In December 2020 Jacinda Ardern called climate change ‘one of the greatest challenges of our time’ and pledged a carbon-neutral government by 2025
The declaration of a climate emergency was supported by the Green Party and Māori Party and opposed by the National and Act parties.
Speaking in parliament after its introduction, Ardern said the country must “act with urgency”.
“This declaration is an acknowledgement of the next generation. An acknowledgement of the burden that they will carry if we do not get this right and do not take action now,” she said.
“It is up to us to make sure we demonstrate a plan for action, and a reason for hope.”
Her government passed the Zero Carbon Act 2019 which commits New Zealand to reducing emissions, and set up a Climate Change Commission tasked with putting the country on a path to net zero emissions by 2050 – made New Zealand one of few countries to have a zero-emissions goal enshrined in law.
The declaration also said the government will “demonstrate what is possible to other sectors of the economy by reducing the government’s own emissions and becoming a carbon-neutral government by 2025”.
But opposition parties have described the move as a publicity stunt, with the National Party leader calling it “virtue signalling”.
New Zealand contributes just 0.017% of global emissions with the biggest source of CO2 emissions being road transport but most greenhouse gases stem from agriculture.
The government set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as part of its overall effort to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030.
“What kind of madness is this?” Given the effects on our food security and also our primary income source (agricultural exports), particularly in the light of the UNFCCC declaration in October 2022 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 October 2022 that the figures need to be cut in half.
We’ve been told for many years now that New Zealand produces excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, with our world-beating farmers accused of being largely to blame.
The argument from the IPCC has always been that the methane produced by livestock digestion is more ‘dangerous’ than carbon dioxide by a factor of twenty-eight - even though methane is part of a natural cycle that can be traced back to the dinosaurs.
However, it now turns out those climate change ‘experts’ were wrong, and that the actual figure is only seven, not twenty-eight.
The IPCC admitted the mistake in their Sixth Assessment Report, explaining at page 1016 of Chapter 7, “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4”.
This mistake has never been acknowledged or corrected by New Zealand officials and in fact those false assumptions from the IPCC have continued to underpin the Labour/Green Government’s Net Zero policy agenda.
Using these false assumptions they have imposed the harshest methane restrictions of any country in the world on our agricultural industry which has been acknowledged as the international leader in efficient primary production.
This was done even though Article 2 of the UN’s Paris Agreement specifically prohibits governments from introducing policies that would restrict the supply of food: “This Agreement… aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change… in a manner that does not threaten food production”.
The IPCC has also made two other corrections that should have been taken into account by New Zealand:
• the first involves their claim that by 2100 the sea level will rise by over a metre, and
• the second is that by 2100, global temperatures could rise by up to five degrees Celsius.
In 2009 the IPCC adopted a “very high greenhouse gas emissions” option - RCP8.5 - as one of four scenarios to predict climate outcomes and as a result predicted very high sea level rises by the year 2100.
It has since been identified that RCP8.5 was based on an ‘impossible scenario’ - that the whole world was using only coal for energy and transportation.
The UN has now admitted the RCP8.5 scenario is so dangerously unrealistic that it’s been banished from all policy making. Even the Biden administration has abandoned it in the US.
The UN has also admitted their temperature predictions were also wrong: “According to the report from UN Climate Change released on 26 October 2022 the world is ‘on track for around 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century’. The UN’s announcement effectively concedes that there is no ‘climate emergency’.”
Yet these dangerously unrealistic scenarios have been used by New Zealand’s climate agency NIWA to justify our “climate emergency” and predict a huge future sea level rise of over a metre by 2100.
We now know all those calculations were based on wrong assumptions.
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 (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
“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.