‘There is no reason for this level of (cyclone) hysteria’
As Gabrielle loomed, some were sceptical, others said New Zealand had become ‘soft’. And the anti-lockdown faction has found a new platform – climate. Charlie Mitchell reports. .
‘‘Kate, I’m in Tauranga. What cyclone?’’ On Monday morning, as Cyclone Gabrielle churned over Northland and the Coromandel on its path southeast, the topic of the morning on Newstalk ZB was the overreaction.
‘‘People contacted me from Napier saying some schools were shut there,’’ broadcaster Kate Hawkesby said on her early morning show, after reading the message from Tauranga.
‘‘I just wonder what’s happened to us as a country that we’ve become this paranoid and this soft.’’
Soon afterwards, Mike Hosking weighed in: ‘‘What we’ve done is whip ourselves into this extraordinary frenzy,’’ he said, wondering why libraries were closed and trains weren’t operating.
‘‘There is no reason for this level of hysteria’’.
(Both acknowledged that they might be proven wrong if the cyclone proved to be devastating, and both interviewed experts about the situation, who gave valuable information to listeners).
Throughout the day, while the station’s news bulletins increasingly warned of the incoming weather, hosts and callers continued to wonder if the warnings were overhyped.
‘‘Kids aren’t that soft that they need to be kept wrapped up in cotton wool or kept under an umbrella all day because it’s a little bit rainy,’’ one caller said.
While cyclone scepticism was rife on talkback radio, a more serious strain of cyclone denial was displayed online.
On Sunday morning, one prominent conspiracy theorist posted a video of himself flying a kite with the caption: ‘‘The Far North right now in this so-called ‘Cyclone of the Century’. They hoped that influencing us into fear would make it worse.’’
That same day, a post by Ken Ring – who claims to forecast both the weather and earthquakes based on lunar cycles – describing the cyclone as a ‘‘fizzer’’ was shared widely (both were posted long before the cyclone hit).
‘‘It’s just the fake news doing their usual stuff,’’ said one of the dozens of comments downplaying the threat of the cyclone.
‘‘Fearmongering [and] controlling the people.’’
As the scepticism of Sunday and Monday collided with reality – devastation and death – it is a less tangible sting in the storm’s tail that may linger: The divisions of Covid-19 are still with us, and now they apply to the weather.
The cyclone-sceptics made familiar arguments. Experts overstating the threat; the media trying to instil fear; we can’t put our lives and the economy on hold.
However one felt about those arguments when applied to the coronavirus pandemic, that they were seamlessly transferred to a cyclone – a hulking, unmanageable natural disaster that occupies physical space – should give cause for concern.
Cyclones are difficult to track with precision. Parts of Auckland were not badly hit on Monday because the system slowed over Coromandel and north Auckland before it bounced east.
Like the pandemic, where crude scenario modelling was mistaken for prediction, scientific uncertainty about the cyclone’s exact path was difficult to communicate.
The messengers of that uncertainty – weather forecasters and Civil Defence officials, via the mainstream media – were either criticised for their inexactitude or accused of fearmongering, even though they were broadly correct.
It was clear on Monday morning that, even if it wouldn’t directly hit central Auckland, the cyclone would hit somewhere in the eastern North Island, and it would do so viciously, including in places that contained schools and other public buildings.
Earlier in the pandemic, speculation about the consequences was sometimes dismissed as fearmongering. On Monday, some commentators talked about the cyclone in almost identical terms.
‘‘It’s all this fearmongering,’’ one Newstalk ZB host said. ‘‘It’s no wonder we’ve got an anxiety problem in this country – we promote it. We promote anxiety by living in this fear-fuelled environment.’’
The influence of Covid-19 on the reaction to cyclone preparations were, in some cases, explicit.
‘‘What message does this send to our children?’’ another Newstalk ZB host said in response to the school closures on Monday morning ahead of the cyclone.
‘‘Yet again, their education must be sacrificed for the greater good, be it Covid, be it floods, be it cyclones – there are greater priorities than education. And we’ve seen the result of that.’’
Later, they continued with the link to Covid. ‘‘One of the biggest impacts of Covid has been this utter dependence and reliance on others to manage our lives for us
. . . ’’
These comparisons were even more explicit online, where the term ‘‘climate lockdowns’’ became a common shorthand for the school closures. Some who were vocally opposed to vaccination and other pandemic response measures are transitioning their messaging to climate change denial.
A few years ago, it was unlikely talkback radio – on the day of the worst cyclone to hit the country in more than three decades – would have been preoccupied with schools closing for the day. On social media, normal precautions would not have been cast as totalitarian over-reach. Both are inseparable from the fierce debates over Covid-19 and the divisions they fostered.
In public health, it’s sometimes noted that success is difficult to quantify: The people who didn’t die from a disease thanks to public health measures are usually unaware of that fact.
The same is true in disaster preparedness. The death and destruction avoided by people heeding the warnings ahead of Cyclone Gabrielle are unknowable. We can’t tally the lives saved by early and vigorous warnings about the cyclone.
What we do know is that cyclones are not pandemics, and as long as the divisions of Covid19 remain with us, the more likely it will be that any looming threat – even one as brutally tangible as a cyclone – becomes another proxy battle in a war that will never end.
Newstalk ZB declined to comment.