In brief
- Jacinda Ardern told the BBC at COP30 that climate action should be “straightforward” and free of politics, warning of dire effects “within five years” if the world fails to act.
- Ian Wishart argues Ardern’s certainty ignores historical data showing extreme weather long predates CO2 rises.
- He cites records from 1893, 1935 and beyond to show similar or worse natural events occurred before modern emissions.
- Wishart concludes that extreme weather has always been a threat but CO2’s role remains disputed.
Ardern – tipped as a probable candidate for the UN’s top job in the new unauthorised biography, Jacinda: The Untold Stories – was being interviewed by BBC’s Ione Wells at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, when she was asked about how to get urgency across as a leader in the face of public backlash:
“I think we’ve got to ask ourselves how we came to the point where something that is about the preservation of our planet for the next generation – how did that end up becoming so political? Because this really is, it should, in many ways, be a very straightforward question.
“You know, if immediately, within the next five years, someone said that without significant change, you run the risk of losing huge parts of our ecosystem, wildfires, tropical cyclones that will take many people’s lives, that a planet that’s so warm that people will die from this from heat if that presented itself with immediacy, then maybe we would be hearing different debates.
“But that is, that is actually the consequence of indecision and inaction. There should be no politics in that.”
Isn’t the key phrase there “if someone said”? How about if that person was Chicken Little of “The Sky is Falling” fame? How about if someone else disagreed? How about examining evidence and allowing or even encouraging debate instead of continuing to preach that you know best?
Buried in Jacinda’s certainty is the notion that CO2 has powers heretofore not observed in the actual results, and it’s going to suddenly escalate temperatures or bad weather within five years (implicit in the dog-whistle, even when prefaced with an ‘If”). Historical data show temperatures have been rising for more than 300 years, long before CO2 was a latecomer to the party.
Ardern talks as if extreme weather is a new phenomenon. She seems to embrace what the climate industrial complex is feeding her, perhaps because she doesn’t have enough knowledge of the science and the data.
The process is gradual, not sudden, and no amount of political climate scaremongering is going to change that. On every metric – tropical cyclones, heatwaves, floods, wildfires – New Zealand has its most extreme examples in our low-carbon past.
Yes, there will be extremes. There have always been, with many of them long before the current climate religion. For instance, back in February 1935, the New Zealand city of Hamilton experienced its hottest 10-day stretch in recorded history, with an average daily maximum of 32.66 °C – a staggering 4 °C hotter than what NZ climate scientists were trying to claim was a new record in February this year (2025) of 28.63 °C.
The 1935 scorcher came on the back of a marine heatwave, as did the 2025 event, but there’s no comparison. The 2025 summer even had 1 °C of a century of “global warming” baked in, but came nowhere near the 1935 extreme. If you remove the “global warming” factor, the gap makes 1935 an incendiary 5 °C hotter than 2025. And it was all natural.
But it’s not just temperature extremes. We have seen big floods overseas and here in NZ this year – surely that’s proof of climate change?
It’s not quite that simple. In 1900, the global population was only 1.6 billion, compared with 8 billion today. We now have people living in areas – often floodplains – where people didn’t live 100 years ago. We also have mass media and smartphone cameras everywhere, meaning weather event footage can go viral from virtually anywhere.
So, is our climate really more extreme now, or are we just exposed to more coverage? Take a look at the year 1893:
“The year will be memorable in the world’s annals as one of violent and destructive natural convulsions. Unusual extremes of temperature, alternate floods and droughts, with cyclones, earthquakes and other terrifying agencies intervening, have given 1893 an undesirable character. Earthquakes claimed their thousands of victims and floods their tens of thousands, while cyclones, hurricanes and tidal waves carried off tens of thousands more.
Natural Disturbances
The year opened with intense cold in the northern hemisphere. The Thames frozen, 230 vessels icebound at Hamburg, several people frozen to death in Germany—these were a few of the signs of the Arctic severity of the season. Then came the disastrous floods in Queensland [67 inches of rain (1.7m) in a cyclone over three days], involving that colony in dire distress, which was generously alleviated by public subscriptions in the other colonies and England.
“Following closely upon these floods came the commencement of the unprecedented drought in England, which lasted for fifteen weeks, and caused heavy loss to farmers. Drought was experienced, with more or less intensity, all over Europe, Canada and the United States. The French Government voted five million francs to relieve its distressed farmers. Simultaneously with the floods in the coastal districts of Queensland, there was a severe drought in the interior, which was renewed at a later stage and caused great loss of stock.
“New Zealand also had its floods, when some sixty miles (100km) of low-lying country in Hawke’s Bay was devastated and several lives lost. New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania also suffered from floods, though not so severely. The most calamitous floods of the year were in China, where over 10,000 people were drowned; in Japan, where 3700 houses were destroyed and about 1000 people lost their lives; in Guatemala, where a number of villages were submerged, and one hundred lives lost; at Toledo, in Spain, where forty persons were drowned; and in Hungary, where the overflowing of the Danube drowned many families.
“ …Cyclonic disturbances were of frequent occurrence in North America, and caused a very large aggregate loss of life and property. The most serious was one that raged on the coastline of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, resulting in thirty shipwrecks, the loss of 1700 lives and 10,000,000 dollars damage to property. A later cyclone in the Gulf of Mexico caused further loss of life, and it was followed by a tidal wave, which drowned 2000 people, mostly negroes.
“England and France were in November visited by a hurricane that wrecked 154 vessels and involved the loss of over 200 lives. At the same time, a violent snowstorm raged over Europe, accompanied by a gale. Disastrous cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, in Madagascar and in Japan; destructive storms and floods in the Transvaal; extensive bush fires in New South Wales and in Minnesota. These are but a partial catalogue of elemental ravages in a more than usually calamitous year.”
In 1893, NZ also had its share of extreme events. The Herald reported on a 975 hPa cyclone (the lower the hPa, the stronger the storm – for reference, Cyclone Bola was 980 hPa) that hammered the country. Then a second storm that left the Hutt Valley submerged from hillside to hillside. An early summer cyclone dumped 14 inches of rain and put much of Hawke’s Bay underwater, as noted.
The moral of this story? Today’s media and political leaders need to stop barking at passing cars on climate change. Yes, the world is warming. But the evidence suggests CO2 emissions are not the dominant driver of extreme weather. Extreme weather has always been a threat to humans, and the data indicate it was much more extreme in our colder past.
Does this negate the science on CO2? No, but it puts it in perspective. Some experts believe CO2 emissions are a comparatively tiny influence – just a few percentage points – on extreme weather events. Those events have been very big in the past and can be big today, with or without CO2. There’s significant debate within the UNIPCC about whether warmer temperatures lead to more rain or less rain – a recent NIWA study has found NZ is up to 4% drier now than it used to be, contradicting the media oversimplification that warmer = wetter.
Likewise, studies around the world have shown the climate is stormier and wetter when it’s colder. The IPCC says the number of big cyclones hitting NZ will not increase as the climate warms – again contradicting “climate for dummies” media and political messaging.If the media wish to regain public trust, a good first step is fact-checking a few more of those ‘truisms’ that lobbyists like Jacinda Ardern feed them. Climate change is real, but the question of whether CO2 or natural ocean cycles or other factors are the key remains under scientific debate. We need to adapt, but linking CO2 emissions to extreme events is the modern equivalent of witch-sniffing.
