EMBARGOED TO 6 PM, 4 May 2009

Cost-effective preparation for and response to climate change

New Zealand should commit to a policy of adaptation to climate change rather than saddling its people with the high direct and indirect costs of an emissions trading scheme that will have no discernible effect on future temperatures. This was the message given today by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition to the Parliamentary Select Committee reviewing the emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Presenting the Coalition’s submissions, its secretary Terry Dunleavy, said that MPs have a duty of care toward all New Zealanders, and before saddling them with direct costs estimated at $2340 per family per annum (based on $30 tonne of carbon dioxide) they need to be certain that a benefit will result.

Increased indirect costs associated with emissions trading include unemployment caused by replacing conventional power stations with wind power, transitional economic costs (estimated as roughly 1% of GNP in the U.K.), contributions towards the huge sums in global-warming aid that are now being demanded by third world countries (another 1% of GNP) and the economic growth foregone because of the whole exercise (Australian treasury estimate, 1.8% of GNP). These costs will more than double the estimated ETS cost of direct extra taxation.

Parliament needs to know with reasonable certainty by what amount the all-too-real and regressive pseudo-tax pain represented by an ETS will reduce global temperatures in the future, because that is what is supposed to be the core objective of this whole exercise.

Senior Australian palaeo-climatologist Professor Bob Carter told the ETS Committee last week that even if NZ ceased its carbon dioxide emissions altogether, the effect on future global temperature would be a theoretical cooling of only around 0.0001 deg. C, i.e. one ten-thousandth of a degree.

Mr Dunleavy said that emissions trading represents the Plan A of stopping global warming, as recommended by the IPCC. “Plan A won’t work because there is no scientific evidence that reducing human-caused emissions of the mild greenhouse gas carbon dioxide will have any measurable effect on future temperature. Plan A is thus all cost for no benefit.”

The coalition recommends instead a cost-effective Plan B, which is to recognise the certainty of future natural climate change, including warming, cooling and dangerous step events, as has occurred in the past. Such climate hazards should be treated in the same way as other damaging natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, flooding and storm damage.

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“New Zealand has a facility, GeoNet, and a process for predicting and monitoring hazardous natural events, which is recognized internationally as world’s best practice. A collaboration between GNS Science and the Earthquake Commission, GeoNet is responsible for the capture of all geophysical data streams and provides GNS Science with real-time response capabilities, allowing rapid analysis of hazard information around the clock.

“As for earthquakes and volcanoes, it is nonsense to believe that humankind can control the natural forces that drive climate cycles, especially by feeble gestures such as changing the miniscule additions to carbon dioxide made by humans, which add up to only 3.6% of the so-called greenhouse gas layer.

“The fact that people live happily and work productively in places so vastly different in mean annual temperatures as Helsinki (4.5 deg C) and Singapore (27.1 deg C), a difference of 22.6 deg C, shows that humankind can and does adapt to all manner of different climatic regimes.

“Given the present global cooling trend, which some solar physicists are tipping to continue and deepen, the medium-term climate hazard is as likely to be cooling as it is warming.

“New Zealand would therefore be better off by strengthening its existing natural hazard research and warning network, GeoNet, so that its role encompasses preparation for and adaptation to long term climate hazards.

“GeoNet is eminently suited to this expanded role because it already carries responsibility for short-term climate hazards. And, thus expanded, GeoNet would cope also with human-caused warming should it eventuate sometime in the distant future.

“Furthermore, an effective expansion of natural hazard research and management could be achieved at a fraction of the cost of a futile, economically regressive, carbon dioxide taxation scheme, and without imposing a raft of swinging and unnecessary direct and indirect costs onto the suffering taxpayer.

“Even if science eventually proves a link between carbon dioxide emissions and measurable levels of temperature increase, New Zealand’s contribution will be so tiny as to make no difference”.

“Meantime, what we can do for both New Zealand and world citizens is to promote our GeoNet system as a global model for hazard preparation and adaptation”.

“Climate policy Plan B, centred on an expanded GeoNet, is precautionary, and will result in great benefit for modest cost”, Mr Dunleavy said.

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