The real climate crisis

For years my wife and I have walked the Taylor River pathways for exercise and the enjoyment this very unique path offers its users.

My compliments to the MDC for a job well done. However, walking the Taylor River pathways has gradually become a very nerve-wracking exercise. What happened? The cyclists also discovered the pathways as an enjoyable exercise path, and rightly so. This means that the walkers and the cyclists have to fight for space which each party feels it is their legal right to use.

The main problem is the speed differential each group of users has to cope with and this on relatively small concrete pathways. For this reason we have abandoned the pathways and moved to Pollard Park to walk. Less hazardous and more peaceful – only walkers and ducks.

I’d like to suggest to the MDC to allocate one side of the river pathway to cyclists and the opposite side for walkers. I am writing concerning Stuarts Smith’s open letter to the Minister of Education.

I feel that the decision of Minister Hipkins to review the co-location was correct in the circumstances and I applaud him for it.

MBC is a fully functioning school with no earthquake damage. Many of the buildings are fit for purpose and less than the 50-year life span which Stuart believes makes them absolute.

I have read the Ombudsman’s Report (‘‘disclosure’’) on what happened in Christchurch. I believe that the consultation in Marlborough also lacked transparency and that the information provided to the community was inadequate for them to make an informed decision. It appears to me that the Ministry of Education came to town with decisions already made.

I went through the difficult process of obtaining the Cabinet Papers concerning the Marlborough colleges using the OIA.

It took 11 months, the use of a lawyer and the intervention of the Ombudsman to obtain the papers. Nothing transparent about that.

The papers showed that Treasury did not support major redevelopment and that at least $30 million could be saved by staying on the existing sites.

The Ministry have been promoting Flexible Learning Spaces. However, at its conference last year the PPTA expressed concern about the lack of research into the effectiveness of these spaces. There is little evidence to support them.

I am looking forward to attending Stuart’s meeting and asking him why he wants to privatise state secondary education in Marlborough. In the debate around climate change or global warming there’s a lot of hot air.

Facts and logic are too often obscured by rhetoric and political double-speak.

Often there is a failure to acknowledge natural climate change is always happening.

It has done so for millions of years. For example, several million years ago, a glacier grated down the Wairau River to about the confluence with tributaries the Branch and Goulter Rivers.

The moraine from the glaciers is evident in the low mound-like hills on the Wairau River’s east and west banks.

The highway goes up and over the eastern moraine hill before descending to cross the Branch River.

The climate warmed and the glaciers retreated – an example, climate is dynamic, forever changing.

Sixteen or so million years ago in the Miocene period, Otago warmed to almost tropical temperatures. Fossil leaf deposits revealed the then presence of eucalypt forests.

George Gibbs in his brilliant book ‘‘Ghosts of Gondwana’’ (2017) wrote fossils from Central Otago that included a turtle and a small crocodile, ‘‘testify to a much warmer sub-tropical climate’’.

So 16 million years ago, temperatures warmed to sub-tropical and then later cooled – again graphic natural climate changes.

In a nutshell and/or in theory, total climate change is represented by natural climate change plus or minus climate change caused by human activities that cause emissions.

To lump natural climate change in with the human effect is distorting and exaggerating the reality.

Botanist and hydrologist the late Dr Patrick Grant was intrigued by 19th century explorer missionary William Colenso’s diary descriptions of dead trees, shingle choked stream beds and giant mountain slips in the Ruahine ranges.

Government departments and Forest and Bird attributed the erosion to wild animals such as deer and possums. Dr Grant’s research debunked that as the cause.

Instead he identified cyclic periods of dramatic natural climate change going back to 1530 as causing forest damage. During 1909-15 there were several dry years exponentially amounted to increasing drought and culminating in ‘‘the mother of all droughts’’ in 1915-16.

The series of droughts killed 100-year-old trees leaving dead spars for which wild animals were erroneously blamed. Dr Grant’s work showed climate change and extreme weather occur naturally.

In recent years, international conferences have been held to tackle climate change but they miss that basic point that climate change is and has always been happening.

From the ‘‘babble-fests’’ of conferences arose the Kyoto Protocol to deal with climate change, natural and/or man induced. The late Owen Mcshane, NBR columnist, planning consultant and confessed capitalist, said in 2003 the protocol developed out of the IPCC conference in Kyoto was ‘‘a fraud, because it is based on fraudulent assumptions, fraudulent models and fraudulent manipulations of data’’.

He concluded ‘‘this necessarily means that the Kyoto protocol itself is a fraud and that our (NZ) government is the victim of a major scam.’’

Arising from the Kyoto Protocol was carbon trading designed ‘‘to allow nations who are unable to meet their carbon emission reduction targets to purchase carbon credits under a unified regulatory framework.’’

In short, it means ‘‘wheeling and dealing’’ carbon credits. It is a free market capitalist approach to a perceived serious environmental problem. As such it won’t work.

In itself carbon credits are arguably a scam, costly to the people and only benefiting corporate gamblers aiming to reap rich profits financially.

Monocultures of pine forests are not the answer as they are environmentally detrimental in many ways, such as soil acidification, depleted streams and heavy siltation at logging time.

Whether one is a global warming disciple or denier is really immaterial. The world has an environmental crisis. New Zealand with less than 5 million people has a looming environmental crisis. And we’d all better do something to combat it. Whether it’s global warming or the big environmental picture, the major cause is people and the lack of a population policy.

The cause of the problem is people and politics. Political hot air cannot hide the reality of degraded rivers, fisheries mismanagement, air and water pollution, exploitive monocultures, raw sewage in rivers and coastlines at high rainfall times, ailing soil health and other symptoms.

It’s clear whether you believe in climate change or not, the world faces the bigger picture of declining environmental health due to human activities. The sharp reality is more people and more consumers equal more resource exploitation, demand more costly infrastructure and cause more emissions.

More, more and more – an addictive disease. The planet cannot tolerate infinite growth. It’s already at a crisis.

Tony Orman, once a town and country planner at the Marlborough County Council, is now a part-time journalist and author.