With climate change, after the event will be far too late
We are told we are facing a climate crisis yet all we get is talk - about instruments, commitments, principles, protocols, green light shows, parasols for the planet, carbon emission credit cards for individuals and other examples of technowizardry. Action is mostly absent and many, including the young people that call their group Extinction Rebellion, are asking why (‘‘Students Set To Strike Again’’, Aug 13).
One of the issues I believe is risk perception. Risk managers need information about specific threats to specific places over a specific period of time, preferably brief. Preparing for an event that may happen in an indeterminate time in the future is still seen as an unnecessary cost, to the economy, and to business. It’s all too theoretical for that global abstraction known as the market.
As a result response to risk tends to be reactive – witness the Christchurch rebuild involving robust earthquake-strengthening after the event. But in the case of climate change, ’after the event’ will be too late. Ian Badger, Christchurch Central
Contingency plans
Global warming or climate change, whatever you want to call it, is creeping and as inevitable as the incoming tide creeps in.
And like the tide all the demonstrations, clockwork cars, banning mining, banning drilling for oil and gas or stopping cows from peeing will not make one iota of difference with our tiny by world standard four million population, which is the equivalent of a large town in the rest of the world. This means that the demand to ban this, that and the other simply became expensive grandiose gestures. The steel will still be made with coal sourced from somewhere else, the oil will still be drilled for somewhere else. We still need the steel and rumour has it we are importing coal from Indonesia to run the power station at Huntly? And the jobs and profits that could have been here go elsewhere.
I am 88 years old, so I doubt if climate change will affect me very much, so I ask our younger people, please direct your energy and ingenuity into making contingency plans to combat the result of sea levels rising and the changes that may come with the warmer climate.
You are the people who will have to find the answers and the way to live with it. To save some of the water that falls as rain instead of dumping down the drain and combating the droughts that may come. You will have to look for the new routes to replace existing roads and rail that hug the coast and may be swallowed up by the sea. I may have to live to be 100 so that I can watch all these wonders happening? D Upton, Mairehau