23 November 2016 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Climate Change Minister Commended for Taking Action on Adaptation

“The companies and people who have funded advertisements in today’s newspapers of an open letter to the Government saying ‘it’s time for climate action’, have wasted their money – they’re too late! Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett has already acted.” This from the chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, Hon Barry Brill, commenting on the Minister’s announcement yesterday of the formation of the Climate Change Adaptation Technical Working Group (CCATWG).

“Our Coalition welcomes the realisation by the Government that the only practical and credible response to climate variation, whether warming or cooling, is to adapt to whatever conditions Nature presents us with. Up until now, much if the narrative about the subject of climate change has bordered on hysterical hyperbole about the alleged dangers of catastrophic temperature increase caused by human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). With CO2 from all sources at 400 parts per million (0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere), and human activity responsible for only 4% of that, we are talking about a mere 0.0015% of the atmosphere, well within the margins of error in the man-made computer guesses on which so much of the climate hysteria has been based.

“Mitigation, as has been the aim until now, places a burden on the current population, is highly speculative about future conditions and often based on the output of climate models despite even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledging that such models are seriously flawed

“Adaptation means responding, in an appropriate manner, if and when something happens; it can respond with whatever technology is available at the time and it is up to the population and politicians of the day whether any response at all is necessary. Adaptation also allows scope to react to whatever the circumstances - hotter, colder, wetter, drier - which is in contrast to mitigation which basically assumes a single future circumstance.

“Overall, it is instructive to consider this statement by Professor Bjorn Lomborg, the distinguished Danish scientist: “Even more insidiously, doom-mongering makes us panic and seize upon the wrong responses to global warming. At a cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually, the Paris climate agreement, recently ratified by China, is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty. It will slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources. This will achieve almost nothing. My peer-reviewed research, published last November in the journal Global Policy, shows that even if every nation were to fulfill all their carbon-cutting promises by 2030 and stick to them all the way through the century—at a cost of more than $100 trillion in lost GDP—global temperature rise would be reduced by a tiny 0.3°F (0.17°C)’.

“Now that Minister Bennett has rightly turned our attention to the need for adaptation to reality, it is also time to turn away from non-validated theoretical computer models and to look more closely at actual recordings of temperatures, sea levels and the like, in recent and longer-term history, which seem to have been ignored by the propagandists. Real-world global temperature trends show CO2’s warming effect to be well below the bottom end of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prediction of 1.5 – 4.5°C, and certainly not dangerous. Proper economic analysis shows that we can adapt to any slight warming effect of the CO2 we add to the air at a cost far below that of trying to reduce it. Satellite data which are extremely accurate tell us that global temperatures have been virtually flat for the past 18 years. So-called “hottest year” claims are based on year-to-year temperature data that differ by only a few hundredths of a degree, well within margins of error,” Mr Brill continued.

“For a country like ours that is so dependent on exports of primary produce, we must also take into account the increased plant and pasture growth generated by extra CO2.

“Sea level rise rates have been steady for over a century, measured in millimeters, with deceleration in some places. Then there is the calculated deception of describing as ‘ocean acidification’ slight reductions in alkalinity of seawater, to which history has shown undersea plants and creatures have been able to adjust over past millennia.

“So there is much for the new Technical Working Group to study, hence the extended time the Minister has allowed. It is to be hoped that the group will listen to all shades of opinion and all levels of experience, and that for once, those of us who can prove the fallibility of what has been imposed on us as ‘settled science’ will have a chance to advance our case. Meantime, we commend Minister Bennett for placing adaptation on the climate agenda,” Mr Brill concluded.

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