OPINION
Ron Scott
Ron Scott is an elected member of the Bay of Plenty Regional Council and therefore clearly the views in this article do not represent that of the Council.
He is an economist and also holds a BA majoring in History and Geography with papers in Calculus, Algebra, Politics and English Literature thrown in for fun.
His day job is teaching strategy and governance to Board Directors and Trustees.
Look at the comparison of rainfall between 2023 and the thirty-year average. It was a bad first half -and then about average.
Last January we had over 130 mm more than this year. That’s almost four times more than normal. This year we are back to normality.
A year ago, the media was fuelling the sense of climate crisis. All this extra rain was proof of climate change they said (see below).
The 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haapai eruption is estimated to have increased total global atmospheric water vapour by 15-20%. Blind Freddy could see, of course, that this water vapour had to land somewhere at some time. It unfortunately landed on Auckland and the East Coast of the North Island a year later.
But that doesn’t meet the needs of the alarmists who insist that the climate is changing mainly due to human activity. If there weren’t thousands of private jets lined up at the conference junkets I might be more willing to believe they are serious.
Now that we are back to normal, watch out for the media to say that a warm day is evidence of a climate crisis.
News Reports at the Time
Climate scientist Dr Kevin Trenberth, an honorary academic in the physics department at the University of Auckland, said there was a climate change aspect to the heavy rain, related to unusually warm sea temperatures.
And of course, behind it all, the increasingly influential elephant in the room that is global climate change.
Climate change is exacerbating the wet setup, as a freight train of rainmaking systems from the tropical western Pacific draws on unusually high sea surface temperatures (up to six degrees Celsius or 11 degrees Fahrenheit above average near the South Island) associated with a marine heat wave. Intensified short-term rains and warming oceans are two of the most clearly established effects of a human-warmed planet.
Of course, it was all over hyped.