Government Lies about Climate Change
Up until November 2022 our government could be said to have acted in good faith in relation to the effects of climate change and the required measures to combat global warming!
Their decisions were based on the best available science from the UN.
But since November 2022 they have been guilty of deliberately lying to us about the basic facts around climate change in the light of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) declaration which stated that their predictions around climate change were in fact wrong and that they were reducing their predicted climate warming numbers by 50%.
“The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) announced that it accepts research shows climate change is expected to reach just 2.5°C – only half as much as the mainstream media has long assumed.
In a formal statement, the UNFCCC said the world is “on track for around 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century”.
This new paradigm replaces the long-standing and much-feared presumption of 4 – 5°C by 2021 – which has led to worldwide declarations of a “Climate Emergency” in recent years.
Our government has been making decisions, based on the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014 fifth assessment report in regard to lowering our greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sectors, that we now find were based on facts which were actually wrong.
The UN stated in November 2022 that the figures need to be cut in half.
The collapse of long-standing global warming expectations is largely the result of the UN’s belated rejection of the most extreme scenario of future emission levels – known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5. This unrealistic input to climate models has for many years applied a massive upward distortion to the calculation of likely future temperatures.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has now banished RCP8.5 (and its successor SSP5-8.5) from all its policy-making at COP27. For good measure, it has also dropped the RCP6.0 scenario, and is now focusing on an envelope between 2.6 and 4.5 – a new addition, RCP3.4.
Even taken in isolation, the long-awaited abandonment of the extreme RCP8.5 is the most important and consequential climate change story of the last decade.
Based on advice from the NZ Climate Commission Minister of Climate Change, James Shaw promised a net 50% reduction of New Zealand’s 2005 gross emissions by 2030, which was calculated by reference to BAU global temperatures of 4.5°C by 2100, and relied heavily upon modelling of the effects of RCP8.5.
We now know all those calculations were based on wrong assumptions. As were the endless calculations and model runs which underpin New Zealand’s First Emissions Reduction Plan, its First National Climate Risk Assessment and First National Adaptation Plan.
Other Government publications such as “Coastal hazards and climate change: Guidance for local government” and interim guidance on the use of new sea-level rise projections, all being heavily reliant on RCP8.5, can no longer stand.
The theory was great but like all modelling, when the underlying baseline assumptions have proved to be wrong then the whole theory is no longer supportable and the conclusions of the modelling must be thrown out on that basis.
Government’s advisers, acting rationally, will have no choice but to change their minds now that the basic assumptions used in their modelling have been proven wrong, as advised by UNFCCC.
Every government promise, every target, every carbon budget, and every quantified policy to mitigate future global warming will now require a thorough review. The models must be re-worked.
Many of the government’s recent decisions have been impacted by their interpretation of the climate change scenarios using the worst case predictions which have now been debunked by the UN. Many of their decisions have had a large impact on our increased inflation rates and will carry on doing so for some time to come.
This madness must stop. We should all be challenging our politicians to explain why they and their legions of report writers are still using the discredited worst case scenario as the basis for modelling public policy in New Zealand.
All climate change policy should be suspended immediately while the modelling is redone using scenarios based on reality, not fantasy.
We again call on this government to review their Climate policies in the light of the UNFCCC changes which they have confirmed were based on incorrect data.
They need to stop lying to us. They cannot deny they have been given the correct information after the UNFCCC declaration was made public, yet the Environment Minister, James Shaw is still quoting data that he knows is false as the basis for some of his ministry’s decisions in relation to climate change.
After 30 long years, the NZ Ministry for the Environment has stopped arguing that the science is on their side. They have had to accept that modern research has exploded their mantra that “agricultural methane causes 28 times as much warming as CO2”.
There is not the slightest ambiguity in the finding of the November 2022 Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –
“…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4”.
Given that we now know the methane science is wrong, then all their CO2 models and targets and budgets and net-zero calculations are all going to be wrong as well.
It seems now that the bureaucrats have decided to utilise a common strategy: –
All agreeing to shut their eyes tight and put their fingers in their ears … and ignore the reality of the situation in the hope that it is years before people find out the truth.
So this becomes a cover-up; an unprincipled deception; a giant lie.
“It is hard to understand why any government would want to take this action when it has potentially severe penalties for the New Zealand economy.