Dr Muriel Newman
nzcpr.com
In November 2017, just after being elected Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern attended an APEC meeting in Vietnam, where she asked world leaders to join New Zealand in reducing the impact of climate change. “It is my responsibility to take a lead role on climate change. My challenge to you all is to join us on that journey and leave a legacy we can all be proud of – we owe it to ourselves, our children and future generations.”
She said, “No matter how small we are we have a role to play”, as she outlined her plans to move New Zealand to a low carbon economy to uphold the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Unlike most countries, New Zealand’s carbon emissions are very low because most of our electricity is produced from renewable sources. So cows and sheep and the methane they produce became the Prime Minister’s main focus instead. This is in spite of Article 2 of the Paris Agreement which specifically prohibits countries from enacting policies that would restrict the supply of food: “This Agreement… aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change… in a manner that does not threaten food production”.
The PM says the methane targets in her Zero Carbon Bill, which require farmers to lower their emissions by 10 percent within 10 years and by up to 47 percent by 2050, came from modelling carried out by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change.
In spite of a great deal of uncertainty over the accuracy of the UN’s modelling – and huge controversy over the science of methane and whether it has any warming effect at all – the PM’s Bill will impose the harshest restrictions in the world on an industry that’s an international leader in primary production – with livestock farmers that produce almost twice the milk and meat per kilogram of emissions than the global average.
While an alternative pricing mechanism to the Emissions Trading Scheme (which was designed for heavy industry) has just been announced for agriculture, farmers were unsuccessful in persuading the Select Committee to lower the punitive methane targets in the Bill. As they stand, these targets will eventually decimate most farming operations and crush New Zealand’s major export industry.
Now, two years after the APEC meeting in Vietnam, Jacinda Ardern is planning to announce to APEC leaders in Chile next month, that New Zealand continues to lead the world by passing the first zero-carbon legislation that targets agriculture.
With New Zealand’s contribution to global man-made greenhouse gas emissions a miniscule 0.17 percent, the Prime Minister’s obsession with looking good on the world stage, comes at a serious cost to the country.
The Australian broadcaster Andrew Bolt summed it up well when he said, “instead of the truth, what now matters are people ‘wanting to seem more passionate, idealistic and holier than though” [sic] on the issue of climate change. Global warming is ‘a movement that attracts the haters and the mini totalitarians’. Ultimately, what green activists want are ‘laws to control you, laws to control the economy. Some will say, we want you to stop eating meat, and we want you to stop flying so much, and we want you to turn off the street lights’.”
To be ready for the Prime Minister’s APEC announcement the Zero Carbon Bill is having to be rushed through its final stages in Parliament.
The Environment Select Committee that is dealing with the Bill was forced to take the unusual step of meeting on Monday in order to finalise its report to Parliament. The Committee stages of the House will need to be truncated by Government MPs, so the Bill can be passed into law in time for the Prime Minister’s visit to Chile on November 14.
But while the Prime Minister’s leadership on climate change has elevated her to international stardom, she is part of an elite cabal spreading climate alarmism.
Her claims that climate change is her generation’s ‘nuclear free moment’ and that ‘the world’s in a climate emergency’, are exacerbating a deadly problem that began when the UN’s IPCC started exaggerating the danger of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, to gain more media profile and scare politicians and the public into action.
Back in 1989, the late climatologist and lead IPCC author Dr Steven Schneider, explained their problem:
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts.
“On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.
“To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
Even Michael Mann, the Penn State climatologist whose discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph was responsible for generating much of the modern-day climate alarmism, is opposed to doomsday predictions: “Unfortunately there’s some bad science behind much of the ‘doomism’. There is no need to exaggerate or misstate what the science has to say.”
Former Vice President Al Gore has admitted that the language used by the IPCC in their reports was “torqued up” in order to “get the attention of policy-makers around the world.”
But Al Gore himself is one of the worst offenders, particularly with his 2006 error-laden movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, which warned melting ice caps and rising seas would drown cities around the world, turning millions of people into climate refugees.
The exaggerated facts in Al Gore’s movie were debunked by British television producer Martin Durkin, who produced the film “The Great Global Warming Swindle” – view HERE. It labelled man-made global warming as “the biggest scam in modern times”.
But in spite of the best efforts of scientists and others to inform the public that changes to our climate are within the bounds of natural climate variability and that the forces that influence the climate such as the sun, wind, clouds, and oceans are beyond the control of mankind, extremists continue to scare people into thinking the world is going to end and there is no hope.
David Buckel, a successful 60-year-old retired gay rights lawyer from New York, was a victim.
One Saturday morning in April last year, he walked from his comfortable home in Brooklyn, to a nearby park, where he emailed a prepared statement to media decrying the lack of progress in tackling man-made global warming. He then doused himself in petrol and set fire to himself.
His suicide note said, “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide. I apologize to you for the mess.” No-one had been aware of the depth of his anguish over climate change.
Such despair is an issue of great concern to this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, Seattle based New Zealand consultant Nicholas Kerr, who explains that doctors are now seeing more and more children who are deeply troubled by the exaggerated doomsday predictions being made by global warming alarmists:
“An old childhood friend, Dr Joshua Betts, practices medicine in Australia and this year posted on Facebook about his experiences: Recently I have had a number of teenage patients break down in my consulting rooms, overcome with despair at the thought that the world will end in their lifetime. My daughter and her friends tell me how the planet is being destroyed and we are all doomed. These thoughts and beliefs feed into a vortex of anxiety and uncertainty that is crippling many young people.
“We need to protect our children, give them hope and strength for the future rather than hatred for their fellow man and contempt for science and industry. This doesn’t mean wearing rose colored glasses and putting our heads in the sand, but instead framing the issues in a rational way where the most likely outcomes are highlighted, rather than the worst case scenario of environmental Armageddon.”
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist, who has been anointed as the new messiah of the global climate change movement, is a victim of this herself.
She began suffering from depression over climate scare stories at age eight. She was diagnosed with autism and obsessive compulsive disorder. As Greta became increasingly despondent, her fixation with climate alarmism led her, by age 11, to stop talking and stop eating. She refused to go to school.
These troubles plagued her for years, and there is now a real fear, that since she has been elevated to celebrity status, other children may attempt to emulate her poor choices and actions.
Around the time when Greta started starving herself, reports emerged that a Brazilian couple, terrified by the prospect of global warming, had entered into a suicide pact, taking not only their own lives, but shooting their two year old son and 7 month old daughter as well. Miraculously, the baby survived.
Last month there were reports on social media that climate change anxiety had played a big part in the death of a 14-year-old boy from Manchester in England.
With a media ban on the reporting of suicide, it is impossible to know how many others have sunk into such depths of despair that they too have taken their own lives.
And it’s no wonder that children despair when they listen to the alarmist rhetoric that’s being regurgitated.
At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Greta Thunberg said, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire because it is.”
Then last month, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, she raged, “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction…”
History may well show that a turning point was reached, when that 16-year-old stood on the United Nations stage and snarled at the leaders of the free world. Reasonable people are now beginning to realise that climate change has become a cult led by indoctrinated children. Many are now saying enough is enough.
But while there’s a mood for people to speak out, many media outlets refuse to publish anything that challenges their Armageddon narrative.
An Italian petition, signed by 90 leading scientists and presented to their President in July is a case in point – it received almost no media coverage. The scientists explained that human-induced global warming “is an unproven hypothesis” based on inaccurate UN computer models that underestimate natural climatic variability. They say the alleged consensus of scientists who believe that humans cause global warming does not exist. And they want their President to reject any policies that pretend that humans can control the climate.
Another 500 prominent climate scientists and professionals from around the world submitted a European Climate Declaration to the Secretary-General of the United Nations last month, stating that there is no “climate emergency”. Organised by Professor Guus Berkhout of The Netherlands, their message explains “the models of climate on which international policy is founded are unfit for their purpose” and they say, “it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions of dollars on the basis of results from such immature models”.
The Zero Carbon Bill Jacinda Ardern’s Government is about to pass into New Zealand law is not based on science; it’s based on ideology – and the UN’s grossly inaccurate models.
If you want to urge MPs to vote against this Bill, their email addresses are HERE.
