North must accelerate shift to clean energy
Every six or seven years, the United Nations produces a climate report through the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), which involves the best climate scientists on the planet, to co-operate and distil the information into a single report, and they have just published the second part of the sixth report.
This second part deals with the human impacts of adaption, vulnerability, ecosystems and human society. This is perhaps the most interesting section as it deals with the impacts on people and the environment.
The best scenario, which is to limit temperature rise to 1.5C, requires a reduction of 45 per cent in burning fossil fuels by 2030. The chances of that are almost zero so we need to be prepared for somewhere between +2C and +3C, and the reading is not good. Reports blithely talk of a 3C temperature rise but most of our native trees will not survive such an increase, and I hate to think of a countryside with dead trees, especially with massive forest fires.
The report is firm on a 600mm (1 metre in New Zealand) sea level rise unless, due to circumstances in Greenland and West Antarctica that are currently not properly understood, it gets considerably worse
There is a similar situation with the temperature where there are firm predictions, with the exception of methane emissions from the Siberian seabed and permafrost regions, where the science is not understood and therefore it is not included.
New Zealand scientists are heavily involved in climate research and have upgraded their predictions to reflect the new reality and the warnings are becoming much starker.
In Northland we have some advantage of a maritime climate, which limits the extremes of temperature, but we do not escape the problems.
A sea level rise of 1 metre would almost cut off the North at Auckland and flood Auckland Airport, the road through Kaeo would be permanently flooded, waterfronts such as Paihia would flood frequently and the wetland area around Kaitaia would be permanently flooded with saltwater.
A rise in temperature of 2.5C would bring severe droughts to Northland, which already can barely cope with a dry summer and the tragedy would be the forest fires, which would be many times worse than today. The loss of native wildlife would be immense and would reverse much of the hard work done with restoration.
Interspersed with the heat and drought would be massive tropical storms, which would bring floods, slips, erosion and high winds that would damage our infrastructure, cutting our roads and flooding our bays with silt.
The water temperature around our coasts has risen 6C already this past summer and further increases would severely damage our fish stocks. We will also suffer ocean acidity, which stops shellfish breeding successfully.
It’s not a good outlook, and that makes it all the more urgent to convert our economy to clean renewable energy and to stop burning fossil fuels.