Northland is on everybody’s lips! To raise awareness of climate & coastal issues affecting the Far North, Kerikeri local Rob Painting is standing for election.
Rob is an passionate about our marine environments in Northland, being an avid diver. Communities up North are greatly at risk of drought and oceanic changes, since farming & the sea are a way of life up here..
Climate change and ocean acidification have fallen off the political radar, just when we’re entering a period of profound change. Hence Rob’s decision to become involved with the Climate Party and run in this by-election.
Volunteers are currently raising signs in Northland, and campaigning as we speak. If you’re interested in getting involved, contact Peter Whitmore or Rob Painting (see Volunteers).
Make sure you vote on 28th March or vote in advance!
You are correct Rob. Man is a pig. If we tidy up our environment it will be a far more pleasant place to live. Slowly we are taking control of vehicle emissions as they part of the vehicle wof system. More and more people are recognising that exhausting our fossil fuels is not good for a number of reasons. The scientists have told us that the earth is on an elliptical orbit around the sun which varies over the centuries. When it becomes closer to the sun which it is doing now, the earth warms up. When it reaches a point of closeness it starts to move away from the circular orbit and the further away it gets the greater the depth of the ice sheet. Hence over the millennia we have had ice sheets which have covered the planet and then they have gone, leading to rising and falling of the oceans. All this without any humans around. No amount of taxes put upon us is going to stop the planet warming or cooling. But while the planet is heating up and cooling we surely could make a greater effort in keeping it tidy.
1lockie – you are mistaken. The changes in the Earth’s orbit – called Milankovitch cycles – progress slowly over thousands of years. It’s this forcing, and the associated feedbacks from the carbon cycle, that give us ice ages and interglacial periods.
Here’s a link to an explanation at Skeptical Science. It’s perhaps a tad technically demanding but hopefully you might better understand how this works after reading it.
The crux of the matter is that this natural cycle has nothing to do with current global warming. The current warming is due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases that humans emit when we burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. This carbon was locked away underground, but adds to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when burnt.
The current warming has what’s known as a ‘human fingerprint’. This image, a compilation of two paleo reconstructions (Shakun et al & Marcott et al), instrumental data, and a projected warming scenario for the 21st century, puts the natural change coming out of the last ice age into context – we’re on the express elevator now:
https://ourchangingclimate.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/shakun_marcott_hadcrut4_a1b_eng.png
Clean energy is not expensive — it comes from the sun & wind, which are everywhere and free.
Currently we subsidize oil & coal. They’ve had 100 years to develop efficiencies, but are still not actually cheap!
If we spend 20 years leaning toward clean energy we’ll be in a much better place — better for pollution, better for climate. But the oil & coal companies will never tell you that