OPINION
Students will take to the streets on April 5 in Christchurch, Auckland, Dunedin and Hamilton (I’ve spared you the Maori names) aided by free nationwide news coverage provided well in advance.
“…biggest protest yet…” is embedded in the headline promising something that hasn’t happened yet and includes video footage with a woman crying into the camera “there’ve been really big floods in Germany with people floating down the river dead…” Between 12 and 15 July 2021 more than 182 mm (7.2 in) fell in 72 hours in some areas breaking through stop banks and causing heavy flooding in Germany and Belgium .
Media bashing the coalition government dovetails nicely into media mobilisation of students encouraged to pick a protest or two:
- The coalition government’s “climate butchering” policies;
- Count international emissions;
- Restore the ban on offshore oil and gas drilling;
- The possible treaty referendum;
- The racist action of abolishing the Maori Health Authority;
- Allowing live exports to resume;
- Free Palestine;
- Expel the Israeli ambassador;
- Withdraw NZ forces in Yemen (there aren’t any); and
- Lower the voting age to 16.
This one-size-fits-all protest accommodates students to tailor their own protest, for instance, discontinued school lunches. School Strike for Climate’s Christchurch arm says the aim is to pressure national and local government to “bring about action on intersectional climate and social justice issues in Aotearoa”.
Pity about the bad science underpinning the climate change cherry on top.
Barry Brill writing for the NZ Centre for Political Research points out the fragility of climate change legislation, including the tendency of public servants to “grossly over-state risks and persistently regulate for gold-plated specifications.”
Ministry for the Environment’s “Guidelines” (read ‘rules’) for Rolls-Royce-standard resilience against the possible future impacts of climate change. Here are a few of them:
Coastal hazards and climate change
Long-term insights briefing 2023
Our atmosphere and climate
Atmosphere and climate indicators 2023
NZ Climate Change Projections.
Interim guidance on sea level projections
Preparing for coastal change.
Planning for coastal adaptation
National climate change risk assessment National Adaptation Plan
The problem? Every one of these key documents is seriously misleading and provably wrong.
Not one of them attempts to assess the actual likelihood of the threats that they assume to lurk in our future. Unbelievably, they treat 1% risks and 70% risks as if they were identical.
Tailrisk Economics has published a scathing review of the National Climate Change Risk Assessment 2020., which found the average evidence quality score to be a scandalously low 3.09 out of 10. In another post, Ian Harrison calls it “A Case of Science Denial”.
The pervasive errors are not random – they all grossly overstate the forecast impacts of guesses regarding future extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts and storms. And then they accumulate these relentlessly over many decades into the future, without any regard to technology and policy changes over time.
These systemic exaggerations translate into hundreds of millions of wasted spending of scarce ratepayer/taxpayer dollars in every region.
NZCPR (emphasis n text is mine)