Written By: - Date published: 5:14 pm, December 9th, 2008 - 55 comments
Categories: climate change, national/act government -
Tags: ets, Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide on National and ACT’s select committee into the ETS:
“I am especially pleased to see that the issue of the scientific and trade implications will be considered alongside the impacts on the economy.
“There is definitely not a monolithic view on the fact of human induced climate change and I welcome this government’s willingness to hear from scientists and others who are sceptics. I have to say I am one and it is appalling that the previous government accepted human induced climate change as a new religion with former US vice- president Al Gore as its prophet.”
Hear that? It’s the sound of our international credibility going down the gurgler.
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Please source statements made by people.
*repeatedly bashes head against wall*
It’s possibly Hansard, gc, which won’t have been published yet
Cringe… I think Leighton Smith might be his environmental adviser. Nice to see we are going back to being 20 years behind the rest of world scientific opinion. Think I will start wearing my stubbies again.
gc, I got it from an offline newswire service. I’ll source it later when it goes up on Scoop.
Guys a fucking clown…
So have I got this correct, it’s cold in winter because there is less CO2 in the air during winter? The angle of the planets axis and the amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth because of the tilt has nothing to do with it. [noone is claiming that seasons are caused by carbon dioxide. You're sailing pretty close to that ban for being too dumb again, burt. SP]
Likewise it’s warmer in summer because there is more CO2 in the air during summer?
I’m not decided either way on AGW. One thing I do know is that humans have massive ego’s and like to think they are in control or can control something as massive as the climate on earth.
Personally I think the sun spot activity has a lot more to do with global warming than the Al Gore deciples want to know about.
However all of this will be resolved in the next 10 or so years as the sun spot cycle is declining at the moment and expected to decline more over the next few years.
Given the last 2 years have seen a slight decrease in global average temperatures and have also seen a decrease in sun spot activity I think it’s foolish to jump on the religious band wagon of socialist command & control via ETS taxation scheemes.
I do wonder if the possibility that the current decline in sun spot activity is a driver for urgent introduction of ETS legislation, get it in before it’s proven we don’t need it then we can all pat ourselves on the back when it’s suddenly “proven” to be working as “Pastor Al Gore” said it would.
“It’s the sound of our international credibility going down the gurgler.”
What international credibility? If you mean Helen Clark and her labour government, you need to wake up: they are no longer in power.
[lprent: I really have to finish that banning plugin. Your two weeks are long up and I haven't pulled you out of moderation yet. Rectifying]
Wow, burt.
Have you ever, ever heard anyone suggest that the seasons are caused by c02?
Where did you pull that one out of, genius? Are you on the pipe again?
Or is this your noble attempt to give Wodney someone to be less retarded than?
burt, this headline will excite you, but look at the graph…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather?commentpage=1
burt: I’m not decided either way on AGW. One thing I do know is that humans have massive ego’s and like to think they are in control or can control something as massive as the climate on earth.
With apologies to David Hume, is it more absurd that some humans consider we can by our actions change the temperature of our biosphere (and have a huge volume of evidence to support this thesis), or that some consider that we are so puny and insignificant that no matter what we do we couldn’t possibly affect something so grand and mighty (and have precious little evidence to this conclusion)?
L
Isn’t the biggest issue that (assuming AGW is true) all current approaches including ETS and Kyoto will not make a difference?
There are two other blocks – there is sufficient concern about the current AGW model to not make a quadrillion $ bet – and even if it’s true China and India are not going to play ball – never mind the yanks – so it’s all an intellectual masturbation exercise.
pk: Isn’t the biggest issue that (assuming AGW is true) all current approaches including ETS and Kyoto will not make a difference?
To an extent this is counterfactual, since it’s unknowable whether they will or won’t until schemes are implemented and bedded in – and none yet are. It’s truue that the EU scheme isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. However, the general principle holds – make something cost more and people will tend to prefer other less-costly options.
even if it’s true China and India are not going to play ball – never mind the yanks
If in the long term they want favourable trade terms, access to technologies and expertise and other soft-power sorts of alliances with the EU they will. And that argument is irrelevant in NZ’s case, since – whether those countries participate or not, our current trade partners do, and they’re just gagging for an excuse to slap tariffs on our premium products – not to mention our methane-producing dairy industry.
L
Burt reminds me of those penguins clustering at the waters edge and none of them wants to be first in in case….
Wouldn’t any move to clean and green the planet be in every living things benefit?
What will Rodney say to those Pacific nations literally trying to keep their heads above water? They are becoming an increasingly vocal lobby.
.
Janet: Sink those annoying Pacific islands, then all the displaced islanders will come here and work for minimum wage on 89-day rolling contracts!
L
SP
Too dumb… So have I got this right, the temperature change in the seasons is directly a result of the amount of solar energy landing on the surface of the planet. The tilt in the planets axis being the reason for higher sun exposure during summer and lower sun exposure during winter. Sun spots have a direct effect on the amount of energy reaching the planet from the sun and also effect the formation of clouds. The seasons prove the amount of energy reaching the planet from the sun effects temperature.
However relative increases in solar energy during periods of high solar activity and decreases during period of low solar activity have nothing to do with the temperature on earth. Ummm….
If you know much about radio transmission problems (which are well documented in relation to solar cycles and fluctuations) you would know that solar activity is anything but constant over time.
Here is some info on solar variations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
This bit is interesting.
And the latest theory (Al Gore’s religious following) is suddenly accurate and explains everything that has never been explained before and we need to introduce taxes to change behaviours and stop the effects that mighty humans are having. Oh yeah….
Janet
Do these same people plan to lobby NZ to pass laws that will halt the movement of tectonic plates as well ?
Land masses have been moving, sinking, lifting, bending, separating, overlapping etc for some time now.
I don’t know how else to tell you this… Earth didn’t came with a “stay exactly the same forever” guarantee.
burt: The problem is not with the amount of energy reaching earth. That doesn’t change on any appreciable time scale (ie more than decades, less than millions of years). Over the past million years and next million years, the suns energy varies but within a limited range (ie our star is mildly variable) and out orbit does not change except fractionally. Remember climate change from greenhouse effect sis going to measured in decades at worst, and in less than hundred years at best.
What we have is an insulation problem. After energy arrives inside the atmosphere, more of it is retained locally, and less radiated to space. The reason that this happens is that CO2, CH4, and other things are far more efficient at ‘scattering’ the energy down to infrared levels. This is exactly what happens in greenhouses with the glass after visible light enters, but the IR from scatter on plants and the ground doesn’t leave.
Radiation at that level is also less likely to get out of the atmosphere. So in effect there is a change in the energy receipt / energy escape ratio out of the atmosphere. In other words the entropy of the radiation will be reduced in a shorter distance in the atmosphere than it was previously.
In the long term that means a new balance will happen at the current greenhouse gas levels (with the consequent effects on reflection). If the levels keep rising, then eventually it’d we’d wind up at a balance somewhere well above what it is now and below that of Venus (because the insolation at our orbit is less).
At some point it is unlikely that human civilisation will be unable to cope, and I’d expect that a lower rather than higher levels based on examples in history.
So the things you’re arguing about are completely irrelevant to the discussion – for intents and purposes over a decade long time scale, they are a steady-state. I’m pretty sure you know all this, which means that all you’re trying to do is obstrufication.
ianmac
Given that greenhouse produce growers (and hydroponics growers) increase CO2 loading in these closed environments to increase plant growth – arguably the best way to green the planet is to increase atmospheric CO2 levels.
Here is a link with some interesting info about CO2 levels and plant growth.
Carbon Dioxide In Greenhouses
So while we tax people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse growers are deliberately cranking the stuff out to increase crop production.
The things we do eh…. But I do agree we should all do our bit to minimise our pollution footprint, I’m just not convinced that “Pastor Al Gore” is the prophet we should be following at this stage.
burt: For your tectonic plate one. Looks like you’re just screwing around. Tell me the time scales for major tectonic movements. Is it centuries? Thousands of years? More?
If you want to be a dickhead with spurious arguments, why not expend some effort and find some credible arguments.
Or are you running an education campaign to demonstrate stupid arguments?
Burt
Watch out for the hungry polar bears losing their homes thanks to human ignorance and greed. They might be coming your way.
burt:
People using greenhouses are growing plants, which breathe CO2. The more of it that they have the faster they will grow.
People using green houses suppress animals which excrete CO2 because they eat plants.
Adding CO2 seems like a reasonable idea if you want to grow more plants.
Any other stupid arguments you want to use?
burt: You’re being wilfully stupid. `Pastor Al Gore’ isn’t the lead for this – it’s the IPCC, and quite frankly, if you believe the skeptics over the IPCC then you no longer believe in science.
Come on, you’re better than this – I’ve seen evidence in your previous posts here and elsewhere. Stop wasting your time and our time pretending to be scientifically illiterate.
L
lprent
That varies lprent. Large areas of Napier were swamp pre 1930. The “big” earthquake lifted that in about a minute. Same for large areas of Wellington Airport Kilbernie etc. Sea levels have never been constant, shells are observable in soils thousands of meters above current sea level and historic sea level plains are observable in many coastlines.
I’m not being deliberately difficult here, I’m just pointing out that life on earth is pretty random. Things happen pretty quickly some times and it’s not always predictable or avoidable.
So which is it, burt? Are you being willfully stupid (a jerk) or genuinely stupid (stupid)?
I’m guessing it’s a bit of both based on your past behaviour.
burt: I know this – the joys of doing a earth science degree are that you get a morbid curiosity. With change – it is a question of time scales against the timescales of human societies.
Most earth changes happen in a minimum of thousands of years for anything significant. Meter level changes locally don’t affect globally. Even something like the deccan traps with its consistent outpouring of gases like CO2 took at least thousands of years to cause global effects.
The difference is where you have an effect that triggers a feedback. It is likely that things like the recent glacials in the last 40 million years are caused by a natural effects tipping one of those. For instance ocean currents…
The problem with the greenhouse effects is that we’re looking at decades as the likely timescales. We are also doing things that are likely to trigger feedbacks in natural systems that we rely on for our civilisations. That is scary.
Now if you can show that doubling the CO2 and doing more than that with CH4 (not to mention the other emissions) isn’t likely to trigger those effects, then I’ll get less worried. At present the science keeps showing that we are more likely to trigger feedbacks in the biosphere than less likely, and has done so ever since the problem was first discussed in the 1950′s.
The danger is in the detail, and the more we learn, the more the people who actually know this stuff get worried. The IPCC has consistently under-estimated the risks in my opinion, and the effects that they’re talking about are bad enough.
burt – A few points about your, as Iprent said, spurious arguments. Drags out plant physiology texbook. In C3 plants photosynthetic rates do increase over a broad CO2 range. However in C4 plants photosynthesis is CO2 saturated at low concentrations. So C3 plants would benefit from increasing CO2 levels but C4 plants won’t. Photosynthesis is also obviously inhibited at high temperatures, remembering that a leaf can be 4-5 degrees hotter than the outside air when the sun’s hitting it. Most importantly plants are adapted to the environments they have evoloved in, if the environment changes too fast then will not be able to adapt – ecological collapse. Face it burt with desertification, increased severity of storms, droughts, flooding, etc, climate change will not make the world a gardeners paradise. What I’ve heard is that food production will certainly decrease and that will obviously be bad for everyone.
Climate change scepticism aside, one surely cannot help but wonder whether NZ sticking it’s neck out yet again in an attempt to set an example which a significant portion of the rest of the world chooses not to follow or lags far behind in adopting, to our cost, is not an ultimately futile gesture.
Sure, when we’re all toast we can turn to China, India and other major CO2 producers, purse our lips and say “See! If you’d been more like us we wouldn’t be in this mess!”. Of course we’ll be saying it in smoke signals since the cost of an ETS as proposed by Labour and the Greens will by then have made that the only viable means of communication.
But choosing to navigate the road to hell in our V8 with the airconditioning on full and accepting our infinitessimally small share of the guilt is also an option, considering that, come the end of the world, our self-sacrifice won’t have made a measurable difference.
[And yes, my glass is always half empty, why do you ask?
]
burt: Incidently, I think that the highest risk of CO2 emissions for humans in the short-term is the probability of triggering another northern hemisphere glaciation. All of the evidence that we have indicates that these are incredibly sensitive to ocean current changes, and that the onset is measured in years or decades.
I won’t bore you with the arguements, but it is pretty much related to tempature and salinity differences changing. That provides the energy for the currents. If they move then you find major land-based climate changes happening very rapidly, because unlike the sea, land doesn’t provide high levels of heat storage.
That is one of the reason I get annoyed with people that start saying, oh but look, there is no global warming because it is getting cooler here. The topic is climate change, and that could move in different ways in different regions.
Incidentially your point about human hubris is wrong. There are demonstrated climate shifts from human intervention in the past. Look at the dust levels in northern europe in the last couple of centuries.
Rex: Actually, given the overwhelming orthodoxy of emissions reduction policy and the propensity of many of our major trading partners to act in protectionist ways, the question is: which will hurt more: implementing a world-leading ETS to prove our environmental bona fides, or endangering our clean green brand and premium markets in Europe and (soon) North America by not having one?
So as I’ve said before – if not for the environment and future generations, do it for the economy and this one. Unless you think that over the next few years we can realign a huge chunk of our trade to China and India, the only two major economies which remain heterodox.
L
Damn, QoT beat me to the plant science geekery (my one chance to make use of it, up in smoke)… anyway, I was going to point out the effects of increased CO2 on tropical rainforests, the Amazon in particular:
It can be demonstrated with the use of oxygen isotopes in water that the rain that falls in the western Amazon basin has already been through many plants on the way. Rain comes from the water evaporated from the Atlantic, and clouds do not penetrate far to the west before it falls. Trees absorb it, then transpire from their leaves, and on it goes until it hits the Andes.
The water exits the leaves through holes called stomata, which are for the purpose of taking in CO2 (mainly), and if CO2 concentrations increase, the number of stomata decrease, and the amount of water leaving a plant’s leaves decreases. gradually the amount of precipitation in the western Amazon drops, leaving scrubland, and then desert.
As you can see, CO2 is not a wonder-fertiliser for plants, without having to invoke any warming at all (which however, is quite real, and will aggravate the effect)
Lew:
[Please don't read a sarcastic tone into this, it's a genuine question]
Do you really think NZ’s clean green marketing image is dependent upon whether or not it has an ETS? It seems to me to be based on a lot of emotive imagery (snow capped peaks, melting ice (ironically) trickling over rocks, Tuis calling in the distance, sheep grazing in dazzling green paddocks etc).
Is the consumer in Harrods mulling over whether to buy the NZ leg of lamb or the French one really going to stop and think “hang on, who has an ETS?”.
Or if not at that level, are you saying that governments will start to use lack of an ETS as an excuse for protectionist measures? No more cheap clothes and tat on a principle?
Lew makes good points as always. I’m not a believer of climate change. I don’t debate the subject, I don’t criticise anyone that believes in it. I barely read the science. I still don’t believe it. I have the same attitude as I did with bird flu which was completely overblown and turned out to be barely anything. Yet we were all meant to be in a world epidemic.
But where Lew is right is regardless of your beliefs in climate change. This country must be seen as doing something something it. Carbon tax, ETS or something else; it doesn’t matter. Just do something to combat climate change or else face real economic consequences. Because like he said, Europe which is known for its protectionism, Obama who so far has shown protectionist aspects and other countries will use it against us.
Rex: I think a number of British people are increasingly going back to local products just as a percentage of Kiwis are increasingly looking at local products and produce. It may be a small percentage in Europe. But there is a small movement overthere and here and these people are demanding not only organic products but they do take carbon profits into account and there is a belief that consuming must take place at local levels. These people, are a number who are interested in good quality food that may in future decide not to buy New Zealand lamb and other products we grow, make etc because of actions in regards to climate change issues etc. Already we know that air miles is an issue. Still I think those movement more look at local products as the key and not necessarily climate change action etc.
Rex: perhaps you missed the “Food miles” issue – people in Europe do care about where their food comes from, and we will need to be proactive to overcome the idea that distance=bad. As far as tourists go, an ETS is more relevant – if people start feeling guilty about the emissions from flying all the way around the world, we need to be able to say to them “you may have flown all that way, but now that you are here, you can have a nice green holiday, because we have clean public transport, renewable electricity etc.”, and while the actual ETS may not convince them, it is the way (or a way) to achieve the results that will.