Time to start taking all of this climate stuff seriously ...

The outcome of the recent Port Waikato by-election was a foregone conclusion and, quite frankly, boring.

The most memorable by-election in the pre-mmp era was probably the East Coast Bays by-election held in September 1980 which resulted in an upset for National Party's candidate, and future leader Don Brash, who was unexpectedly beaten by Social Credit's Garry Knapp.

The winner of that by-election wasn't already an MP, wasn't from one of the two major parties and the winning margin was under 1000 votes.

Ironically the outcome was consequential for the country as the new MP for East Coast Bays dedicated his political career to advancing the cause of proportional representation, which ultimately led to the introduction of MMP more than a decade later.

Gary Holmes, Waiuku

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I’m appalled to read in the

that the city council is considering reducing the spend on street sweeping. On several occasions in the past I have unsuccessfully submitted to the council’s Annual Plan that more should be spent on street sweeping in order to reduce pollutants being washed into the river through stormwater drains. Street sweeping in the vicinity of urban shopping areas needs to be done weekly. Anyone who spends time on the river will be well familiar with the extent of street litter entrapped in vegetation on the river banks and I expect a large proportion of Hamilton’s street litter is carried downstream well beyond city limits. The council must do more, not less, to mitigate the ill effects that sloppy citizens have on the river.

Arthur Giffney, Hamilton

At the opening of the COP28 global climate summit, here are some thoughts about the state of climate science. I have interviewed at least 60 leading climate scientists in a dozen countries over the past three years. They are unanimously terrified by the speed at which things are moving, but also relieved that the crisis is finally getting some serious attention from both the public and governments.

What might be useful at this point is a review of how the science has developed, because it can be seen as a play in three

I am surprised by the reaction of the antismoking lobby to the call by the incoming government to remove the proposed law changes of the Labour Government. The call to say that we will see thousands of deaths because of it is ridiculous. What they are saying is that the up and coming generations will be incapable of reading and researching and understanding the harms of nicotine. I would hope that through education we will see future generations not wanting to pollute their bodies.

There is also a bigger reason why the previous government wanted to change and make directions. It started with Covid and they had for a while control over everyone and everyone believed what was being said. With that success they then wanted to control everyone by banning all smoking.

We now have a government that believes in personal choice and wants everyone to make that correct choice when it comes to health.

Trevor Green, Matamata

The Hamilton City Council mayor who got elected by the ratepayers has written an unacceptable opinion stating times are tough for ratepayers. The mayor is responsible for all this due to poor management of council affairs.

Now residents are paying for more councillors compared to previous years acts. In the first act, beginning in the 1980s, warning was identified as a potentially serious problem, but not one that required an emergency response.

Yes, greenhouse gases of human origin were warming the atmosphere, but this could be dealt with by modest reductions in emissions (5%) by the biggest emitting countries. Developing nations could emit as much as they liked: it wouldn’t be enough to do any harm.

That was the 1990s. Twenty years on, in 2015, things had changed a lot. The early support for the notion that ‘something must be done’ had been undermined by a powerful campaign of climate change denial largely funded by the oil, gas and coal industries.

At the same time, the emissions of the ‘developing countries’ had soared as their economies shifted into high-speed growth.

The biggest emitter is now China, not and getting less service. In the past we had only 12 councillors but now we have 14, plus three appointed councillors. Also council spending on all unwanted projects has put the city into debt.

In the year 2000 we paid just one rate in Hamilton. The Labour Government created Environment Waikato, now called Waikato Regional Council, and now we pay two rates. If we had Labour in power we would have paid another rate called Waikato Regional Water council rates.

The newly formed National-led Government should look into the number of councillors required for Hamilton, similar to the government departments, and reduce the number of councillors. This will reduce the council debt and public opinion will prevail at the next council elections. Cilla de Roy, Hamilton

Every so often councils throughout the land stop what they are doing and plan what they intend (would like) to do over the next 10 years. Not so much a great leap forward but a plan nevertheless.

Then they spend the next 10 years adjusting the plan to fit the current circumstances.

The pity of it all is the amount of money that is spent creating this plan. It can't be cheap.

It must have become obvious to most of us by now that all the guesswork that went into the last plan wasn't worth much. the United States, and India holds third place. Scientific understanding of how the atmosphere will react to a huge input of carbon dioxide and other warming gases has expanded enormously.

It has also become clear that the climate can change abruptly as well as gradually. As the climate warmed up when we emerged from the last Ice Age, it made sudden leaps when various ‘tipping points’ were crossed. Our warming is starting from an already much warmer climate, but we will almost certainly cross some tipping points too.

We have to stay below them at all costs, because we would have no way of turning them off once they got going.

Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research that did most of the work on tipping points, sees our experience as a kind of journey.

“Thirty years of climate science has

Who could have predicted Covid and all its issues or that interest rates would be so low for so long and then triple almost overnight throwing the bean counters into disarray. Who can predict what El Nino is going to throw at us.

Treasury with all its modelling and financial wizardry doesn't seem able to get within a billion dollars of the answers. Estimated project costs prepared by professionals always seem to fall well short of the actual costs. Why do we expect councils to do better? They are run by politicians with the usual vested interest of getting re-elected.

The only good that may yet come out of the various levels of government crashing into their respective debt mountains is that it may concentrate their minds on needs rather than wants. When HCC doesn't bring in enough income to mow the berms you can guess that they have the wrong mix of managers running the show. The sort of rates increases being bandied about is going to make the eyes of people on fixed incomes water.

Cost of living crisis. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Geoff Orchard, Ōhaupō

I wish to refer to the letter written by John Winter in the of 25th November requesting council to bin the cycle tracks, speed bumps, footbridge over river etc. Although it is the opinion of all the residents, councillors and planning staff will never listen to the residents. When the previous mayor proposed a 16% rates hike, he was dumped at the next elections.

I suggest Tainui Group Holdings open up another shopping base with free parking in the internal port land closer to the new highway to catch the travellers from Auckland to Rotorua and Tauranga in addition to local residents.

The previous government increased the number of councillors and the present council consists more of Green and Labour councillors.

The new government should look into the proposed rates increase in present high given us so much understanding, and what I now see very clearly as a red thread during that entire journey is that the more we learn about the Earth system, the more reason for concern we have ...

“In 2001, you see the best assessment of the risk of crossing catastrophic tipping points, of destabilising the biosphere, is estimated to lie somewhere between +5 degress Celsius and +6C of warming.

“Then for every new assessment the level of average global temperature at which the risk of crossing tipping points gets serious just goes down, down, down – until 2018, when the assessment is somewhere between +2C and +3C.

“People think we raise the alarm because human pressures are increasing, but that’s not the case at all. It’s just that we are learning how the planet works, and the more we learn the more vulnerable cost of living.

The council can trim the expenses of their pet projects like cycle tracks, horrible speed bumps, foot bridge and climate change projects etc.

During election time public opinion will be stronger than these unwanted projects and unacceptable rate increases.

Mano Manoharan, Hamilton

As we race towards the end of 2023 and we reflect on the past year filled with conflicts and climatic events that have affected thousands if not millions of individuals, it strikes me that we seem to have lost the desire for self-preservation. Whether it is taking steps to protect the lives of individual civilians in areas torn apart by conflict or ravaged by storms and fires, we seem to have failed to recognise that there but for the grace of whatever God we pray to go we. It is actually in our best interest to work together; to treat our fellow inhabitants of earth with respect and make a daily effort to "Save the World" from destruction. So let's consider making a resolution to at least attempt to treat those around us with respect and understanding. Maybe if we do that we might survive. Dunstan Sheldon, Hamilton

When I was a child growing up in the small [then] sleepy Northland town of Warkworth on the upper reaches of the Mahurangi river it centred around the local dairy factory.

My father had a jeweller’s shop in the main street. He was a keen gardener, grew all sorts of veges and we had seasonal fruit from a substantial orchard. In retrospect I can’t recall any spraying or artificial fert being used. Mum never had a job apart from looking after four kids, sewing up our new clothes, feeding the chooks, cat, etc and relieving the old man in the shop if he had gardening to do or never-ending projects renovating the large old villa we lived in. In those days there was the village policeman who kept an eye on things and she is.”

So here we are in 2023, and Jim Hansen, the climate scientist who delivered the original wake-up message to the United States Congress in 1988, returns to tell us that he has used new data to work out the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS). The news is bad.

The ECS – how much warming we will get in the long run from doubling the amount of carbon dixide in the atmosphere – is much higher than we thought. We were expecting an extra 3C; we will get five.

In the short run, we also have an urgent problem from the opposite direction. Hensen reckons that all the visible pollution we put into the sky was cooling the planet by reflecting incoming sunlight back into space. About 3C worth of cooling, so we would be in the deepest trouble imaginable without it.

But we are rapidly cleaning it up, woe betide you if you stepped out of line or tried to wag school.

Everyone had jobs back then as there was no welfare or unemployment to bludge on. Everyone had weekends off apart from the local dairy, and there was late night shopping till 8 or 9pm on Friday to stock up for the weekend. I would appear that with the now rampant escalating of costs, most people struggle to maintain their standard of living. While the supermarkets and big multinationals often say that turnover is up, the unpleasant fact is that ordinary hard-working families are forced to spend more to get less. Most people have X dollars of disposable income to spend and this leads into the following conclusion.

24-hour, 7-day shopping, while ‘convenient,’ adds hugely to wage bills as well as extra power and other factors. The only way to recoup this added cost is to put prices up even more. So, once again the Sheeple are burdened with the extra cost without fully realising why.

Bernie Haskell, Tamahere (abridged)

Previous governments have focused on the reduction of population numbers in large state-run facilities - prisons, mental health facilities, etc - over the decades often leading to individuals gaining early release placed into the public arena without support. This has led on occasion to innocent individuals being seriously harmed or killed, the unintended consequences of some woke ideology or a catchphrase budget-cutting electioneering policy.

We inadvertently make things worse while trying to make things better. Renowned scholar Thomas Sowell raises the following proposition: “A murderer may have had an unhappy childhood, but does that justify gambling other people’s lives by turning him loose among them, after some process that has been given the name ‘rehabilitation’? Are high sounding notions and fashionable catchwords important enough to risk the lives of innocent women and children?”

Paul Evans-mcleod, Hamilton because it’s bad for people’s lungs. In the past 10 years, China got rid of 87% of the sulphur dioxide in the ‘brown cloud’ that used to hang over Chinese cities, a brilliant success – but events like that mean we are rapidly losing our protective global sunscreen.

In 2020, the International Maritime Organisation ordered all 60,000 giant container ships that carry 90% of the world’s trade to clean up their fuel. The permissible level of sulphur dioxide was cut from 3.5% to 0.5% – and the ‘ship tracks’, cloud cover that followed the ships like marine contrails – virtually disappeared.

Hansen suspects these changes have lost us one degree’s worth of cooling – and in terms of average global temperature, a degree of lost cooling is just as bad as a degree of extra warming. It may be time to start taking this climate stuff seriously.