Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets
It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…
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Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote
It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…
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ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
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On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
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Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise
Permanent ice sheets are a misnomer. Ages involving alternating glacial and interglacial periods are ephemeral, occupying only a small percentage of geological time. Humankind’s greatest—although certainly not in any laudatory…
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Wasting storms of the grandparents
When Dr James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren nine years ago this December, he lambasted governments for greenwashing while doing nothing meaningful to curtail fossil-fuel use. But despite, by that time, having already seen his…
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With every fibre and electrified-transit solution
Aucklanders once took an average of more than 400 public-transport trips per year. In 1945, with a sixth of the population, Aucklanders were taking nearly 120 million trips, compared to today’s paltry 90 million boardings. Not that all Aucklanders should be…
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Future Mahurangi transport network feedback
Mahurangi Action’s feedback pro forma on Warkworth’s future transport network is good to go. Members, and readers generally, are warmly encouraged to use the pro forma as-is or as a starting point for their own feedback, and to put their oars in…
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This might have been one more for the roads
September’s town-hall talk is now cancelled, and possibly the balance of this year’s. The September slot was pencilled in for the topic of paedophilia awareness—apparently paedophile networks operate locally—but no subsequent response was…
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One billion trees and bugger the science
In 2004, $3 million over 5 years sounded like all Mahurangi’s Christmases had come at once. But a back-of-a-seed-packet calculation strongly suggested that the $3 million the former Auckland Regional Council had budgeted would barely…
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Faith in the 1% and fighting the 80
Photovoltaics have a huge future and have grown enormously, to about 1% of global energy use. Banking heavily upon it, Germany has plunged it’s poor into energy poverty, by shuttering nuclear, not because of the risk or impact on health, but to pander…
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Forlorn futility of faith-based climate action
One person’s demagogue is another person’s saviour, and, for many, the Elon Musk credibility needle will have finally flicked from where it has been firmly stuck on f, to e. For most students, in this age of social-media-supercharged celebrity, learning…
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Proposed zero-carbon bill submission
Comment on the proposed zero-carbon bill closes at 5 pm on 19 July. The following pro forma is provided by the Mahurangi Magazine in the earnest hope that the resultant legislation is exponentially more substantive than a zero-carbon-by-2050-target…
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Proposed carbon bill zero-action
Generation Zero is ecstatic. But over a proposed zero-carbon bill that clings cravenly to the ineffectual, at best, emissions-trading-scheme approach. To be fair, Generation Zero’s enthusiasm is primarily for having succeeded in selling, to the new…
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Thirty years later, what needs to change
Thirty years ago, while the Midwest withered in massive drought and East Coast temperatures exceeded 100°F, I testified to the Senate as a senior nasa scientist about climate change. I said that ongoing global warming was outside the range of natural…
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