Recent statements reported by NZCPR.com highlighted the band wagon that Minister James Shaw rides on
Excerpts from their newsletter of today vilify the politics at the expense of those impacted by the cyclones:
Meanwhile, some alarmists, like the Green Party’s co-leader James Shaw are making the ridiculous claim that it was man-made climate change that caused the cyclone – telling Parliament: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt as angry about the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not, because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse. There will be people who say, it’s ‘too soon’ to talk about these things, but we are standing in it right now. This is a climate change – related event. The severity of it, of course, made worse by the fact that our global temperatures have already increased by 1.1 degrees. We need to stop making excuses for inaction. We cannot put our heads in the sand. We must act now.”
He went on to say: “There will be a certain crowd who say … let’s give up on stopping climate change and its focus entirely on responding to the effects of climate change and I cannot state enough what a catastrophic mistake that would be, because every tenth of a degree of warming increases the frequency and the severity of these events.”
But he’s wrong. Just as there has been no appreciable global warming since 2016, the number of extreme weather events around the world is falling. According to Swedish climate specialist Bjorn Lomborg, 2022 was the second weakest year for hurricanes in more than forty years.
It appears that not only is Minister Shaw unaware of this information, but he also does not appear to understand the impact that last year’s eruption of the Tongan volcano is having on the weather.
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano erupted on January 15, 2022, it was the world’s largest explosion in 140 years. A 20m high wave of water travelled more than 100km from the volcano at a speed of around 500km/h. Pressure shockwaves circumnavigated the planet six times, and 400,000 lightning events were triggered that day.
The eruption not only shot volcanic ash 58 km into the earth’s stratosphere, but it also sent up 146 million tonnes of water – which NASA claimed was enough to fill 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This boosted the amount of water vapour in the southern hemisphere’s stratosphere by around 20 percent.
Water vapour, which is our most common greenhouse gas, acts by reflecting the sun’s radiation back into space, while reflecting the earth’s radiation back down to the surface of the planet.
As a result of the eruption, the vast increase in water vapour has cooled the stratosphere and warmed surface temperatures, which Australian meteorologist Rob Sharpe predicted would lead to wetter weather in many parts of his country, and what he described as a “Flooded Summer”.
This, of course, is similar to what much of New Zealand has also experienced.
In fact, a new international study has now been launched to further investigate the link between the Tongan volcano and Cyclone Gabrielle.
While Minister Shaw has been politicising the crisis to imply that mankind caused the cyclone and promote climate change scaremongering, this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator Barry Brill, the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and a former Minister, believes it is time the whole zero carbon agenda was abandoned since the goals have now been largely met:
Meantime we see on television biodigestors that generate methane from food waste. These plants in the pilot stage here in New Zealand exist en masse in Europe and the USA.
We are told by the promoters that a number of plants fed by food thrown away, often in landfills, would be used to produce all of New Zealand’s domestic gas supply and 75% of industrial needs. All reticulated using an existing network.
Why are we not hearing this from Minister Shaw? And why are we not seeing large scale Government backing behind this German technology?
Posted by eitg 
GHG Emissions Trading 