Ardern’s Big Lie – There Is No (Climate) Emergency

Prelude:

Wikipedia tells us:  “It is verified that Goebbels did put forth a theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression “big lie”. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler’s first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: “From Churchill’s Lie Factory”) was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Paul Joseph Goebbels

On Wednesday, Parliament voted in favour of this motion by the Prime Minister, Right Hon Jacinda Ardern:

That this House

• declare a climate emergency, following the finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, to avoid a more than 1.5°C rise in global warming, global emissions would need to fall by around 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net-zero by around 2050;
• recognise the advocacy of New Zealanders in calling for action to protect the environment and reduce the impact of human activity on the climate;
• join the over 1,800 jurisdictions in 32 countries to declare a climate emergency and commit to reducing emissions to avoid a more than 1.5°C rise in global warming;
• recognise the devastating impact that volatile and extreme weather will have on New Zealand and the wellbeing of New Zealanders, on our primary industries, water availability, and public health, through flooding, sea-level rise, and wildfire damage;
• note that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, that the Government has made significant progress on meeting that challenge through the Paris Agreement and the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019, and that New Zealand has committed to taking urgent action on greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation;
• acknowledge the core tenets of New Zealand’s response by establishing emissions budgets that set us on a path to net-zero by 2050, setting a price on emissions through the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, transitioning to a low-carbon economy and planning for climate adaption;
• implement the policies required to meet the targets in the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019, and to increase support for striving towards 100 percent renewable electricity generation, low carbon energy, and transport systems;
• seize the economic opportunities that a clean, green reputation provides;
• create green jobs in the low-carbon economy while managing risks for workers and communities currently reliant on carbon-intensive sectors;
• recognise the alarming trend in species decline and global biodiversity crisis, including the decline in Aotearoa’s indigenous biodiversity, and acknowledge New Zealand’s strategic framework for the protection and restoration of biodiversity Te Mana o te Taiao;
• note that the Government will take further steps towards reducing and eliminating waste; and
• show leadership and demonstrate what is possible to other sectors of the New Zealand economy by reducing the Government’s own emissions and becoming a carbon-neutral Government by 2025.

The motion was supported by Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party, and opposed by National and ACT.

In summary, it is nothing but a big lie by Ms Ardern, in demonstrating her adherence to the principles espoused by Adolf Hitler’s spin doctor Joseph Goebbels. Worse still was the failure by a single MP of any party to challenge the alleged “emergency” aspect of the lie.

We reminded National MPs on Tuesday that one of the original New Zealand propagators of climate alarmism, Dr Jim Salinger, was reported in the New Zealand Herald four days ago:

Scientists have just pieced together 150 years of New Zealand climate history, revealing cool spells driven by volcanic eruptions – and the growing handprint of climate change. A team of researchers have compared land temperatures recorded around the country between 1871 and 2019 with surrounding ocean surface data, finding our wider region has warmed by about 0.66C over that time.

NZ Herald

Reflect on that: 0.66 degrees C over 150 years. Hardly an “emergency”!  Especially when you consider that last Saturday, in Auckland, the temperature jumped from 17C to 19 C between 9 a.m. and 12 noon, three times as much, and no one cried “emergency”.

In fact, look at this graph of Auckland temperature movements for the past 11 years:

Again, where’s the “emergency”?

Why the rush, especially when Climate Chance Minister James Shaw admitted to Parliament on Wednesday that he does not expect a response from the Climate Change Commission on the recommended level of the “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) mandated under the Paris Climate Accord until May of next year?

What was really disappointing was that instead of challenging the notion of  “emergency” for which there is absolutely no evidence (thus rendering the Notice of Motion as nothing more than the virtue signalling for which Ms Ardern is fast becoming notorious), the National Party’s new spokesman on climate change, Stuart Smith, MP for Kaikoura, chose to concentrate on the country’s poor performance in lowering “emissions”, a topic which reflects the extent to which it seems everyone in our Parliament confirms their ignorance of the realities of climate behaviour.

This ignorance they share with most so-called journalists and TV programmers, certainly with the scaremongering alarmists, for whom “emissions” has become as dirty a word as carbon.

In the case of carbon, as in “Carbon Zero” they never specify which carbon compound they are talking about. They don’t mean diamonds, or the carbon black in printers ink, or the carbon fibre that adds strength to aircraft. Is it too much to ask that if they mean the trace gas Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) they should say so?

How many of them understand the vital necessity for CO₂ as a key factor in the photosynthesis on which we rely for the ripening of our grapes and other fruits, or for the fertilising of our green plants? How many bother to acknowledge that since the advent of satellite recording of global climate in 1979 we have been able to observe and record a 7 per cent reduction in desert wastes and reversion to greening, or 15 per cent increase of crop yields, in both cases attributable to the increase of CO₂ in our atmosphere to 415 parts per million (ppm) – a measly 0.0415 per cent of the total atmosphere – of which 392 ppm are entirely natural from volcanoes and ocean out-gassing over which we have not one iota of human control.

And true to form on TV One, the 6pm news bulletin opened with a report of the passing of the “climate emergency” motion with presenter Wendy Petrie backed by an image of three factory chimneys spewing into the air large volumes of steam and smoke, which any third form science student could tell you could not be carbon dioxide because that CO₂ is colourless and odourless.

Over the years since 2006 when I was inspired by the late (and much-lamented) Professor Augie Auer to form the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, we have asked experts such as the Royal Society in UK, the UN IPCC, Royal Society of New Zealand, NIWA,  Prime Ministerial Chief Science Advisers, Professor James Renwick and others for evidence that CO₂ causes any more warming than has occurred naturally for centuries (if not millennia). In every case, they have been either unable, refused to answer, or referred us to computer projections by the IPCC.

But we’ll go on asking for that evidence, which ought to be a prior obligation on MPs before they presume to insult our intelligence with claims of a non-existent “climate emergency”.

We can only wonder what socialist Ms Ardern’s hidden agenda is in promoting alarmism about a “climate emergency” at this time.

Meantime, for readers of The BFD who may want to know more about the lack of any need for emergency action have a read of these.

Clintel – “There is no Climate Emergency”

NZ Climate Science Coalition: Professor Geoff Duffy. Climate Emergency! Where?

A paper by Professor Geoff … by Juana Atkins

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