissions and reducing our impact on the environment. These are the kinds of things that the US should be focusing on rather than who to bomb next...

For a long time now I have felt that the general NZ culture fits better with Europe than America. In this increasingly globablized world I think that New Zealand should consider joining the EU. Then our coins would be worth more than the Australians' :-) Economically we would fit into the EU very nicely - they already buy a lot of our wine and primary produce. The EU would just have to be renamed to the SU (Sustainable Union) or something similar. Europe keeps getting redefined anyway...

A great film about alternative energy

2006-10-13T09:06:00.000+13:00

YouTube is fast becoming a great place to get hold of educational films. This is a great film about Combined Heat and Power energy (very efficient) and renewable energy sources that are being used in Denmark, Sweden and Netherlands right now to great effect. Why don't countries like New Zealand and Great Britain (not to mention those dinosaurs in USA) follow?

A few tips on flying green

2006-10-12T09:50:00.000+13:00

Time/Asia had a short article on how to fly green a couple of weeks ago. This is something that is constantly on my mind given the large amount of travel I do for my job as a scientist speaking at conferences and teaching workshops mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. From New Zealand you know you are doing some damage going on these flights.. The article makes a couple of points about flying direct and so forth. But it seems to neglect the most important thing to do if you have to fly: it is actually not that expensive to completely offset your carbon dioxide emissions using the services of companies like MyClimate. Carbon neutral travel is a reality. Do it :-)

Supersize Nation

2006-10-12T09:07:00.000+13:00

I just read the front page article in the Independent about the USA reaching 300 million in population... Unfortunately as far as carbon dioxide emissions go they contribute as much as 1.5 billion people based on the worldwide average.

On a global scale the average US citizen uses far more than his or her fair share of the planet's resources - consuming more than four times the worldwide average of energy, almost three times as much water and producing more than twice the average amount of rubbish and five times the amount of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming. The US - with five per cent of the world's population - uses 23 per cent of its energy, 15 per cent of its meat and 28 per cent of its paper. Additional population will mean more people seeking a share of those often-limited resources.

Are we nearing a political tipping point?

2006-09-27T21:14:00.000+12:00

A number of events over the last few weeks give reason for cautious optimism that climate change may finally be climbing the political agenda. Whether it makes it to what must be its rightful place at the top, and whether it gets there fast enough, remains to be seen.

At a conference hosted by Bill Clinton, Richard Branson last week pledged the next 10 years of Virgin travel profits to low emissions technology (estimated at £1.6m). Knowing that John Howard would be listening, Branson also criticized the Australian government's head-in-the-sand approach to climate change. Meanwhile, the Australian Football League (not known for their progressive politics) has agreed to offset all CO2 emissions arising directly from their competition.

Rupert Murdoch's son, James, who runs BSkyB for his father, is concerned about climate change and BSkyB is now climate neutral. James also seems to have got his father on board - given that Mr Murdoch Snr owns half the world's media, this has got to be good for spreading the word.

In California, Arnie is doing his bit to make up for the current US administration's lack of response to climate change, and California is taking the top five car manufacturers to court for contributing to the "public nuisance" of climate change.

And in the UK, the Royal Society has told ExxonMobil to stop funding bad science by climate change skeptics.

Gore vs. Bush

2006-03-27T11:49:00.000+12:00

A few years ago Helen clark got into trouble for basically saying that the world would have been a better place if Al Gore had beaten George Bush in the presidential elections (back before the "war on terror"). I always agreed with her whole-heartedly. This recent piece in the Guardian about Gore's new movie makes me wonder what a difference he could have made on the environmental front. Imagine the US, signed up to Kyoto and pioneering emissions reductions...

Apparently, there is a great mp3 going around of Gore's recent address at a TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference, in which he outlines his views. Unfortunately, TED doesn't seem to want anyone to post it so it is difficult to find.

As an alternative, here is a speech on climate change by the guy who somehow managed to get elected over Gore.

Warmest Canadian Winter

2006-03-15T20:28:00.000+13:00

Canada has experienced its warmest winter since modern record-keeping began, with average temperatures 3.9 degrees (!!) above normal and all regions of the country basking in abnormal mildness, according to preliminary figures compiled by Environment Canada.

The biggest departure from typical winter weather was in the area where Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories converge. Temperatures there were a staggering eight degrees warmer than normal. But other notable warm spots included the entire Prairie region, where temperatures were five to seven degrees above average, and southern British Columbia.

Not too many urban heat islands "in the area where Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories converge." As the saying goes, I thought these things might be clues. On the plus side, one assumes that use of fossil fuels for home and office heating in winter might be on the downward slide (although summer a/c is a different matter of course).

French researchers find new species (to eat?)

2006-03-10T17:49:00.000+13:00

Kiwa hirsuta is a newly discovered species of lobster that is blind and blond-haired. This deep sea creature was found 2.3km below the surface of the ocean and 1500km south of Easter Island. It is so morphologically different from related species it has been given its own taxonomic family (though lets look at its DNA before we get too excited). Unfortunately for this little critter it is already being refered to in the same sentence as a salad plate by the Associated Press:

The animal is white and 15 centimetres long - about the size of a salad plate.

Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly

2006-03-08T12:51:00.000+13:00

A recent article in Science has estimated that Antarctica is losing about 36 cubic miles of ice each year. This is equal to 150 cubic km. An article in the Washington Post provides a good synopsis. This is the first evidence of the extent to which the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking and the extent of melting has surprised many scientists, especially because previous data had shown that some local regions of the Antarctic continent were getting colder. This new information about the Antarctic ice sheet as a whole adds to the already strong evidence of rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice, suggesting that rising sea levels could become a major issue sooner than previously anticipated.

2005 hottest year on record for Australia

2006-01-19T15:31:00.000+13:00

Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell says new data showing 2005 was Australia's hottest year on record is further evidence of climate change.

The Bureau of Meteorology is releasing figures today showing the average temperature last year was 22.89 degrees.

It is the highest average temperature in Australia since comprehensive record keeping began in 1910.

Senator Campbell says it is extra proof that the earth is warming up and a global response is required.

"It is a huge and serious challenge, these figures add to the weight of evidence that climate change is real and that it's a problem that the world needs to work together to seek to solve," he said.

Hottest year for Northern Hemisphere

2005-12-16T13:55:00.000+13:00

2005 is looking like it will be the warmest (0.65°C above the 1961-1990 average for northern hemisphere) year in recorded history for the Northern hemisphere. In terms of global temperature it is heading for the top 5. The ten hottest years in recorded history have all occurred in the last 11 years.

10 hottest years on the globe (in °C above global average for 1961-1990):

1. 1998  +0.54°C
2. 2002  +0.50°C
3. 2003  +0.49°C
4. 2005  +0.48°C
5. 2004  +0.44°C
6. 2001  +0.40°C
7. 1997  +0.39°C
8. 1995  +0.38°C
9. 1999  +0.30°C
10. 2000  +0.30°C

(source Hadley Centre, UK Met Office) [2005 is provisional]

A world view of global warming

2005-12-15T08:46:00.000+13:00

Gary Braasch of World View of Global Warming was nice enough to let me reproduce this picture of a Polar Bear foraging on dry ground in Barrow, Alaska. His website is a photographic essay of how global warming is affecting people, plants and animals all over the world.

Personally, to date, global warming has affected my view of the detractors more than it has affected my day to day life. I have realised that media and politicians generally have little understanding about how science works, its interface with advocacy and how scientific information is best used in the face of uncertainty. Take the following statements:

Global warming will cause the extinction of 90% of life on Earth.

Global warming is caused primarily by human activity.

The truth or otherwise of these statements is not currently known with absolute certainty.

Is this uncertainty a reason for inaction? No! Based on current scientific evidence, there is a possibility that the human activities driving climate change could precipitate a mass extinction event — the first in 65 million years. Should we take that chance? Over time the scientific evidence will grow until we are near certain, one way or the other - either climate change will be devastating or it won’t. But can we wait until near certainty is established before we act? No! The precautionary principle says that if the consequences of an action (for example, converting all the world’s fossil fuels into greenhouse gases and deforesting the planet) are unknown, but are judged to have some potential for major or irreversible negative consequences (like making the planet uninhabitable for humans and many other species), then it is better to avoid that action. So why are we currently conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the only habitable planet we know of?

Invoking the precautionary principle is the only reasonable action that politicians can take in this situation. The quality of the debate in the media around this issue has been woeful. Especially the so-called ‘balanced’ reporting, where Kyoto Protocol detractors are given as much airtime as are advocates for action against global warming. This ‘balanced’ reporting is usually delivered without even mentioning the dwindling number of detractors and their tendency to be associated with the oil industry.

Apart from the wealth of information from long term studies of atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, ice cores and so forth, the record heat in summers in Europe, forest fires for months in Portugal, the worst Atlantic hurricane season ever recorded, and a rapidly disappearing Arctic ice cap are all (quite probably) signs of the long-term effects of climate change. The Tegua islanders of Vanuatu have had to shift their entire town recently due to frequent flooding and are probably the world’s first climate change ‘refugees’. How much more evidence is required before Dubya and his cronies join the rest of the world and acts on this problem now, before it is too late. Some things are actually more important than the Gross Domestic Product.

Paradise Lost

2005-12-10T15:25:00.000+13:00

This week, a small Pacific Island community on Tegua Island in Vanuatu had to pack up their lives, disassemble their coastal village and relocate inland. Their village was being repeatedly flooded by tidal surges attributable to climate change. The UNEP calls the Tegua Islanders the world's first climate change refugees. I wonder how the villagers feel about this honour? Pretty pissed off I would say, and not so much because it happened, but because it happened and the rest of the world doesn't seem to care - most of the world seems obsessed with keeping terrorists off planes; meanwhile, carbon emissions from air travel threaten the lives of millions.

The obvious analogy between Tegua Island's villagers and the global village should have us all worried - and when the temperature rises, we don't have the option of relocation.

Not just another Aucklander?

2005-12-09T20:07:00.000+13:00

The sad naked hills of Motutapu
Photo from trust website

If you are:

(1) an Aucklander and
(2) are getting sick of reading the depressing stuff on this site and
(3) you would like to make a difference, then

Why not try volunteering for the Motutapu Restoration Trust? I have gone over for a day of volunteering three times so far, and have thoroughly enjoyed it. The trust has planted over 300,000 seedlings, covering 65 hectares of regenerating forest, since it was established in February 1994. A hectare of land can be planted with about 4500-6000 seedlings, which will eventually thin out to a mature patch of forest containing about 1000-1200 mature trees. To plant the whole island will take about 7.9 million seedlings, or about 430 volunteer years. I guess at some point the forest might start replanting itself though... The trust plans to plant 30,000 seedlings next year, amounting to 600 person-days of volunteering. You can be one of those person-days!

Based on standard calculations the regenerating forest on Motutapu is sequestering about 1.5-4.5 tons of carbon (5.5-16.5 tons of CO₂) per hectare per year. Counting all 65 hectares, this is will neutralize about 730 tons of CO₂ emissions).

A 1.4 litre car travelling 20,000 km per year will, on average, produce 3.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂). This mean that the current regenerating forest on Motutapu neutralizes the greenhouse emissions of about 210 cars on Auckland's roads. If the whole island was planted in regenerating forests it would neutralize the emissions of about 5000 cars on the roads.

Not bad, but still leaves a lot to be done... for instance you could drive less and conserve electricity :-)

Now lets finish the calculation. New Zealand has about 3.6 million cars. From the above calculations you need about 0.32 hectares of regenerating forest for each and every car. That means we need about 1.15 million hectares of regenerating forests to neutralize the emissions of all the cars in New Zealand. That works out to only about 4.3% of the total land mass (268,021 sq km) of New Zealand. Totally reasonable. What we need is for scientists to work out a super-efficient automated way to plant regenerating forests. Because right now volunteer hours are the bottleneck!!

Assumptions for calculation of 7.9 million seedlings and 430 person years:
* Each hectare is planted with 5250 seedlings
* Each volunteer plants 50 seedlings a day
* Motutapu Island is 1509 hectares

Note:
* 1 metric ton of carbon equivalent is 3.67 metric tons of CO₂

Beware of the fossil fools

2005-12-09T19:00:00.000+13:00

This article in the Guardian is an oldie but a goodie. As a scientist I have been continually pissed off with the medias' so-called 'balanced' reporting on climate change. When 99% of the climatologists are saying global warming is happening and 1% are saying its not, why do media outlets like the BBC persist in giving both views equal air time? At the very least they could mention the fact that the supporting evidence for global warming outweighs that for other opinions. Otherwise If the media people are going to continue this farce they might as well invite the smoking-doesn't-contribute-to-lung-cancer and HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS loonies to elaborate on their opinions as well.

Granted, many successful scientific theories start with a small number of supporters. But as evidence accumulates and the theory survives scientific testing, that small number of proponents eventually grows to a majority of scientists, at which point the theory becomes scientific dogma. In the case of climate change we are well on the way in this process. Very few scientists thought the world was heating up 30 years ago. Now almost all scientists agree that global warming is happening. There is still debate around how much of the global warming can be attributed directly to human activity, but again the trend is clear. As we accumulate evidence the picture is pointing more and more towards the greenhouse effect as a primary cause.

Polar bears on the front line of war on climate change

2005-12-09T18:38:00.000+13:00

This polar bear on pack ice in the Arctic circle is feeling the heat well before we will. Although the average global increase in temperature in the last 50 years has been around 0.5 degrees celsius, in the Arctic circle it has been 2-3 degrees C. This dramatic rise has led some scientists to predict the complete disappearance of summer ice in the Arctic before the end of the century. Since polar bears use the sea ice to hunt for prey, this will spell disaster for the world's largest terrestrial carnivore. Polar bears could become extinct in the wild within a hundred years if the current trend in global warming persists.

Image source: WWF website (WWF-Canon / Jack Stein GROVE)

Imagine: John Lennon would have been 65 today

2005-12-09T17:30:00.000+13:00

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

- Written by John Lennon, 1970

The lyrics of Imagine by John Lennon have come to represent much of what he stood for as a person. Two things jump out at me from the wonderfully simple and powerful lyrics:

1. Imagine there's no countries: This would certainly make it clear that Africa's problems are as much ours as theirs. It would also mean that things like the Kyoto Protocol (and beyond) could be enacted without a superstate like the USA undermining it. But of course globalization of nation-states and democracy would be a massive transformation of society on Earth. George Monbiot has done an excellent job of arguing the case in his recent book entitled "The Age of Consent".

2. Imagine all the people sharing all the world: Not just with each other, but with all life on Earth. I wonder if you can.

A decade after the Imagine album was released, John Lennon was assassinated. I wonder what he would have done in the last quarter of a century, had he had the chance to live under the sky with the rest of us... Probably not as much as some might have hoped from these early lyrics.

Photo of the day

2005-12-09T15:15:00.000+13:00

This is an old picture, but it is worth more than a 1000 words.

13 July 1999, Chukchi Sea Russian Federation

Walrus on ice floe; Greenpeace tour investigating climate change effects, Chukchi Sea, Alaska.

Photo is Copyright Greenpeace / Daniel Beltra

DiCaprio to make a documentary on Global Warming

2005-12-07T11:28:00.000+13:00

Leonardo DiCaprio. I didn't used to like this guy, in the way that you sometimes just don't like a Hollywood actor for no good reason. Envy perhaps. Or perhaps a feeling that Hollywood actors are inherently 'fake'. How could they possibly be real down-to-earth people with all that mind-distorting money, glitz and glam? However in the last couple of years I have been hearing that Leonardo DiCaprio is an environmentalist, or at least has a genuine concern about global warming. No doubt this will be viewed as being flaky from some corners. However I for one am looking forward to the documentary entitled 11th Hour that he is currently producing, co-writing and narrating. The subject of global warming is extremely important subject matter that has seldom been adequately tackled in film. The challenge of presenting it with scientific accuracy while still be an advocate for action is a very difficult one. Global warming epitomizes the tension between the cautious nature of scientific progress and the urgent need for action that some people feel the challenge of global warming warrants. When scientists finally find out, one way or the other, that we have sealed our fate by burning all the fossil fuels, it could well be too late to reverse. I wonder how long we might sit around, waiting for the inevitable conclusion, with the knowledge that, had we acted sooner, the end game could have been avoided.

Scientifically, it is clear that there is already a large body of evidence to support human-induced climate change, but there is also still room for doubt as well. You can't be a scientist without admitting this. However this should not be a reason to wait around. Even if there is only a 0.1% chance of human-caused catastrophe on a planetary scale, we are talking about the only planet we have. We don't have a backup in case our inaction proves imprudent. And for all you sci-fi freaks, No, Mars is not an answer. If we can't keep this Earth habitable then we don't deserve another planet.

In my opinion, even the small chance that our actions are causing a cascade of climate- and environment-related events that could jeopardize the habitability of the planet should be reason enough to start acting now! Since when did expendable income gain such primacy in the minds of the masses that even the smallest sacrifices in the bottom line seem unbearable, no matter what the potential future benefits? The prudent thing is to spend money on this problem now, because you can bet your life savings that it will be costlier to fix in the future! If not priceless.

International Day of Action on Climate Change

2005-12-02T23:02:00.000+13:00

Saturday 3rd December 2005 is International Day of Action on Climate Change. So tomorrow you have an excuse to annoy your friends, family and colleagues by reminding them that every one can take small actions to reducing carbon emissions and promoting reforestation. Education and advocacy is definitely a large part of the solution, but action is even more important. Simple things like using your legs or your bike instead of the car and sending a letter to your local MP are positive ways to contribute.

More good news

2005-12-01T12:46:00.000+13:00

Three sobering points from Michael Hopkin in this week's Nature...

- The North Atlantic is losing its ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This means that future emissions are more likely to cause global warming, said researchers at a meeting of the European CARBOOCEAN project in Amsterdam.
- The carbon dioxide that does dissolve in the ocean makes it more acidic, threatening to corrode the calcareous exoskeletons of animals such as corals, attendees told the meeting. The Atlantic soaks up some 25% of all carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
- The system of currents that includes the Gulf Stream — which warms the temperate regions of Europe — is weakening. Research suggests its flow has reduced by a third since 1957. This weakening is evident not in the Gulf Stream itself (the fictional failure of which was dramatized in the film The Day After Tomorrow), but in the movement of cold, deep waters.

Not sure what to say about this really...the evidence just keeps on mounting and the predicted effects and speed of change keep on increasing. I guess at some point there will be a media frenzy and then we might actually start doing something! Any ideas for how to initiate said media frenzy would be much appreciated.

The human health effects of global warming

2005-11-29T00:36:00.000+13:00

No Right Turn has a nice summary of some recent research published in Nature magazine on the geographic distribution of effects of global warming. Basically, the developed world gets off lightly and all the really bad shit happens in Africa, Asia and South America:

Image from No Right Turn

However snow-melt dominated water sources are predominantly in the northern (largely developed) countries, and these places will have trouble with water shortages:

Image from No Right Turn

Isn't it odd that the damage done by the (largely northern) industrialized nations seem predominantly to impact the (largely developed) nations near the equator. How evil is that?

Greenhouse-gas levels highest in 650,000 years

2005-11-28T08:08:00.000+13:00

Two recent articles in Science magazine demonstrate that current CO₂ and methane levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have been at any time in the last 650,000 years. In the case of CO₂ the current level is about 375 ppm (parts per million). This is compared with a maximum of 290 ppm during the period between 390,000-650,000 years before present. In the case of methane, the current level is about 1700 parts per billion (ppb), as compared with an average of 600 ppb during the same historical period. Furthermore, Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, who led the analysis of Antartic ice cores that provided this information said:

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen 200 times faster over the past 50 years than at any other time during this period.

This unprecedented rate of increase of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere puts the responsibility firmly on the shoulders of the human race. If we are driving this change, should we not therefore take it upon ourselves to reverse it?

References

Siegenthaler U., et al. Science, 310. 1313 - 1317 (2005).
Spahni R., et al. Science, 310. 1317 - 1321 (2005).

Priorities

2005-11-25T09:46:00.000+13:00

Bird flu is creating quite a stir at the moment, and rightly so - a pandemic would be disastrous and we should do all we can to prevent an outbreak. It is amazing to see what can be done on such a large scale, in such a short time to combat a problem once it is deemed threatening enough. The EU has banned imports of all wild birds, as well as farmed birds from Turkey and Greece, and EU nations are spending millions of Euros on the alleged miracle cure, Tamiflu, in an attempt to control the disease should it infect humans. The Americans have set aside $3.9bn in “bird flu funds”, mainly for antiviral drugs and vaccines. Curiously, although perhaps predictably, George Bush says that he has considered using the military to maintain control should the strain appear – cue images of GI’s gunning down poultry and guided missiles taking out chicken farms. Perhaps most impressive though, is the Chinese government’s decision to vaccinate 14 billion birds. This is a lot of birds.

And it isn’t just governments getting in on the act. Auckland University has recently developed a pandemic plan , including briefings to the senate and senior management, a dedicated “response team” and adopting the four-level WHO pandemic management system.

So the message is clear. Bird flu is a big problem and we are doing almost everything we can to prevent it, including spending lots of money on preventative measures and research.

It is interesting to contrast this with the global response to climate change and the threat of global warming. Whilst bird flu is a serious problem that we certainly need to address, global warming is surely a much greater threat to the future of humanity and yet it has initiated less response. Although there is plenty of discourse about global warming, there has been relatively little action. China is willing to vaccinate 14 billion birds but has done virtually nothing to reduce emissions – currently, China is on track to double the world’s anthropogenic carbon emissions. George Bush sees obtaining oil and eliminating dangerous chickens as good reasons to deploy the US military but has shown no interest in curbing US carbon emissions. Only the EU comes close to giving climate change the same sort of priority as bird flu.

So why have birds with colds got most of us more worried than melting glaciers? I suspect it has to do with the immediacy of the threat and that, stories and images of dead chickens (or people) make good news and a fairly convincing, easy-to-follow argument – if you get bird flu you could die, and this is bad. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is just as compelling but far less direct. So this might explain why people aren’t as worried about climate change, but why the lack of action? This is probably to do with the commons dilemma. It makes economic sense to spend money eliminating a disease from your chickens if you want people to buy them in the future. It is more difficult to justify spending a lot of money on cleaner energy sources and higher emissions standards. The climate is a shared resource and it is in a nation’s best interests in the short term to burn fossil fuels as a cheap energy source and to exploit the climate as a dump-site for carbon emissions, even if, in the long term, we all suffer.

Nonetheless, I think the assault on bird flu should give us hope. The Kyoto Protocol is a good first step towards managing the climate as a global commons and if the Chinese government can all of a sudden decide to do something as drastic as vaccinating 14 billion birds, perhaps getting them to fit a few million catalytic converters and start building zero emission vehicles isn’t unrealistic. We just need to convince the right people, and perhaps do what New Zealand has always done, and lead by example.

Instability

2005-11-20T15:00:00.000+13:00

One of the things that bugs me at every election is inane comments from 'business commentators' to the effect that 'the markets don't like instability, and eagerly await a conclusive result from this election.' Note the way in which markets are given human personalities. While amusing in a stomach-churning kind of way, there is a far more serious undertone: the markets don't like elections. Or at the very least they don't like the 'instability' associated with them, and with representative democracy more generally. They would, presumably, have preferred Ruth Richardson to be installed as Supreme Commander for Life circa 1992. The notion that government should be run not by elected representatives, but by technocrats whose ideologies have no public mandate, has resurfaced recently.

But let us suppose that markets really don't like 'instability' - by which I assume those commentators mean 'uncertain outcomes.' Why aren't they, then, speaking out about the climatic instability associated with global warming? Where are business' talking heads on this year's strange hurricane season, for example? I may have missed them, but I suspect not: business might not like democracy, but its distaste for instability doesn't seem to extend to any serious questioning of the effects its goods and services have on the climate.

Paraphrasing Diamond's Collapse

2005-11-17T12:14:00.000+13:00

…Australia has a well educated populace, a high standard of living, and relatively honest political and economic institutions by world standards. Hence Australia’s environmental problems cannot be dismissed as products of ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, desperately impoverished populace, and grossly corrupt government and businesses, as one might perhaps be inclined to explain away environmental problems in some other countries.

- from Jared Diamond's Collapse

I could make a joke about Australians’ intelligence here, but I am not going to. I am part way through Jared Diamond’s latest book and, after discussing numerous environmental successes and failures, from the collapse of island ecosystems at the hands of Polynesian settlers, to the extensive national park systems and forests of Japan and Dominican Republic, Diamond turns to something much closer to home…for me at least. He chooses Australia as a case study of modern western environmental problems.

Now, Collapse is a fascinating read, but the above quote bugs me. In one sense it is quite obvious what Diamond is saying, and I don’t mean to criticize him for simply making the point that Australia is very different to, say, Haiti. It is wealthier, better educated, and politically and economically more stable and less corrupt. And, this should make it easier to initiate positive environmental change. This makes sense. What bugs me is that, given all these ‘advantages’, why is Australia (and the West in general) failing so dismally to instigate positive change? Are the factors Diamond mentions in the West really any better when it comes to getting people to live within the carrying capacity of their environment?

By assuming that our hallowed education system, high standard of living and political and corporate systems are advantages, we may fail to pick up on problems with these aspects of our society as far as the environment is concerned. Similarly, we may wrongly despair and lose hope about the future of societies without these characteristics.

Australians may be highly educated, but do they really have a better understanding in general of, say, how ecosystems function? Tertiary education itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce people to behave sustainably. For instance, Diamond speaks of the Papua New Guinea highlanders who have learnt to manage their local environment very effectively and they don’t need a degree to do this. Of course, I am not suggesting everyone pulls their kids out of school so they can learn bush-craft, just that, at the moment, despite our wonderful education system people don’t know much about their natural environment. How many times have I heard people confuse global warming and the hole in the ozone layer?

Our ‘higher’ standard of living is also falsely reassuring, and not just because it is largely the result of unsustainable per capita consumption rates. We also tend to value the fact that we are free to do something about the environment whilst the “desperately impoverished populace” of Third World nations can barely manage to get food for today, let alone think about tomorrow. I do not mean to trivialize the plight of the world’s poor, but we from the West also appear to be locked into a similar mindset of desperate impoverishment. Consumer culture subjects us to a constant, largely inescapable bombardment of invented wants and needs that render us desperately impoverished as far as the environment is concerned. Despite serious environmental consequences, few of us seem to be able to resist for long the opportunity to basically have anything we want and do anything we want, anywhere we want. In addition, it is consumer culture and our own ‘desperate impoverishment’ that is indirectly responsible for a large amount of the environmental destruction in the developing world. Whilst it is tragic when a poor Third World farmer is forced to overgraze his land one year and then starves the next, it is unconscionable that the world’s poor might be starving so that we can get cheap cotton or coffee.

Finally, we like to think that our just, democratic political and economic systems set us apart from the problems of corruption that plague environmental movements in the Third World. Again, this may be a false sense of security. For example, despite widespread public opposition, the Australian logging industry has managed to largely retain legislation allowing unsustainable logging of Australia’s last Old-growth forest remnants. Similarly, US environmental and foreign policy remains almost laughably in favour of oil companies and arms manufacturers at the expense of US citizens and the environment.

The point Diamond was making above, was that there are good reasons to be optimistic about the ability of the West to deal with environmental problems and adapt to live more sustainably. Whilst this may be true, it is easy to become complacent and even arrogant about the way the West operates. In fact, the environmental and social obstacles that Western societies face are not so different from developing nations. We have a public largely ignorant of their impact on the environment, starving for instant gratification in favour of long term planning, and a political and economic system geared towards short-term goals and big business interests. We cannot afford to be complacent or arrogant. We must be open-minded, humble and innovative, for the solution is surely not Western, but global.

-- by Quentin, member of the Thinking about Tomorrow Society

Are you taking Climate Change seriously?

2005-11-16T18:53:00.000+13:00

The Age has an in depth article on climate change and how it is already affecting a number of fragile species in Australia such as this frog that lives on the highest peaks of Queensland's wet tropical rainforests.

Bellenden Ker Nursery-Frog (Cophixalus neglectus)
[image source]

In the side panel of their article there is an interesting reader's poll on global warming. These were the results when I voted:

How seriously do you take global warming?

72% - Extremely - it's too late to avoid problems
10% - It's a moderate threat
4% - I think it's important but manageable
13% - Overblown - it's not a huge threat

Total Votes: 304

Of course all this says is that the majority of people that take the time to read about global warming think its a problem. But I guess they are also the best informed. So what do you reckon?

Blair now has to live up to the rhetoric

2005-11-14T21:36:00.000+13:00

The World Wildlife Fund UK (WWF UK) has strongly criticized Blair for his recent comments that suggest he is trying to undermine the idea of binding targets such as those that UK has signed up to under the Kyoto Protocol. This comes just days after the President of the Royal Society made similar appeals to Blair and the British government to stop talking and start acting. The BBC reported that according to the WWF UK, there is little difference between Bush and Blair apart from rhetoric. This kind of comment must sting Blair given that climate change has been one of his self-proclaimed strengths whereas Dubya is widely regarded as the least environmentally-friendly President in the history of the universe. Blair has got to start coming good on his promises.

Fossil fuel sucks, lets do renewable

2005-11-12T16:48:00.000+13:00

(Click image for larger version)

Thinking about tomorrow.

NZ Green Party Priorities

2005-11-12T15:57:00.000+13:00

There have been various rumblings on Frogblog about Green party policy priorities. Most recently these rumblings have been instigated by news of the return of Nandor to parliament. Some posters have worried that

...many ‘environmentalist-only’ greens would be shocked by the sizeable number of votes that would be lost if the Green Party lost their parallel social justice focus.

However, as far as I can see none of the contributors have denied the importance of social justice as a corner-stone of Green party policy. The discussion has been about priorities, and it is a discussion I think the NZ Green party needs to have. How does the Green party allocate effort to the various policy platforms that they support. I would contend that both social justice and environmentalism are global issues. I would further contend that social justice is a fundamental requirement for a modern society, but is irrelevant if we don't also have sustainability.

Currently I think it would be fair to say that New Zealand is far closer to being a just society then India, China and most countries in Africa. New Zealand is probably also more socially just than the USA and Australia right now. However this is no reason to be complacent and the NZ Green party should continue its good work in this direction. Unfortunately, there is no developed country, including NZ, that currently has a sustainable future. All of the developed world is living on borrowed, non-renewable resources. A solution to this problem is urgently needed, and it is for that reason that I believe New Zealand should lead the way, and that the Green party should prioritize accordingly. I am not suggesting dumping social justice concerns. But I am suggesting that the resources and focus should be rationalized. Simple as that.

Blair must walk the talk on climate change

2005-11-11T19:59:00.000+13:00

World-renowned scientist and President of the Royal Society, Lord May, has said that Tony Blair will not be able to continue claiming to be a world-leader on climate change because the UK has lost control of its own greenhouse gas emissions.

Lord May also explained to his peers that "research earlier this month suggests that a drop in rainfall in Ethiopia and surrounding countries in the past few years, where six to 10 million people are already facing serious food shortages, is also caused by a rise in sea surface temperatures, this time in the southern Indian Ocean. In the developing world climate change is about life and death - not just about domestic economics."

He continued by saying, "It is very difficult to criticise other countries, such as the United States, who will not meet their targets if we are unable to meet ours."

Tony Blair could start walking the talk by support a couple of backbencher bills that are being read for the second time in parliament today. The Management of Energy in Buildings Bill, promoted by Alan Whitehead, sounds like a great plan. It would require all new homes to have energy generation capacity such as solar panels or heat and power boilers. These would generate electricity that could be sold back to the electricity grid, thus reducing demand for dirty generation from coal and oil-fired power stations.

The Independent also ran a story on the effect of climate change on the British marine environment. The Environment Agency now says that climate change is the single biggest threat to British coasts, outweighing both pollution and overfishing! According to the Agency report erosion damage caused by global warming already represents an estimated cost of £100M/year to the UK economy and that cost is expected to grow over time.

Roger Kerr totally misses the point

2005-11-08T22:02:00.000+13:00

In an ill-conceived and frankly idiotic press release by the New Zealand Business Round table entitled Global Warming and Kyoto Becoming Decoupled, Roger Kerr attempts to argue that the Kyoto Protocol and anything like it is fruitless.

I wonder if Roger Kerr is also dismissive of the objective of the Kyoto Protocol which is the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous human-caused interference with the climate system.

Early in the article Roger Kerr says:

no democratically elected government could impose large economic costs on its citizens today for minimal environmental benefits a century into the future.

I guess Roger thinks that stabilizing the global climate system is a 'minimal environmental benefit'. Or perhaps he is refering to some of the other 'minimal environment benefits' of curbing global warming? Perhaps saving the Arctic from disappearing altogether is not important to Roger Kerr. Perhaps preventing a modern mass extinction event in the next century (the last one was 65 million years ago) is not a pressing issue for Mr Kerr. Perhaps maintaining the ability for humans to live on the planet past his lifetime is uninteresting to him. Otherwise his statement makes no sense. It is true that the Kyoto Protocol is not enough to curb global warming, but that is an argument that we need to do much more than Kyoto, not less.

I would guess that many democratically elected governments would impose large economic costs on its citizens today in aid of:

* Saving the Arctic from disappearing completely.
* Maintaining a sustainable environment for our children and grandchildren.
* Preventing large rises in the ocean levels.
* Preventing further increases in fires, droughts and flash floods in Europe and around the world.
* Prevented global warming from contributing to the extinction of many of the worlds plants and animals.

I would certainly vote for a government that wanted to do those things.

Roger Kerr goes on to say:

A report for the Greenhouse Policy Coalition by economic consultancy firm Castalia released this week makes it clear that it will be impossible to meet our Kyoto targets without causing unacceptable economic hardship.

What hardship is unacceptable given the potential consequences of unchecked climate change? I assume he is worried that he might have to settle for one latte a day rather than two? It seems that the smallest reduction in the amount of spare change in Roger's pocket would be totally unacceptable, even if saving the planet is the cause. Does Mr Kerr hope that by ignoring climate change it will go away? Maybe an old man who doesn't care about future generations can make that case, but I sure can't.

Turning to the newly elected New Zealand government and the agreement between the Labour party and its minority supporters, Roger Kerr crows:

Especially pleasing is the provision in the agreement with United Future that 'a new cost benefit analysis of the proposal to introduce a carbon tax as part of our Kyoto obligations will be conducted and no legislation will be introduced before the analysis is completed.'

Sorry Roger, but in any reasonable cost-benefit analysis, I suspect the cost of a few shiny dollars will be slightly outweighed by the long term benefit of saving the planet from being flushed down the toilet. How do you put a cost on our planet anyway? These money-worriers have to realize that the planet is not their personal port-a-loo. Someone has to clean up around here and for too long economists have been neglecting to notice that the planet is small and we only have one of them! If you want a worthwhile read, that uncovers the nonsense of doing a cost-benefit analysis of climate change, look no futher than here.

Rod Donald has died, cause unknown

2005-11-08T21:08:00.000+13:00

Rod Donald, co-leader of the NZ Green Party, died suddenly early on Sunday morning at the age of 48. This is a terrible blow to the Green party and a tragedy to those that knew him. Most surprising is that a heart attack has been ruled out as the cause, although I don't know what else suddenly kills apparently fit and vital 48 year olds.

According to a story in the NZ Herald Rod Donald was a well-known and well-respected figure world-wide in the green movement, and it appears that he also was very well-regarded by his fellow NZ parliamentarians of all parties, as a great number of them plan to attend his funeral on Thursday.

The green party blog, Frog blog has a link to the Tom Scott cartoon about Rod that summarizes him as a Pragmatic Idealist, a Friend of the Planet and a Good Man. He has undoubtedly inspired many people to follow in his footsteps, as the condolence book on Frog blog, with hundreds of entries, is a testament to.

Kyoto Protocol reduces growth, but global warming costs money and lives

2005-11-08T20:40:00.000+13:00

The BBC has run a story that the Kyoto Protocol will 'reduce Europe's growth'. The story is about a report from the Council for Capital Formation that shows Spain's growth will fall by 3% and Italy's will shrink by 2% because of their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. So what?! Without measures to curb global climate change, there will be a lot more to worry about than a downshift in growth. Check out some of my previous posts on the effects that global warming will have on Europe and worldwide animal and plant species.

The BBC article does correctly point out the Kyoto Protocol is not enough by a long shot. But without concrete binding targets and cooperation of nations the problem will not be solved in the time that it needs to be. In the long term, inaction will be much much more costly then the short-term economic cost of action now. Yes, life will be a bit more difficult and costly in the short term if we reduce emissions, but that is because we have been living in an unsustainable and short-sighted manner, without regard for future generations. That short-sightedness must cease if we are to start taking responsibility for our actions and start thinking about our children.

Top 200 Universities according to The Times

2005-11-05T08:18:00.000+13:00

The Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the top 200 Universities worldwide again for the 2005 year. The top 10 were:

1. Harvard University (USA)
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
3. Cambridge University (UK)
4. Oxford University (UK)
5. Stanford University (USA)
6. University of California, Berkeley (USA)
7. Yale University (USA)
8. California Institute of Technology (USA)
9. Princeton University (USA)
10. Ecole Polytechnique (France)

New Zealand universities

Auckland University managed a very respectable 52nd (up from 67th in 2004), coming in above the likes of Pennsylvania State University, USA (64), Copenhagen University, Denmark (66) and King's College London, UK (73).

Otago University came in at 186th (down from 114th).

Massey University was the only other New Zealand University in the top 200, coming in at 188th (down from 108th).

The volatility of these scores seems a bit suspicious. Usually you can't drastically change how good a university is in one year, which suggests to me that these scores are either really noisy (dependent on small sample sizes for peer review which is 40% of the score), or really sensitive to year-on-year data.

Either way, according to the outside world it appears Auckland University is held in the highest esteem of the New Zealand Universities. For a while now there have been arguments that New Zealand has too many Universities for its small population size, and would be better served by reducing the number of Universities from 8 down to about 4-5. That sounds like a very nasty business to me, but I guess having only 3 universities in the top 200 is the kind of argument used to support that conclusion. Either way, ensuring high quality research and tertiary teaching must be high on the agenda in any country that wants to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Incidently this is quite different from non-British-based rankings of Universities. It appears that the British think quite highly of us NZers -- maybe its because of the All blacks :-)

Global warming hurrying along the sixth mass extinction?

2005-11-05T00:01:00.000+13:00

Over the last few years there has been a continous flow of evidence that the behaviour of plants and animals is changing (often inappropriately) in response to rapid global warming and climate change.

In a recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, one of the authors, Marcel Visser, from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Heteren, sounds a stark warning:

"The point has often been made that temperatures have increased before in the Earth's past; but the rate now is 100 times greater. And whereas in those times there were large areas of natural habitat, now it's much more difficult for animals to change or migrate; plus there's loss of genetic diversity, habitat fragmentation - it's just much more difficult for species than 1,000 years ago."

In the research paper, Marcel and a co-author catalog over 50 publications carrying evidence for animals and plants responding inappropriately to changes brought about by modern global warming.

As well as the human-caused habitat destruction and deforestation which has already been heralded as the beginning of the sixth mass extinction in the history of Earth (and the first mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago), it appears that global warming is now taking part in the mayhem as well.

Think about clean energy

2005-11-02T09:07:00.000+13:00

If you are a NZer then check out the Clean Energy Guide, and feel free to print out this image and paste it up somewhere that people can see:

(Click on image for larger version)

Dubya: By being the problem I will provide the solution

2005-11-01T23:57:00.000+13:00

Type "failure" into Google and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. At 11:57pm NZ time the reproducible behaviour was to be taken directly to Dubya's website (This is the result of a successful Google bomb). On Dubya's site, if you dig deep enough you can find his official executive summary of the Administration's approach to climate change:

"Addressing global climate change will require a sustained effort, over many generations. My approach recognizes that sustained economic growth is the solution, not the problem – because a nation that grows its economy is a nation that can afford investments in efficiency, new technologies, and a cleaner environment." -- Dubya Bush

What a load of elephant shit. A simple fact he seems to be missing is that the Earth has finite resources. Unbounded growth of any kind is pure fantasy. We humans have had a nice ride during the rapid growth phase of our life on Earth, but that phase is about to end rather abruptly. Dubya is sitting down at one end of our little wooden vessel busily drilling a hole in the bottom in search of oil. The rest of us are watching the water level rise inside the boat and are starting to wonder whether or not we should start bailing.

Should we start bailing, or is there another solution?

No wonder Winston wants to sit on the cross-benches

2005-10-31T21:53:00.000+13:00

Just for fun I did a quick graphical analysis of the conscience votes for the leaders of the 8 parties as well as the votes for Michael Cullen and John Key. I used the same technique as I outlined in an earlier post in which I created a policy web of the parties. The only difference is that I used a method called "Neighbour-joining" to draw a tree (acyclic undirected graph) rather than a network. Basically I encoded the Yes and No votes as a binary string of "political DNA" and then asked which politicians' consciences are most closely related. The lengths of the edges in this graph correspond with how different the voting behaviours of the leaders are. If there is a short path along this graph between two leaders then their voting behaviours are very similar. It turns out that Winston, Tariana and Dr Don are comfortable (and fringe) bed-fellows based on this analysis. While all the other politicians are fairly closely clumped together miles away from these three (including John Key and Rodney Hide!). Click on the image to see a full-sized version...

Blair calls for global response to climate change

2005-10-31T00:30:00.000+13:00

Tony Blair is a hard man to pigeon-hole. For all his foibles he does seem to have his eye firmly on the ball when it comes to global warming and climate change. His commentary in the Observer is full of completely sensible facts. Yes, the Kyoto Protocol is a step in the right direction, and No it is certainly nowhere near enough. And Yes, the United States and China and India and Brazil have to be included in any sensible long term strategy because it is a global human-population-driven problem. And Yes, urgency is required. Unbelievably sensible. How refreshing. But will anything actually get done? My worry is, will Dubya sign up to anything that admits greenhouse-gas-induced climate change is a serious reality that must be curbed immediately? We actually have to seriously reduce our emissions, not just make our exploitation of the planet's resources more efficient, as Bush seems to think is enough.

Australian Environment Minister latest to accept global warming is human-induced

2005-10-30T22:27:00.000+13:00

The balance of the scientific evidence is that global warming is occurring, is potentially harmful, and is largely caused by human activity. That is the conclusion that Australian Environment Minister Ian Campbell has come to after evaluating the scientific evidence over the last 12 months. He claims that Dubya Bush, Tony Blair and Australia's former chief scientist Robin Batterham all agree with him. He also claims that, despite not ratifying the Kyoto protocol, Australia is one of the most progressive nations in the world on the issue of global warming. I wonder what policies he would point to in order to support that claim? Nevertheless, being aware of the problem is a start. Apparently he is planning a trip over to the UK for a conference on global warming that Tony Blair has organized. I wonder if they will announce some actual plans for action, or just proclaim once again that its an 'important issue'.

Senior scientists fed up with Bush over global warming

2005-10-30T22:02:00.000+13:00

It must be seriously frustrating being a scientist in the United States of America right now. I mean, didn't previous American Presidents listen to and respect scientific evidence? Anyway, Dubya and the gang in the White House certainly don't. I doubt Bush would know what evidence-based science was if it smacked him in the head. I haven't met a single American scientist who was happy with their country's current two-term President. I for one have been boycotting all conferences in that country until they find a decent Administration. In the mean time, senior scientists in the USA will continue to be flabberghasted by Bush's views on global warming amongst other things. I wouldn't be surprised if a few American scientists are starting to look for jobs offshore.

Think big because the planet is small

2005-10-29T15:18:00.000+13:00

Northern madagascar from space

Increasingly it appears that the greatest challenge facing humankind is to sustainably manage the limited resources of the planet Earth, in the face of human overpopulation and increasing material demands of modern human societies. We still know too little about the detailed interactions of the biosphere and global climate to be certain of the long term consequences of human-induced global warming. However we do know that the huge and growing human population on the planet is leaving a large footprint on the global ecosystem. The long term consequences of human-driven global deforestation and wholesale transformation of land usage of the planet Earth are anything but predictable (see Box 1).

Box 1: This satellite picture of Egmont National Park and the surrounding area shows that the original native forests (dark green) of the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand have been largely replaced by argicultural pasture lands (light green). Only the circular national park boundary around Mt Taranaki appears to be providing protection against further land use transformation, and without the national park designation, even more deforestation would undoubtedly occur. The park's circular shape originates from its first protection in 1881, at which time it was specified that a forest reserve would extend from the summit of Mt. Taranaki in a 9.6 km radius. The park covers 33,534 hectares and its peak is 2518 metres above sea level.
The human-driven removal of large swaths of primary forests in New Zealand and worldwide are playing a large role in the changing dynamics of the planet's carbon cycle. The long-term consequences of this transformation of the planet's surface for the global climate and biosphere are not yet clear. The original image was produced by NASA in May 2001.

As a global society, humans need to understand the finite nature of the planet's natural resources and reorganize our behaviours to reflect this finite supply.
A tiny yeast population in a test tube of nutrients initially grows exponentially, unimpeded by the ultimately limited nature of the available resources. However at some point the population of yeast cells become so large that they compete for the remaining resources. In short order the population growth stagnates, as individuals scavenge for the rapidly diminishing left overs of previously unfettered consumption, while also contending with the increasing concentration of waste products of that consumption. Finally the whole population of yeast crash as the resources are completely exhausted and expended. Humans are currently still on the growth part of the curve, but the transition to decline and ultimate extinction can be extremely rapid. Luckily for us, unlike the test tube, the Earth is provided with a continual input of new energy from the Sun. However humans rely heavily on the global climate and ecosystem to harness this energy and convert it into usable resources like tuna and rice. Without a productive and healthy biosphere, we will be hard-pressed to find much nourishment from solar panels alone. We need to learn how to rationalize our energy consumption and restrict our ever-expanding encroachment on all other life on the planet. If we don't do this the consequences could be difficult or impossible to live with. There is no reason why New Zealand should wait for other countries to lead in the battle for a sustainable future. Smart people should apply themselves to this problem immediately and challenge the status quo.

Think as big as the oceans are vast

2005-10-29T14:05:00.000+13:00

Image from conference website

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has just co-hosted an inaugural conference urging international action to create a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to combat the effects of global climate change and human exploitation of our seas and oceans. A press release for the conference, held in Geelong, Australia, says that "nations across the world need to step up and scale up their efforts in protecting the world’s vast and increasingly vulnerable marine environment from climate change, pollution, resource depletion and other threats".

Climate change will bring drought and fire to Europe

2005-10-28T08:22:00.000+13:00

Image from BBC story

A recent study published in the prestigious Science magazine, and reported on by the BBC, used computer modeling to predict the impact of global climate change on Europe in the next century. The main negative impacts are expected to be water shortages and droughts, increased frequency and severities of forest fires and increased flooding. Arguably, all of these effects have already been observed in Europe in the last few years. Apparently, it is only going to get worse. However, one of overall results of the report was that most of Europe is going to be less affected by global climate change than other regions such as the Arctic and the Amazon. Apart from droughts, fires and floods, the European simulations predict rapid changes in the distribution of various species of plants and animals as well as changes in crop suitability in agricultural areas. A good friend of mine from Portugal was telling me that the widespread fires that Portugal experienced this year have only just been put out in mid October, and that they are thinking about extending the fire season in Portugal to accomodate this shift. These kinds of things could well become the norm across Europe in the next few decades.

A NZ Herald piece picked up on the water shortage part of the simulation analysis, especially for the Mediterranean, and reminds readers that "in 1995, about 193 million people out of an EU population of 383 million faced water shortages."

Millions of fish die in massive drought in the Amazon

2005-10-27T22:40:00.000+13:00

Experts believe that global climate change and massive deforestation are to blame for the Amazon's worse drought in more than 40 years. Greenpeace has an alarming slide show of the devastation, including this image of what used to be a thriving lake:

Global climate change is "the greatest challenge to face man"

2005-10-27T20:50:00.000+13:00

It must be true because the Prince of Wales says so! :-) I am not sure why we should listen to him more than thousands of the world's leading scientists that have already said the same thing, but at least the Prince is on message. Its a pity he can't use his royal powers to force some action...

Greens patience wearing thin

2005-10-24T01:24:00.000+13:00

An article in the NZ Herald again references frogblog as a voice of green party membership. I wonder how long the media can afford to keep on getting that wrong. I leave comments on frogblog but I am not a Green party member. The Greens seem to be getting more coverage after the election than they did before. Not the right way around I would have thought.

Greens co-leader says being centrist is blah

2005-10-23T10:49:00.000+13:00

In a recent interview with 95 bFM, Greens co-leader Rod Donald had this to say about being centrist:

"Well, being centrist is being blah from our point of view. I mean, I'm not interested in being a nothing. We want to stand tall on what we believe in. Sometimes those policies are popular; sometimes they're not. And over time, our positions become mainstream. Thirty years ago, if you'd talked wind turbines, people would have laughed at you. What's happening now? Most of the new energy projects are wind energy projects. It's the same with energy efficiency and solar water heating and rail. All those types of initiatives. Concerns about the environment generally are much more in vogue than they were when I started out in Values 31 years ago. I'm not about to sell my principles just to get the baubles of power." - Rod Donald.

I find it hard to disagree with Rod on most of this. Selling your principles for the 'baubles of power" does not sound cool to me either. I guess its just a question of what exactly are the Green party principles, focus and priorities? One of my associates from Oxford recently had this to say about his opinion on a reasonable set of principles for the Green party:

The Greens should "develop a tight focus on scientifically strong and politically relevant policies, and ... by reducing waste, eliminating perverse subsidies and creating opportunities for new eco-industries".

This sounds like a good starting point to me. I think that most would probably agree that the Green Party have at least tried to do something on the specific policies of reducing waste, eliminating perverse subsidies and creating opportunities for new eco-industries. But what about the overall approach as a party? Is the current Green party scientifically strong and focused on politically relevant issues? Or do they tend to tackle too many small and disparate issues. Are they always backing their positions with science, where science is relevant?

Scientifically strong!
I am a scientist. Some of us scientists still have principles, even in the morally bankrupt times we live in. One of the biggest things lacking in political discourse as far as I can see is scientifically sound, reasoned argument and a basic understanding of statistics. Too many issues are pursued with emotional fervour (nothing wrong with emotion!) but without any sound reasoning. For instance, acknowledging that marijuana use (on the current balance of evidence!) contributes to mental illness in teenagers. The scientific evidence for this is steadily growing. Of course, how you use this information to inform policies is another thing altogether. But it is not only important to understand, as a policymaker, the science, but also to communicate those principles of evidence and reason to the general population.

Politically relevant
As a small party, should the Greens be spending their time focusing on things like child smacking laws? Arguably, it is a worthwhile cause, but the planet is getting smacked much harder than our children are. Priorities are important. If the Green party maintains a focus on sensible environmental policy, the public will follow them. I am not suggesting that the Green party changes its principles, I am suggesting that the Green party re-assesses its priorities and the means by which it communicates those priorities to the public. As Rod correctly points out, environmentalism and clean energy are now mainsteam. Why isn't the Green party? Since the Green party is the only party that can make a clarion call for global environmental sustainability - shouldn't that be their number one priority?! In the same interview, Rod Donald himself says:

"There is some pretty radical change that needs to take place if we're actually going to save this place. That might sound over the top, but you've just got to look around you to see what we're doing to this earth, and it can't cope with much more abuse."

I couldn't agree more.

25% more carbon released by Amazon deforestation than first thought

2005-10-22T23:36:00.000+13:00

A recent article in Science magazine details research by American and Brazilian scientists using high-resolution satellite imagery to refine estimates of the amount of logging occuring in the Amazon rainforest. These new estimates suggest that "stealth" logging, in which individual prize trees are removed is very widespread and that previous estimates may have underestimated that amount of carbon dioxide released by Amazon deforestation by as much as 25%. For a forest the size of the Amazon, that is a lot of greenhouse gases...

Environmental concerns bring Jane Campion back to the director's chair

2005-10-20T12:26:00.000+13:00

Jane Campion has come back out of her self-imposed exile from film to direct a new film called The Water Diary to highlight the United Nations's Millennium Development Goals. Campion said that "The Water Diary and the seven other films in the series are trying to help create public awareness of environmental and humanitarian concerns affecting us right now." According to Campion the film was inspired by her daughter and the children of friends.
"One day I heard them talking about the world they would inherit and how our generation had used up so much of the resources that they will inherit a depleted and plundered Earth where they might not live very long."

I am glad that Jane Campion is thinking about tomorrow. More kiwis should.

Worst Hurricane Season Ever?

2005-10-19T16:49:00.000+13:00

Hurricane Wilma is the 12th hurricane this season, and the 21st named storm. The last time there were this many hurricanes in a single season was 1969. The only other season that there were this many named storms was in 1933. Reliable hurricane records stretch back to 1851, eight years before the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

The link between the severity/frequency of hurricanes and global warming is still a hotly debated topic. My guess is that it will not be debated in 5-10 years time...

Policy Webs and the Coalition Game

2005-10-16T01:31:00.000+13:00

The Vote for the Environment campaign asked each of the eight main political parties in New Zealand to answer 59 specific questions on their policy regarding the environment and global climate change. The results of this questionnaire give invaluable insight into the affinities of different parties on policy related to the environment. One simple way of interpreting the results of this questionnaire is to look at the similarity of the answers given between each pair of parties. If this procedure was performed for all pairs of parties then a total of 28 measures of similarity could be tabulated, to completely describe the levels of policy similarity amongst all eight parties. Table 1 shows the policy similarities between all pairs of parties based on the Vote for the Environment questionnaire results.

	ACT	Greens	Labour	Maori Party	National	NZ First	Progressive	United
ACT	-	12%	47%	26%	64%	60%	28%	56%
Greens	12%	-	63%	84%	45%	52%	83%	47%
Labour	47%	63%	-	65%	65%	69%	69%	67%
Maori Party	26%	84%	65%	-	53%	62%	78%	54%
National	64%	45%	65%	53%	-	70%	56%	61%
NZ First	60%	52%	69%	62%	70%	-	61%	67%
Progressive	28%	83%	69%	78%	56%	61%	-	54%
United	56%	47%	67%	54%	61%	67%	54%	-

By itself, this table makes for interesting reading. For example, it shows that, on environmental policy, the two most similar parties are the Greens and the Maori party, being 84% similar. Whereas the two most different parties are (unsurprisingly) the Greens and ACT, having only 12% common policy ground. As you would expect Labour and National are both fairly central. The Labour party shares more than 60% policy similarity with all other parties apart from ACT, while National shares greater than 50% similarity with all other parties except for the Greens. NZ First is the only party that somehow manages to maintain 50% similarity with all of the other parties, making them the most versatile party when it comes to coalition talks.

Although this table makes for interesting reading, sometimes a picture is even better. Its possible to turn these numbers into graph that visually illustrates the policy affinities of all the parties in a single picture. To do this we need to borrow some analysis tools used in evolutionary biology. Using standard software when can generate a graph that summarizes all these relationships by using a table of pairwise differences. It is trivial to convert Table 2 into just such a set of differences. For example the 12% similarity between Greens and ACT will convert to an 88% difference. With these differences (known in evolutionary biology as distances, and usually calculated based on the differences between pairs of DNA sequences) we can now use standard computer software to calculate a graph called a Neighbour Net, which provides a compact summary of pairwise similarities. The resulting graph (which I will dub a Policy Web) is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Environmental Policy Web for 8 New Zealand political parties. The scale bar provides an idea of the approximate percentage difference that the edges in the graph represent.

One observation from the Policy Web is that the Greens, the Maori party and the Progressive Party form a policy clique advocating a strong focus on environmental issues. The second observation is that ACT is out on a fairly long policy limb compared to the other parties. The distance along the shortest path in the graph between two parties in the Policy Web is representative of the amount of difference between their respective policy packages. The Policy Web provides an at-a-glance summary of the relationships between different party’s policies. If it were used across the board, it should provide a quick insight into what coalition combinations actually make sense for a given policy area. Based on environmental policies, the Maori Party should be in coalition with the Greens, and could not possibly sit comfortably with parties such as ACT, National and United Future.

Abrupt climate change

2005-10-14T20:17:00.000+13:00

According to Nature magazine's in focus on Climate Change:

"A change in global climate has been described as the greatest current threat to humanity. The fierce debate over how we should meet that threat is constantly stoked by researchers' efforts to understand more about how our climate works, and how exactly we are altering it. Here news@nature.com looks at the changing political and scientific climate in this emotive arena."

Recent research articles in Nature point to a growing consensus among climatologists, using many different data sources including satellite data, weather balloons and climate models. Not only is there agreement that global climate change is real, but independent estimates of the rate of global warming based on these different data sources and methods are starting to agree as well, with rates from 0.09-0.2 degrees Celcius per decade.

More alarming is the possibility of abrupt climate change. This can occur when initial global warming creates the opportunity for positive feedback loops, where more warming triggers new events that create more warming or more greenhouse gases. Three examples of such feedback loops that are occuring are:

The shrinking polar ice in the arctic is exposing more dark open ocean, which absorbs much more sunlight then the reflective ice it is replacing. This increase absorption causes further rises in ocean temperatures and thus further decline of the polar ice caps. This process is likely to increase the rate at which the polar ice caps are melting, causing still greater rises in temperature and sea levels worldwide.

Increasingly hot and dry summers have in recent years caused widespread forest fires in the USA, Australia and this year in Portugal and Spain. These forest fires release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus accelerating global warming, and causing still hotter and drier summers in the future.

Increasingly hot and dry summers, even without fires, have also caused many agricultural crops in Europe to wilt, dry out and sometimes die completely. During this process a huge amount of carbon is released as CO2 into the atmosphere. It has been calculated that in this year alone, as much carbon was released by dry crops in Europe, as was stored by crops in the last 4 years.

These kinds of positive feedback loops could lead to a runaway process whereby even if we cease all human-caused production of greenhouse gases we would still experience the end-game of global climate change -- whatever that may be. Certainly it is likely to involved the complete disappearance of the arctic polar ice and a large increase in worldwide ocean levels. As well we should expect more powerful hurricanes, more forest fires and huge changes in the fauna and flora planet-wide, including the range and distributions of many species.

If the runaway process scenario is correct, than these changes could all occur very abruptly. Even if is not the case, we should expect this century to be the last nice one for humankind for a long time. Taking this scenario together with the fact of diminishing global oil supplies, and you have a recipe for economic paralysis and disaster if the status quo continues. The only good thing is that we know about all of this in advance. Thanks to solid scientific research that is growing more certain and dependable by the day. We are in a position now that we have enough information to act. So lets face this challenge while we are still in good nick! Lets start acting now!

Endangered Greens

2005-10-12T14:18:00.000+13:00

Gordon Campbell weighs in on how the Greens went in the last election.

Green rank and file talking about a revolution

2005-10-12T13:43:00.000+13:00

This article in the Herald suggests that the Greens are unhappy with their election result. They should be! There are enough potential Green supporters in this country that the Green party should be at least up near the 15% level. I hope that in the next three years, the Green party works out how to demonstrate to a large percentage of New Zealanders that the Green party is a mature, serious political force that can actually represent their views on the very important issues of environment and global climate change, and support those views with sound and sensible social and economic policies.

Arctic ice satellite mission has launch failure

2005-10-09T15:37:00.000+13:00

This article on the BBC website reports on the failed launch of the recent Cryostat satellite mission. This mission was designed to give much improved readings of the decline of the polar ice cap which has been estimated to be decreasing at a rate of 8% per decade since 1980. The failure has thrown the project into disarray and it is not clear if and when a replacement satellite will be built to make these much-needed measurements.

Climate change and pollution are killing millions

2005-10-07T08:58:00.000+13:00

A World Bank report says that environmental factors such as climate change and pollution are responsible for a wide range of ill affects on human health around the world including increases in cancer and diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

Greens must turn on and tune into the mainstream

2005-10-06T17:58:00.000+13:00

This article appeared in the NZ Herald on 6/10/2005. There is an interesting response from Frog of the Green party.

Although it is arguable that the majority of the New Zealand population is green, only 5.3 per cent voted for the Green party.

Is this because the Green Party is disenfranchising environmentally minded New Zealanders by the cocktail of policies it requires the voter to swallow with the Green pill?

Why does the Green party require that you also swallow the red social-engineering pill and the multicoloured hallucinogenic pill?

Would it not be better served by avoiding matters unrelated to the environment, and redefining itself as a party with a distinct focus: its raison d'etre, sustainability and the environment?

By only identifying with left-wing economics, does the Green Party not substantially reduce its political influence in the New Zealand MMP environment by discouraging a large pool of environmentally concerned people who are economically right of centre from voting Green?

Effectively, the Greens have backed themselves into a minority corner.

What have they actually achieved since their entry to Parliament? Have they successfully communicated to the public that global oil production has peaked? Are we better informed about global climate change?

No - but we do know that Nandor rides a skateboard and Keith Locke likes body-paint.

Why on Earth are they saying anything about matters that do not relate to the environment? Most New Zealanders were against native forest logging, most were against genetically modified food, and most New Zealanders say the environment helps give us our distinctive sense of identity, yet the Greens have almost no representation of the people who make up this majority.

Where is the business community within the Green Party? The urban professionals? Or farmers?

Instead, there is a reluctance even to appoint a leader - preferring "leadership sharing" - an inheritance from the 1970s Values Party.

A perfect example of how the party marginalises itself is its stance on the decriminalisation of marijuana.

What does this have to do with Green politics or saving the environment? Nothing. Then why have an opinion on it, particularly if it is an opinion that distracts people from core environmental issues and is not a mainstream political view?

The Greens have a mandate to do one thing only - to improve the chance that the human race and other species will not become a mass-extinction story in the long-term, and, in the short-term, that through our own greed we do not cheat our children out of the lifestyle we are able to enjoy.

Whatever means are required to legally and constitutionally arrive at this end should be pursued. All else is noise and distraction.

This aim has most chance of success if it can permanently move both the Left and the Right in a Green direction: an impossible aim under the party's current modus operandi.

To sell this message it needs to promote a new definition of family values that emphasises the hypocrisy of all socially conservative parties that promote (so called) family values, while pursuing greed-based, shortsighted policies that guarantee that our children will inhabit a worse world than us.

The Green Party needs to wake the sleeping world to unquestionable truths about the environment and the requirements for immediate action: reducing CO2 emissions; conserving our natural environment; and developing sustainable alternatives to non-renewable energy sources.

There is a large community of socially liberal, economically conservative people with a green agenda who are not catered for by any political party.

The German Greens, who enjoy a wider support base than our "lefty liberal" Greens, are economically almost completely centrist.

The British Greens, who are a political irrelevancy (and would be even if Britain had MMP), are more left than ours.

Green politics is unique in that its values can apply across the traditional political spectrum. Environmentalism is ubiquitous, crossing social, economic and cultural boundaries, but the Greens court only a subsection of environmentalists.

Today it is a no-brainer to be an environmentalist - this was not the case 30 years ago when we were still largely ignorant of our impact on the environment.

But the Green movement has not caught up with the fact that its cause is now in the mainstream. The look, feel and indeed policy of the Green movement still looks like something from the 70s fringe.

The Green Party remains the only party that is thinking about the sort of world our children will inherit - both major parties in New Zealand pay lip service to this while offering voters instant gratification.

It is for this reason that the Green Party needs to do a better job of focusing on why it exists, and a better job of widening its support base.

We are Green and we demand a mainstream voice.

* Daniel Batten is chief executive of Auckland-based bioinformatics company Biomatters, and a member of the Thinking About Tomorrow Society.

Cities take the fight against climate change into their own hands

2005-10-05T08:00:00.000+13:00

A recent article in Nature highlights a meeting of more than 20 world cities in London to trade ideas on how to combat climate change. One of the examples of success that individual cities have already had is London's congestion tax on driving in the city centre which was introduced in 2003 and has already reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the city by 19%.

Satellite set to survey Arctic ice thickness

2005-10-04T07:58:00.000+13:00

Nature reports that a new satellite that will accurately assess the rate at which the Artic polar ice is disappearing will be launched on 8th October 2005. UK scientists hope this will be the first of numerous missions and that the resulting information will alert the world to the increasing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Green demons or Kiwi battlers fighting for our planet?

2005-10-01T21:11:00.000+12:00

In a recent Opinion piece, Simon Cunliffe does a good job of debunking the tired caricatures of the Greens. In fact I think he goes some way towards arguing for the importance of the NZ Green party's continued and increasing role in New Zealand politics. It is a refreshing perspective and I whole-heartedly agree. I think, like him, most of us have a soft spot for the planet, but at the same time get put off by the more exotic fringes of the Green party. Therefore the challenge is to ensure that in future elections the Greens are a viable mainstream party rather than a fringe party that barely makes the threshold. The only way for this to happen is for all those that agree with Simon Cunliffe's point to make their voices heard and engage the NZ Green Party.

Average temperature in Arctic has risen more than 2°C in half a century

2005-09-29T23:08:00.000+12:00

Every day it gets harder to ignore the alarmingly rapid changes to the global climate. According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment the average temperature in the Arctic has risen between 2-3 degrees Celsius over the last half a century. A CNN article entitled Warm climate transforms Alaska terrain provides us with a stark reminder of how rapidly things can change with Alaska experiencing sinking villages, record wildfires and rapidly shrinking sea ice. The question is, even with the will, can these changes be reversed?

Arctic sea ice melts to record low

2005-09-29T17:45:00.000+12:00

Even the NZ Herald has covered this story.

Marsden B will contribute to Kyoto deficit

2005-09-27T10:34:00.000+12:00

In response to yesterday's initial resource consent for Mighty River Power to recommission Marsden B, the moth-balled coal-fire power station in Whangarei, the Greens have made a press release warning that Marsden B will make it even harder for New Zealand to maintain a positive balance under the Kyoto protocol. They point out that the environmental cost of Marsden B was not considered in the resource consent process and that other greener alternatives exist. Why on Earth do the commissioners think refurbishing a dirty out-dated coal-fired power station is a good idea?

Marsden B is a giant leap backwards

2005-09-26T16:48:00.000+12:00

Greenpeace says that the world's greatest threat is climate change (and we agree!). If this is so, then they argue that the decision by Commissioners to allow Marsden B coal fired power station to be restarted is a huge blow to New Zealand's efforts to develop a sustainable future. If we don't lead the world down the sustainability route than we will eventually have to follow those brave enough to lead. It is just a matter of time. We strongly argue that if New Zealand leads the push for a sustainable society, it will provide great rewards for all New Zealanders. Therefore it is imperative that we ensure that Marsden B doesn't go ahead.

Election reaction

2005-09-20T09:37:00.000+12:00

Why have New Zealander's clamoured towards the right in this election? Is it just about taxes? In a guest opinion piece (Is Kiwi greatness just a façade?) in Scoop I try to understand what has happened. Is this the end of the great Kiwi tradition of being a pioneer society forging into the future? Are we now meekly following the global trends of self-interest that are occuring everywhere else in the western world? I hope not.

National ignoring climate science

2005-09-07T11:15:00.001+12:00

In June this year, the national science academies of the G8 nations, along with China, Brazil and India, published a statement asserting that the scientific evidence on climate change is now clear enough to take prompt action to reduce and mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases.

Last week I attended a science communication conference at Te Papa. Listening to National’s Paul Hutchison espouse the virtues of good science, I thought it ironic that National has decided to ignore the global scientific community. In light of the clear and widely acknowledged need for action, National’s proposal is that New Zealanders ditch the Kyoto Protocol and do less, not more, to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Hutchison’s argument was paradoxical - the evidence for climate change is inconclusive and the Kyoto Protocol is not up to the task – and, to paraphrase a late New Zealand politician with a nose for the truth, I could smell the petroleum on his breath.

Check out this for a neat review of all the parties' energy policies.

Gas-fired power station is short-sighted and environmentally unsound

2005-08-03T20:47:00.000+12:00

This is a letter to the editor of the New Zealand Herald.

What a great front page story you ran today (Tuesday 2nd August) regarding the possibility of building a gas fired power station in Auckland city to stave off our hunger pangs for electric energy. This idea is short-sighted, ethically dubious, and environmentally unsound - all in one.
It is generally acknowledged that the reserves of natural gas in this country, and petroleum deposits worldwide, are running out. Given the law of supply and demand it seems safe to assume that the spiralling prices that the shortfall in supply will engender will rapidly make this power station uneconomically expensive to fuel.
Even beyond this there should be grave concerns about this country involving itself even deeper in the reprehensible struggle for the remaining gas (and oil) that the planet has to offer. Just look at what the world is coming to, war, bombings, poverty and famine. The first justified by any means available to secure access to oil, the second in response to the first and the others largely ignored because there is no oil in the countries where these events are occurring.
New Zealand has abundant possibilities for generating energy from renewable and environmentally friendly sources, why on Earth would we go down a route towards using more fossil fuels?

- Revel Drummond is a Research Scientist at HortResearch, Mt Albert, Auckland.

New Zealand will be amongst first to levy carbon tax

2005-05-06T08:41:00.000+12:00

This is the best thing that New Zealand politicians have done since declaring the Nuclear-free zone. Kiwis are leading the way to a sustainable future. We will be one of the first countries in the world to levy a carbon tax. Carbon taxes are the most natural way to build sustainability directly into the economy by taxing a "bad" (pollution) rather than a "good" (income). Yet again New Zealand is showing huge vision in the global arena. Lets hope that the dinosaurs will follow.

Response to Listener "Global Meltdown" article

2004-12-31T22:58:00.000+13:00

Listener article implies "Make hay while the world sinks"

Earlier this year I was astonished to see that environmental issues made it to the front page of the economist and the listener. The "Hitting Home" article by the listener compelled me to buy it - but after reading it I was left puzzled. I read it again and recoiled at the fact that the article was spending a good deal of its attention looking at the short-term opportunistic benefits that would be afforded as a result of global warming. In response I wrote this - which the Listener published, and nominated as "Letter of the Week"

Rather than consulting climatologist-peers of highly respected climate scientist Peter Barrett for a second opinion on his prognosis for earth, this article places him in the company of the Hollywood entertainment industry , and then "balances" his views with non-specialists and vested-interest groups"

With all due respect to The Manufacturers and Employers Federation, they are neither scientists nor objective. Eliciting their view is like asking the Tobacco Industry whether smoking is dangerous. David Bellamy - respected ecologist? - yes, climatologist? - no.

If we have suspected bowel cancer, we see a specialist in that area. If we don't like the result, we get a second opinion from a second specialist. We don't ask the opinion of say, a gyneacologist , and an accountant. While truth may sometimes disturb us - chance of survival is increased by facing it, ie: talking to qualified experts.

"So relatively speaking, New Zealand is in a prime position to take advantage of global warming" the article says, whereas Australia are " in the shit" and Pacific Islanders are going to have drinking water supplies salinated by as early as mid-next century.

The article asks if New Zealand will be more suitable for growing Shiraz or Pinot Noir, and the effect on coastal real estate markets, while cautioning that no-one should be seen to be dancing on the graves of others.

In short, by focusing on Australia's imminent problem with global warming the article is saying there is a bad leak in their side of the boat. Then, rather than focus on our shared fate, the article speculates on a brief anomaly: the same force that sinks them first might lift our end up first - affording us for a time a fleetingly better view.

By isolating the voice of Barrett, ignoring short-term effects in a global context, and marginalizing the longitudinal effects of global warming, the article produces a favourable review of a bad Shiraz: good impression when it first hits the nose, bitter aftertaste that leaves us all gagging.