Is climate change going away?
Recent decisions by the government might easily make you think everything’s fine and we have nothing to worry about.
It has halved our targets for reducing methane emissions, a major and dangerous contributor to global warming and removed any obligation on businesses worth less than $1 billion to report on their plans to reduce their carbon emissions. These are measures that might sensibly be taken if the human race had climate change under control and we were on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Unfortunately, that is not the reality. The reality lies in the alarmingly high temperatures experienced during the northern-hemisphere summer and our own recent wind events causing billions of dollars in damage.
In fact, the latest research findings tell us that the rate of climate change is accelerating, and that the planet is on track to becoming uninhabitable for humans.
As a species we have failed to curb our greenhouse gas emissions, even though science has told us for 80 years that they are destroying our only home.
We are now triggering tipping points in nature’s own processes: thawing the tundra is releasing huge amounts of methane, the melting of the Greenland glaciers is starting to alter the sea-currents and temperatures throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon rainforest, formerly known as "the lungs of the planet", is on its way to becoming a savannah. At this rate, the temperature rise will be unstoppable.
So why is the government stepping back from addressing this? There are several reasons.
Winston Peters and David Seymour hover on the edge of climate scepticism and have been allowed an influence on government decision-making far in excess of their support among the population.
Many in the farming community see curbing emissions as a threat to their wellbeing and way of life; the National party has traditionally been the party of the farmers.
Conspiracy theorists have spread the idea that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by thousands of scientists in the pay of a cabal of the super-rich, an imaginative but totally impractical fiction which serves the goals of the fossil-fuel industry and enables those who believe it to avoid doing anything.
Peters and Seymour also argue that we are such a small country we won’t have any effect on rising temperatures, so we needn’t bother. We should quit the UN’s attempts to save the planet and us.
The irony here is that it is economic policies and actions based on growth that have caused and are continuing to cause climate change. Growing our economy will not reduce global warming by a thousandth of a degree. We’re on the wrong side of the equation.
Seymour wants us to put our meagre efforts not into mitigation — reducing our emissions — but into adaptation — dealing with the consequences of climate change.
What are those consequences? On our current pathway worldwide the global average temperature will reach 3⁰C higher than pre-industrial levels by the end of the century if not before. Around the same time the sea level will have risen by up to 2m, possibly more.
This doesn’t mean that nothing will happen between now and 2100: on the contrary, the sea and the temperature will be rising every year between now and then.
The figures represent not the maximum temperature to be reached in 2100 but the average.
We can expect the summers to be much hotter than that. A 3⁰C average temperature increase means the world will be very different from today’s world.
According to the World Bank, "ecosystems and human societies are not adapted to a 3⁰C world". Nor is our current economy.
We are dependent on exports and imports, that is, on markets overseas who will buy our products and on producers overseas who will ship to us the things we need, but ever-increasing temperatures will undermine all of that.
At home our entire agricultural sector, including our major exporters the meat industry, the horticulture industry and the wine industry, will be gradually and drastically transformed by climate change. Dairy farming may only become possible in Southland.
Overseas, our markets will not exist in the same form, as Europe, China and the Americas all experience economic and social turmoil if not collapse.
We won’t be able to import many of the things we need — spare parts for our trains and our electric power systems, our technological devices, our vehicles, any food we don’t grow ourselves.
Life will be very different — for all of us.
The question the government should be asking is this: how can we ensure the long-term survival of Aotearoa New Zealand and its citizens (including our farmers) in a world of runaway climate change?
Obviously we should be doing everything we can to help stop the runaway, but we should also be starting a transition from the old economic models to ones necessary for our future.
Nothing else matters more.
• John Drummond is an emeritus Professor, University of Otago.
