Don't mention Hunga Tonga

For months the country has felt as if it’s under a state of siege – not from a hostile foreign power, but from extreme weather. 

This week, the north of the country has been pummelled again by torrential rain, gale-force winds and high seas. RNZ reported this morning that more heavy rain warnings had been issued for the west coast of the North Island and the top of the South. 

But please, whatever you do, don’t mention Hunga Tonga.

Constant weather warnings have created a pervasive sense of anxiety. Night after night, the TV weather maps show heavy rain. I’m surprised that the graphics people even bother to redo them.

We’ve become familiar with scary colour codes denoting storms of varying severity. Meteorologists whom no one had previously heard of have been thrust into national prominence in the same way that epidemiologists became household names - celebrities, almost - during the Covid crisis. 

But the experts don’t say anything about Hunga Tonga, and quite rightly. We wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea.

In some areas, Taranaki being the latest, residents have been advised to have emergency grab bags prepared in case they have to be evacuated suddenly. In Nelson last night, the city council opened emergency accommodation as a precaution.

In Hawke’s Bay, Tairawhiti, Coromandel and West Auckland, traumatised farmers, orchardists, grape growers and home owners are still cleaning up after Cyclone Hale, Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods. In parts of Hawke’s Bay, people are still digging themselves out from under several metres of silt.  But please don’t make the mistake of thinking this has anything to do with Hunga Tonga.

Vital highways remain closed by storm damage. SH2 between Napier and Wairoa, closed for three months, is scheduled to reopen on May 14 once a Bailey bridge has been completed on the devastated Waikare Gorge section. Repairs to SH25A on the Coromandel Peninsula may take until next year. But it would be pure mischief to implicate Hunga Tonga.

The Wairarapa, where I live, has largely escaped the worst of the mayhem, although floodwaters inundated the Tinui School, on the road to Castlepoint, and forced its closure. But even here, we’re lamenting a summer that never was. One rural contractor, in business since 1988, said it was the wettest season he’d experienced. Crops went unharvested because the rain was almost constant.

Masterton got through summer without water restrictions, which is almost unheard of. Lawns that would normally be mown every few weeks, and then only to keep the weeds down, just kept growing. The glorious hot, dry spells that we’ve come to expect since moving here 20 years ago just didn’t happen.

The statistics tell the story. In January, 182mm of rain fell at Masterton Airport compared with the historical average of 83mm. In February we got 159mm compared with the average of 25mm.

And when it wasn’t raining, it was threatening to rain. It was a summer of gloom. NIWA figures show that Masterton had 536 hours of bright sunshine during summer compared with the average of 649. That may not sound like a huge difference, but ask any family camping on the coast how much fun they had this summer. Not bloody much, they’ll tell you. But Hunga Tonga? Nah.

By now you’re probably muttering, “Hunga what?” and wondering what the hell I’m on about.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the underwater volcano that erupted near Tonga in January last year. I wrote about it here.

To recap a couple of key points from that blog post, Hunga Tonga was the most powerful eruption so far this century. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than 100 years, measuring nearly 6 on the volcanic explosivity index – roughly equivalent to that of Krakatoa. The eruption created a volcanic plume that reached 58km into the mesosphere.

An article in the scientific journal Communications Earth and Environment – one of many devoted to the event – noted that major volcanic eruptions are well-known drivers of climate change and said the magnitude of the Hunga Tonga explosion ranked it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era. Researchers calculated that it resulted in a 13% increase in global stratospheric water mass and a fivefold increase in stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in three decades.

One study estimated the amount of water displaced as 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the entire water content of the stratosphere. That’s a helluva lot of water and it has to go somewhere. Communications Earth and Environment said the eruption had “potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate”.

Similarly, Atmosphere magazine devoted a special issue to the eruption, calling it an epic event that would have a continuing effect on the climate, both locally [that probably includes us] and globally.

It seems reasonable to conclude that an eruption of that scale might at the very least be a factor in the freakish weather patterns of the past few months. Yet I can’t help suspecting that the eruption of Hunga Tonga is the climate event none of the New Zealand experts want to talk about, possibly because it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change.

In a New Zealand Herald article published two months ago, New Zealand meteorologists seemed to go out of their way to play down the Hunga Tonga factor. While acknowledging that eruptions can have climatic impacts, they attributed our wayward summer weather (and now autumn as well) to other causes. James Renwick said much of the excess moisture from Hunga Tonga would have been rained out within weeks. He and Jim Salinger posited that La Niña and something called the Southern Annular Mode were far more important. The other big factor, of course, was background climate change. Nothing new to see here, folks.

Obviously I can’t contradict them. They’re experts and I’m not. But can we rely on the likes of Renwick and Salinger being rigorously objective? I’d like to say yes, but both have nailed their colours to the climate change mast and the subject is so politicised that we can be excused for having doubts. Science is not immune to ideological contamination, as we learned from the shameful gang-up that followed the Listener letter about matauranga Maori.

Setting aside all the arguments about whether climate change is human-induced, and to what extent (if at all) we can mitigate it by riding bikes, buying Teslas, planting trees and punishing farmers, I think most people can accept that the climate is changing. Even my own amateur observations suggest it’s happening. One admittedly crude measurement is the frequency with which the Remutaka Hill road is closed by slips. When we moved from Wellington in 2003, such events were infrequent. Now they happen regularly. That can only be the result of the ground being saturated and destabilised by constant heavy rain. The frosts, too, are fewer and less severe.

But what’s happened lately feels different. Gabrielle was New Zealand’s worst weather event this century. The Treasury puts the likely combined cost of the cyclone and the Anniversary Weekend storm at $9-$14 billion.

Climate change is surely a gradually evolving trend, and that doesn’t gel with what New Zealand has experienced this year. The recent extreme weather events have been freakishly violent and abrupt. They feel like outliers – striking departures from the norm – rather than the predictable continuation of a long-term pattern. If I'm wrong, such events are the new normal and we face an unimaginably dismal future.

Just by suggesting this, I probably risk being labelled as a conspiracy theorist from the alt-Right and put on the watch list of the Disinformation Project (which, incidentally, has so far failed to respond to my requests for information about who funds it – a novel approach for activists who like to promote themselves as champions of transparency). But where climate change is concerned, as in all issues where ideology intrudes, I’m inclined to follow the advice of my late colleague Frank Haden: doubt everything with gusto.

Are we allowed to suggest that Hunga Tonga is the cause of the weather mayhem?

The most powerful volcanic eruption of the 21st century happened on January 22 last year in Tonga.

Scientists measure the force of eruptions using something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. (I learned about this from my teenage grandson, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of volcanoes.)

The eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai had a VEI of 5 or 6, depending on which source you believe. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than a century. As a point of comparison, the cataclysmic Oruanui (Lake Taupo) eruption about 26,500 years ago had a VEI of 8. Krakatoa (1883) scored a 6.

The Hunga Tonga (HT) eruption sent atmospheric shockwaves around the globe and was heard as far away as Alaska. The eruption plume rose 58 km, reaching above the stratosphere.

The subsequent tsunamis devastated parts of Tonga, claiming four lives there and even killing two people in Peru. The eruption also wiped out 55 km of undersea cable, but otherwise it aroused relatively little public attention. After all, it was a long way from anywhere in a very sparsely populated part of the globe.

Scientists, however, got very excited about it. An online search turns up numerous academic papers marvelling at the scale of the eruption and assessing its implications.

Why am I writing about this? Simply because I can’t help wondering whether Hunga Tonga might have something to do with the freakish weather the North Island has been enduring.

I can’t recall a wetter, more miserable summer. January rainfall in parts of the North Island was four times higher than normal; Auckland was the wettest ever. Campers, and especially those with kids, will remember 2023 as their annus horribilis.

The February figures will be far worse. We’ve just been through several weeks of catastrophic weather events and they may not yet be over.

In so far as there’s any explanation for these events, they are commonly (if vaguely) attributed to climate change, the implication being that it's human-induced. La Nina and “atmospheric rivers” have been cited, but in such a way as to imply that they are all part of the same pattern. Anyone who dares suggest otherwise, as Maureen Pugh did, risks being put in the stocks. But is there more to it than that?

Before anyone rushes to denounce me, I’m not a climate change denier. I’ m not in a position to deny anything, since I don’t possess the scientific knowledge to make definitive assertions. My own amateur observations tell me the climate is changing; the winters are warmer (we seem to get far fewer frosts in Masterton than 20 years ago) and the frequency of slips on the Remutaka Hill road is a very basic pointer to heavier and more frequent rain. Weather bombs that were once exceptional are now the norm.

Nonetheless, the science on climate change is contradictory and often freighted with ideology – so yes, I’m sceptical. I think journalists and scientists have a duty to be sceptical.

Oh, and another disclaimer: I’m generally clueless when it comes to science. When I began my fifth form year (today’s Year 11) at Central Hawke’s Bay College, I was thrilled to discover that science had quietly been dropped from my curriculum. I was such a no-hoper that my teachers decided, without any consultation, that there was no point wasting my time or theirs. The same thing had happened with maths the previous year.

But while acknowledging I’m an ignoramus, I think I have a legitimate question to ask. Even accepting that the climate is changing, what has happened this summer seems qualitatively different. It has not only been brutal and extreme but abrupt, persistent and viciously repetitive – too much so, surely, to have been simply a continuation of a familiar long-term trend. It just seems too easy – too glib, almost – to put it all down to human-induced climate change.

Which brings me back to Hunga Tonga. Notwithstanding my lack of scholarship, it seems obvious to me from the various academic papers published about the HT eruption that it had meteorological consequences. One study, published by the French National Center for Scientific Research, called it the most remarkable climate event of the past three decades. There’s a clue, right there.

Another paper, published by the American Geophysical Union, had this to say: “The violent Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption on 15 January 2022 not only injected ash into the stratosphere but also large amounts of water vapor, breaking all records for direct injection of water vapor, by a volcano or otherwise, in the satellite era.

“The massive blast injected water vapor up to altitudes as high as 53 km. Using measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder [no, I don’t know what that means either] on NASA's Aura satellite, we estimate that the excess water vapor is equivalent to around 10% of the amount of water vapor typically residing in the stratosphere. Unlike previous strong eruptions, this event may not cool the surface, but rather it could potentially warm the surface due to the excess water vapor.”

The study also notes that “the H2O injection was unprecedented in both magnitude and altitude” and says it may take several years for the water plume to dissipate.

I admit that much of the paper is incomprehensible to me, but am I wrong to assume that a phenomenon of that scale is going to affect weather patterns?

Yet another study, published in Nature Climate Change, similarly noted that the HT eruption had expelled an unprecedented amount of water into the atmosphere and could cause an increase in global surface temperatures lasting several years. So there seems to be some sort of consensus.

I learned that volcanic eruptions can have a profound impact on the weather when, in a past life as a wine writer, I heard New Zealand winemakers bemoaning the Pinatubo years.

The 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo, in the Philippines, had a VEI of 6. It produced what’s called a volcanic winter, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by 10 percent – hence the challenge of getting grapes to ripen even in distant New Zealand. Pinatubo’s eruption is also thought to have triggered the so-called Storm of the Century in 1993.

Hunga Tonga, being an underwater eruption that produced a plume of water rather than clouds of dust that absorbed sunlight, had a different effect, leading to the predictions of rising global temperatures.

Either way, it seems safe to assume the eruption will have had an effect on the weather. And being a lot closer to New Zealand than Mt Pinatubo, doesn’t it stand to reason that its impact is likely to be more pronounced?

Bearing all this in mind, it doesn’t seem fanciful to suggest that Hunga Tonga might have played a hand in the apocalyptic weather events of the past two weeks. But I wonder if that likelihood is being played down because it conflicts with the human-induced climate change narrative so feverishly promoted by the Greens and now apparently accepted by the National Party – and enforced by sections of the media.

To put it another way, are we in a Fawlty Towers-type scenario where no one's supposed to mention Hunga Tonga? (To quote Basil Fawlty, I just did, but I think I can get away with it.)

There are people who read this blog who are far better informed than I am on matters of science. I would welcome their input, even if it results in my theory being – for want of a better expression – blown out of the water.

On Greta Thunberg and the fawning media

The media love affair with Greta Thunberg continues unabated. If anything it has become even more frenzied. COP-26 has given the diminutive, garrulous Swede a platform where she commands as much attention as presidents and prime ministers.

And it seems she has an understudy from New Zealand: a young woman named India Logan-Riley, who claims to speak for indigenous communities.

Logan-Riley, who is described as Maori, is part of the official programme in Glasgow. In her address at the opening ceremony she used highly emotive rhetoric reminiscent of Thunberg. “Six years ago I spoke these stories into this space and every year since I have repeated the same words – wildfires, sea level rise, wildfires, suffering, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, sea level rise.

“This is an invitation to you, this COP: learn our histories, listen to our stories, honour our knowledge and get in line or get out of the way.”

Setting aside the fact that she borrowed her punchline from Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ – “Your old road is rapidly agein’/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand” (though without the old-fashioned courtesy of Dylan’s “please”) – her speech was notable for its overweening sense of entitlement and self-importance. Logan-Riley is certain she knows the answers and assumes the right to be heard, although where and how she got her mandate isn’t clear.

This is something she has in common with the disturbingly manic Thunberg, who makes no attempt to conceal her contempt for the politicians in Glasgow. “They have led us nowhere,” she told her besotted followers. “Change is not going to come from inside there. That is not leadership – this is leadership.

“We’re sick and tired of it and we’re going to make the change whether they like it or not,” she raged, before leading her disciples in a chant of “No more blah blah blah.”

Later, looking immensely pleased with herself and bathing in the uncritical admiration of her fans, she sang “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse” to the tune of Coming ‘Round the Mountain.

But here’s the thing about people like Thunberg and Logan-Riley. They can afford to be contemptuous and disdainful of those in power, safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to come up with practicable solutions to the challenge of climate change.

Thunberg and Logan-Riley can posture, moralise, ridicule and pontificate for all they’re worth, knowing they don’t have to bear any personal consequences for decisions made (or not made, as the case may be).

No one elected them and they’re not accountable to anyone. At the end of COP-26 they can walk away and start planning their next attention-seeking stunts. This is the crucial defining difference between the noisy, know-it-all activists and the politicians, who have countries to worry about and voters to answer to.  

I doubt that the thought of collapsing economies and massive social dislocation keeps Thunberg awake at night, assuming that it even occurs to her. But these are factors politicians must weigh in deciding how far to go in countering climate change. Thunberg, on the other hand, just wants action, regardless of the human cost.

For all their glib talk and showboating, the politicians she disparages have to live with the consequences of whatever they decide. In that vital respect they are the moral superiors of Thunberg and her moronic followers. It’s a shame the fawning media coverage doesn’t reflect that.

New Zealand is being transformed, but not in a good way

[I wrote this piece for the latest edition of The Spectator Australia.]

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern promised, on the night of her general election triumph last October, to govern for all New Zealanders. But her Labour government is pursuing policies that will entrench racial separatism, undermine democracy, turbocharge the grievance culture and promote polarisation and divisiveness.

The immediate threats come from proposals to outlaw “hate speech”, however that may be defined, and bestow special privilege on people who identify as Maori by allowing city and district councils to create exclusively Maori wards. In the longer term, the government is likely to seize on climate change as justification for policies that could deliver a savage blow to the country’s most dynamic productive sector.

Add to that the politicisation of education, in the form of a new, Marxist-influenced history curriculum that portrays Maori as a race still oppressed by colonialism, and you have a perfect ideological storm. New Zealand sometimes feels as if it’s in the grip of a Year Zero cult similar in tone, if not in scale, to that promoted in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (Cambodia), where everything that had gone before was renounced.

To take those developments one by one:

■ Urged on by inflammatory rhetoric from an ideologically driven Human Rights Commission and a handful of vociferous immigrant activists whose views are at odds with those of their communities, Labour has vowed to introduce tight controls on what New Zealanders may legally say about matters of race and religion (and very likely gender and body shape too). The government cites the Christchurch mosque massacres as justification, although a royal commission failed to find any evidence that lax “hate speech” laws allowed or even encouraged Brenton Tarrant (who, it should be remembered, was an Australian) to embark on his killing spree.

■ Labour is encouraging the creation of designated Maori seats on city and district councils, despite the idea being resoundingly rejected by voters in local referendums wherever they have been proposed. A law change will not only give Maori (or more correctly, part-Maori) candidates a short cut to representation by enabling them to avoid the inconvenience of winning popular support, but will result in the election of councillors responsible only to people who claim Maori ancestry.

Under present law, any person of Maori descent can stand for office and win a seat, and many do. The crucial difference is that the law change will guarantee seats under a preferential, race-based system. The irony that this is being done in the name of racial equality is lost on leftist zealots.

■ The government is expected to embrace climate change recommendations that would punish the farming sector – now more than ever the country’s economic lifeline following Covid-19’s devastating effect on tourism. Farmers will be rewarded for keeping New Zealand afloat economically for more than 100 years by having their livestock numbers slashed and being ordered to replace diesel utes with electric vehicles.  Will this concern Labour MPs? Not likely, since hardly any represent rural constituencies and few show any interest in economic realities. For Labour, the economy is not so much about generating income as redistributing it.

■ Having shamefully ignored New Zealand history in the past, education bureaucrats have taken advantage of an ideological tail-wind by approving a draft curriculum that’s drenched in neo-Marxist identity politics and presents the country’s past as one characterised by the oppressive effects of colonialism on Maori. Will teachers be permitted to mention that colonialism also brought an end to centuries of savage tribal warfare, slavery and cannibalism? Don’t bank on it.

All of this would be alarming enough, but is made more so because no one is standing in the way. New Zealand First, the conservative government coalition partner that acted as a handbrake on Labour between 2017 and 2020, much to the chagrin of the Left, lost all its seats in the election – punishment for a record fatally tarnished by dodgy and opaque backroom dealings.

What, then, of the National party, nominally Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? Reduced from 56 to 33 seats in the 120-seat parliament, National is in abject disarray – floundering, demoralised and apparently rudderless after its humiliating election rout.

Historically the dominant force in New Zealand politics, it seems to be waiting for a new messiah to guide it out of the wilderness. Current leader Judith Collins rejoices in the sobriquet “Crusher”, bestowed by the media when she was a tough-talking cabinet minister in John Key’s government, but Kitten would be a more appropriate nickname as she allows herself to be browbeaten almost daily by Labour cheerleaders in the parliamentary press gallery.

Ah yes, the press. In a properly functioning democracy, the media can be relied on, when all else fails, to hold governments to account; but not in New Zealand in 2021. Ardern and her government get a free run from admiring journalists – many of them young and female – who are enthralled that their prime minister is internationally feted as a model leader by left-leaning papers such as the New York Times and the Guardian. The media’s capture by the woke left was never better demonstrated than when the country’s biggest print company devoted acres of newsprint over several days to a hand-wringing mea culpa for decades of supposedly racist reporting that marginalised Maori.  

None of the above conveys adequately the scale or force of the ideological tsunami currently washing over New Zealand. Other manifestations include the almost complete takeover of the public conversation by proponents of divisive identity politics; the vindictive daily denunciations of people whose opinions, until quite recently, were considered not only legitimate but mainstream; and the massive power grab by people who have reclaimed (or rediscovered) their Maoriness.

The danger is that most New Zealanders, being essentially passive, easy-going and good-natured, will ignore the tumult and just try to get on with lives – until they wake up one morning and realise that the open, tolerant and fair-minded society they grew up in has irrevocably changed. 

On moral panic and the Doomsday Clock

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, Stuff regional papers and Stuff.co.nz, February 5.)

There are two types of panic. There’s ordinary, everyday panic, and then there’s moral panic.

The first is the type that happens when you look out the window of your plane while flying at 30,000 feet and notice the wing has fallen off.

With this type of panic you either quickly recover once the danger has passed, or you face a genuine risk of death. If the wing of your plane has fallen off, it’s likely to be the latter.

The other type of panic, moral panic, is a socio-political phenomenon. It’s defined as a contagious fear that some hazard threatens social wellbeing.

A textbook example was the prohibition movement, which succeeded in having alcohol made illegal in the United States in 1920 and came very close to achieving the same result here. In fact moral panic over alcohol has never completely subsided and is complemented today by rising apprehension – encouraged by finger-wagging academics – over the food we eat.

A more recent moral panic involved fears of satanic sexual abuse in the 1990s, for which Christchurch childcare worker Peter Ellis paid the price with his liberty. Some people may even recall an outbreak of anxiety over the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which was suspected of messing with kids’ heads and promoting witchcraft.

No one ever died as a result of moral panic, to my knowledge, but it tends to stick around a bit longer than the type that occurs when a wing falls off.

One moral panic has been with us since 1947. That’s when a bunch of American scientists, concerned at the development of nuclear weapons, created something called the Doomsday Clock.

The Doomsday Clock is a metaphorical representation of how close humanity is thought to be to annihilation. In 1947 the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight, that being the hypothetical hour when the world would end.

Over the decades, the minute hand has moved back and forth in response to the supposed threat of nuclear war. In 1953, at the height of the Cold War, it was set at two minutes to midnight. A learned professor gloomily pronounced that with a few more swings of the pendulum, atomic explosions would strike midnight for Western Civilisation.

Well, we’re now one-fifth of the way through the 21^st century, and although the scientists keep adjusting the clock every January, I’m not sure that people take much notice anymore. This may be due to the fact that we’re all still here.

The truth is that the Doomsday Clock was never an objective scientific measurement, though its creators wanted us – indeed still want us – to think it is.

It was more a political device than a scientific one, intended to serve as a warning of what might happen if the White House or the Kremlin got trigger-happy.  But the people who occupied the White House and the Kremlin, for all their huffing and bluffing, were just as frightened of mutually assured annihilation as the rest of us, and always pulled back from the brink.

The Bureau of Atomic Scientists, which determines the clock’s setting, still insists nuclear war is a global threat, but it has struggled to sound convincing in recent years.

It’s true that the threat is still with us, but these days the most likely aggressor is not one of the great powers but the rogue state controlled by the unpredictable Kim Jong-un, and any nuclear conflict, horrific though the prospect is, is more likely to be containable rather than global in scale. (That's assuming Kim Jong-un is mad enough to use nuclear weapons. It's far more likely that he will use North Korea's nuclear capability to gain diplomatic leverage.) 

That’s okay though, because climate change – arguably the mother of all moral panics – has provided the keepers of the clock with another putative global threat to dramatise.

Accordingly, the minute hand has been moving steadily closer to midnight since 2007, when climate change first entered the scientists’ calculations. We were then said to be five minutes from global catastrophe, and in 2015 the ominously ticking hand advanced to 11.57pm.

We’re now told we’re just 100 seconds from midnight – the closest the world has yet come, if the Doomsday Clock people are to be believed, to the Apocalypse.

This theatrical announcement was given heft by a ceremony in Washington DC attended by several sainted figures of the global political elite, including United Nations human rights luminary Mary Robinson, former UN chief Ban-Ki Moon and former California governor Jerry Brown, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party.

Their involvement confirmed that while the Doomsday Clock purports to be based on science, it’s heavily overlaid with politics – which means that while we shouldn't disregard it altogether, it should be treated with much the same cautious scepticism as any other political exercise.

Does this mean we shouldn’t be concerned about climate change? Not at all. It would be silly and dangerous not to keep an open mind about climate change and its possible causes, and take sensible steps to mitigate it.

But we are entitled to be suspicious of what appear to be arbitrary determinations, often wrapped in statements that are more emotive than scientific, about the imminence of global catastrophe.

One function of moral panics, after all, is to convince people of the urgent need for political, economic or societal change which they might otherwise resist. There’s an old political axiom that you should never waste a good crisis.

Fortunately, age is a helpful antidote. The older you get, the more moral panics you’ve seen come and go.

The absolutism of climate-change ideologues

Letter-writers attacking me in The Dominion Post over the past few days have obligingly confirmed everything I’ve been saying about the climate-change zealots’ aggressive intolerance of dissent.

I said in my Dom Post column last Thursday (reproduced on this blog) that the ideology surrounding climate change was capable of being every bit as dogmatic and authoritarian as religious indoctrination, and my critics have done me the great favour of proving me right.

Two correspondents rebuked the paper for giving me space to criticise the recently announced propaganda package under which primary and intermediate school pupils will be subjected to a highly politicised and scientifically contestable syllabus covering climate change.

In the eyes of these dogmatists, the issue is settled and no dissent should be permitted. Their stance neatly demonstrates my point that climate change dissent is the new heresy.

Note that I say dissent, not denial. My column said nothing about whether climate change was real. In fact I’ve been careful to avoid denying it’s happening. But that didn’t stop my critics from charging me with being a denialist – a modern synonym for an enemy of the people, to use a phrase once popular with totalitarian regimes. Close your eyes and you can almost hear the click of Madame Defarge’s knitting needles and the rolling wheels of the tumbrels.   

It surely says something that a single, isolated newspaper column should arouse such an angry reaction, given that we're relentlessly bombarded almost daily with  stories and opinion pieces that overwhelmingly reinforce climate-change orthodoxy. The message is clear: any heterodox voice that challenges or even questions the presumed consensus around climate change is subversive and must be deterred. 

One letter-writer accused me of implying that the climate change programme is compulsory (actually I didn’t, but I confidently predict that many teachers, convinced they’re doing the right thing, will fervently embrace it) and went on to smear me by associating me with “the fossil fuel industry, National and other climate [sic] deniers”. In this person’s rigid, narrow and simplistic world view, there could be no other explanation for my stance than that I have secret allegiances and an ulterior motive. I can’t decide whether she was wilfully dishonest or just thick.

Another correspondent resorted to puerile, schoolyard-level abuse, calling me a dinosaur. That this bigot identified himself with the honorific “Dr” lends weight to the belief that whatever the requirements may be for the attainment of a doctorate, they don't include intellectual maturity or an open mind.

I should exempt from these critical comments a letter in today’s paper by former Labour MP Bill Sutton, who heartily disagreed with my column but avoided insult or misrepresentation. I should also acknowledge a letter from Graham Dick of Masterton (whom I don’t know, despite living in the same town), who correctly observed that what I wrote couldn’t be construed as meaning I was a denier; merely that I objected to the way climate change was being introduced to the school curriculum. Dick characterised the reaction to my column as hysterical and warned against “climate zealot theorists” infiltrating the education system. Amen to that.

Just for the record, I have an open mind on climate change. I remain open to persuasion that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly man-made. I can even sign up happily to some of the changes we’re being urged to make in the way we live, because they make sense to me regardless of whether we’re hurtling toward a global catastrophe. But I refuse to ignore the large body of evidence that contradicts the doom-mongers (for example, on rising sea levels), I refuse to ignore demonstrably dodgy pseudo-science, and I refuse to ignore the ideological agenda driving climate-change activists who have seized global warming as an opportunity to overturn the existing economic order.

If that makes me a sceptic, fine. Scepticism used to be regarded as indispensable in journalism and it’s an honourable attribute in science too, because the advance of science depends on scientists questioning existing theories. But as the letters attacking me in the Dom Post make clear, climate change is an absolutist ideology that demands 100 per cent buy-in. No deviation will be tolerated.

The education system's latest ideological project: the grooming of Greta Thunberg clones

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, January 23.)

There was a striking synchronicity in the timing of two of the New Year’s first political pronouncements.

On January 13, Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced that parents would in future be required to give written consent for their children to attend religious instruction classes.

This effectively signalled the end of religious teaching in state schools, since parents are far less likely to opt in than to opt out, as they are permitted to do now. RI classes will likely wither on the vine through lack of interest, which is Hipkins’ avowed intention.

The public response was so muted as to be unnoticeable. This may have been because most of the population was still on holiday and focused on other things – a factor the minister very likely took into account in the timing of his announcement.

But the public’s apparent indifference may also be explained by the fact that New Zealand is now an essentially secular society that quite reasonably sees no place in the education system for religious instruction. Only a small minority will lament its abandonment as a lapse into paganism.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and the government had a quasi-religious substitute locked, loaded and ready to fill the gap. January 13 was also the date on which the far more significant news broke that climate change is to become part of the school syllabus for Years 7-10 pupils, which means those aged between 11 and 14.

This was no sudden political impulse. The climate change curriculum (you can read it online) emerged fully formed, with the Greens’ fingerprints all over it. It was trialled at Christchurch’s South New Brighton School – an ideal test bed, since the school’s pupils have been primed with fears that their neighbourhood is at risk from rising sea levels.

Join the dots. Out goes religious instruction and in comes its secular substitute in the form of politically charged dogma surrounding climate change. The two announcements neatly complemented each other, serving as a kind of metaphor for wider political and social changes driven by the “progressive” Left.

And make no mistake: While purporting to be based on solid science, the climate change curriculum is heavily freighted with ideology and represents a world view that’s capable of being every bit as dogmatic and authoritarian as religious indoctrination.

It is quite explicit about its goal, which is to groom a generation of climate change activists. Apparently drawing inspiration from Greta Thunberg, the teaching resource is threaded with statements such as: “Climate change poses a severe threat to children’s most basic rights”.

It’s a piece of work the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own – one that targets malleable young minds in much the same way as the Hitler Youth did in the 1930s.

Guilt is an unstated sub-text throughout. The message is that earth has been put at risk through greed and complacency and we must act fast before the process becomes irreversible. Parents and grandparents can expect to be held to account for allowing this to happen.

In effect, schoolkids will be captive zealots in training. Indoctrination isn’t too strong a word for this, and it raises questions about the morality of using the public education system to impose adult anxieties and political convictions on the young. 

Again, the public response to the announcement was low-key, but that may change when children start coming home from school and badgering their parents to stop using the car and cut back on meat and dairy products, as the curriculum urges them to do; or when they start exhibiting symptoms of anxiety and depression, which the teaching resource acknowledges are possible consequences of heightened climate-change awareness.

Indeed, the curriculum seems almost to relish the prospect of impressionable pupils panicking over the prospect of an overheated, perhaps uninhabitable, world. The teaching resource is tinged with New Age gibberish about the need for children to explore their feelings – anger, frustration, sadness, fear – relating to climate change. Teachers in turn will be encouraged to listen, empathise and “reinforce the key message”. If that’s not indoctrination, I don’t know what is.

Valid scientific scepticism is caricatured as Donald Trump-style craziness. Nowhere in the teaching resource is there any acknowledgement that many of the statements it makes are scientifically contestable.

But this is where we have ended up. If climate change alarmism is the new religion, then scepticism – or denialism, to use the more damning term favoured by climate-change activists – is the new heresy.

There’s a disturbing whiff of totalitarianism in the way this secular religion permits no dissent. If you believe that it’s dangerous in a democracy to allow one view to hold complete and unchallenged sway, denialism starts to look like an honourable stance, purely on principle.

The rise of militant veganism

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, Oct 2.)

My wife and I don’t always agree about things; just choosing a paint colour for the bathroom can take months. But we celebrated a moment of instant accord over breakfast recently.

In front of us was a newspaper account of the black-clad vegan protesters who formed a line in front of the meat shelves in an Auckland supermarket. Shoppers who were prevented from buying meat reportedly lost their patience, lashing out at the protesters.

My wife’s reaction was the same as mine. We agreed that if we’d been there, we probably would have been among those doing the lashing out.

I respect the right of vegans to renounce meat, and I’m certainly not insensitive to concerns about inhumane treatment of animals. But protesters are inviting a backlash when they arrogantly assert the right to obstruct people going about their lawful business.

This has nothing to do with the respective merits of carnivorous and vegetarian diets. It’s a matter of respecting people’s right in a free society to make their own choices within the law.

The right to protest is an essential item in the democratic toolkit, and one I’ve taken advantage of myself. But I’ve never assumed that my beliefs were so sacred that they took precedence over the rights of others – which is why, although I marched against the 1981 Springbok tour,  I avoided taking part in protests that tried to prevent fans from getting to matches. It’s also why I get mad when I see activists trying to bar people from attending political events they disapprove of.

Unfortunately, the thing about zealots is that they become so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that it overrides all other considerations. Thus we are now witnessing the rise of militant veganism, as was evident in the meat section of the Countdown supermarket in the Westfield St Lukes Mall.

Food has been well and truly politicised, and with that has come a rising level of strident militancy – hysteria, almost – and denunciation of anyone who doesn’t fall into line with the “meat is murder” agenda.

It’s all part of the so-called culture war – the clash between traditional liberal values (and I mean genuinely liberal, as in tolerant of people who differ) and those promoted by the radical and increasingly assertive authoritarian Left.

A significant recent development was the convergence of two of the great secular theologies of our age: militant veganism and climate change alarmism. The two came together in fist-pumping union nine months ago with the publication of a report purporting to link climate change with supposedly unhealthy global food production systems.

There you have it: two moral panics rolled into one – pure gold for the ideologues who endlessly lecture us on the supposed failings of capitalism and Western civilisation.

Published in the British medical journal The Lancet, the report – written by a team headed by our own Professor Boyd Swinburn of Auckland University, a high priest of wowserism – claimed that food production systems, controlled and manipulated by profit-crazed global business interests, are not only driving climate change but propelling us toward early graves.

How this squares with statistics showing steady worldwide improvements in life expectancy wasn’t explained, but hey – why nitpick?

Swinburn and his accomplices even came up with a fancy new term for this looming apocalypse. They called it a Global Syndemic, or a “synergy of epidemics” interacting with each other to produce “complex sequelae” – a bit of Latin always looks impressive – which ultimately threaten the planet.

There should be no mistaking the purpose of such reports. They are aimed at frightening people into meekly accepting radical changes imposed by those who insist they know what's best for us.

Neither should there be any doubt about the real target of the reformist zealots. They may not say it in so many words, but their goal is to dismantle international capitalism. That’s the agenda that underpins almost all the moral crusades currently being waged in Western societies.

I recently watched the New Zealand-made documentary film Capital in the 21^st Century, which was inspired by a best-selling book written by the left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty.

The film is a very slick piece of propaganda. It uses every trick in the film-maker’s repertoire to convey the impression that greedy capitalism is responsible for pretty much everything that’s wrong in the world.

Of course capitalism is imperfect. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But like most works of propaganda, Capital in the 21^st Century is significant for what it chooses to leave out – such as the inconvenient fact that the world’s freest, most open and most prosperous societies all have capitalist economies. 

And here's the other thing: the film doesn't say what better system might be installed in its place. Either the crusaders against capitalism don't know, or they're not telling us. Either way, they're not to be trusted.

The voice of Western millennial entitlement

I happened to hear a BBC interview with the Swedish teenage enviro-wunderkind and media darling Greta Thunberg about her forthcoming trip to the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. (In case you haven’t heard, she’ll be crossing the Atlantic on a racing yacht so as to avoid leaving a carbon footprint.)

After discussing the privations of sailing on a yacht that doesn’t have a toilet (oh, the sacrifices this selfless girl is willing to make for the cause), the fawning interviewer asked what action Thunberg would be seeking at the UN.

The answer was revealing. “Our job is to demand the solutions, not provide the solutions,” Thunberg replied.

There you have it, really: the voice of privileged Western millennial entitlement. Don’t bore me with the practical realities that politicians have to grapple with. Don’t waste my time talking about the likely economic consequences of abandoning fossil fuels for unreliable renewable energy sources, or the downstream social impacts. Not my problem. Just fix it.

How Trump weaponised distrust of the US media - and how the media obliged him by playing along

(Published in the Manawatu Standard, Nelson Mail and other Stuff regional papers, December 12.)

Whenever I read something about Donald Trump, my eyes go straight to the credit line at the bottom of the story to see where it came from.

If it’s sourced from the Washington Post or the New York Times, I read it with a degree of scepticism. These once-great newspapers have dangerously compromised their credibility by allowing their almost obsessive dislike of the American president to contaminate their reportage.

This is made worse by their tendency to allow fact and opinion to become so entangled that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other starts. It’s open season on Trump, and many American journalists make it clear that they despise him.

And actually, I understand why they feel that way. I despise Trump too, and worry about the damage his presidency might do to America and to the world. He’s a man who appears to have no moral compass and no respect for the truth.

He has also, consciously and deliberately, made an enemy of the media. The terrible mistake made by news organisations such as the Washington Post and the New York Times is that they have been suckered into playing his game.

There is always tension in the relationship between politicians and journalists, but it’s usually kept under control by both sides. Not so with Trump.

He has weaponised public distrust of the media in much the same way as Robert Muldoon did in New Zealand 40 years ago. Trump knows, as Muldoon did, that it can be politically advantageous to portray the media as biased and elitist.

Trump plays this political card more blatantly and unscrupulously than even Muldoon did, repeatedly branding the American media as the enemy of the people.

Sadly, by buying into the adversarial relationship and adopting an openly hostile stance toward the White House, the media have perversely enhanced Trump’s political capital.

He can point to their antagonistic coverage as proof that the liberal media can’t be trusted to report things fairly and accurately. This played well to his supporters on the campaign trail in 2016 and it continues to play well for Trump now, because there will always be an element of the public that is prepared to believe the worst of supposedly elitist, out-of-touch reporters.

And it has to be said that many journalists are elitist and out-of-touch – especially in the US, where the big media organisations are headquartered far from the neglected heartland where Trump’s support base is located. That helps explain why the media so dismally failed to foresee Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

The best counter to Trump’s game, surely, is to do what reputable newspapers used to do as a matter of course: play it straight.

News columns are not the place for editorial opinion. They should be concerned only with detached, factual accounts of what Trump has said or done.

This doesn’t preclude journalists from documenting inconsistencies and obvious untruths, or from reporting the turmoil created by Trump’s erratic behaviour. Neither does it stop columnists and editorial writers from expressing themselves freely in opinion sections.

But tone is everything, and what passes for news coverage in papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times is often freighted with emotive rhetoric and laced with the reporter’s obvious contempt. In those circumstances, even readers who dislike Trump are entitled to wonder whether they are getting a reliable, unbiased account, or whether the media are reporting only what happens to align with their perception.  

Many liberal Americans share this concern. A recent programme on National Public Radio, which is anything but pro-Trump, attracted calls from listeners who called out media bias. As one said, “I think they [the media] have decided what’s right for everyone and think it’s their job to convince people.”

All of this leads me, in a roundabout way, to last month’s declaration by Patrick Crewdson, editor-in-chief of Stuff, that his organisation will no longer give space to the views of people he classifies as climate change sceptics and “denialists”.

Okay, the parallel with Trump isn’t obvious, but Stuff’s stance does raise a serious question relating to trust in the media.

When a news organisation decides to shut down dissenting comment on an issue as important as climate change on the basis that the debate is “settled”, it assumes a position of omniscience that will rankle with many readers. But far more importantly, it raises doubts in readers’ minds about its commitment to free and open debate.

I would have thought the media faced enough challenges in the current environment without incurring accusations of elitist bias. That threatens to take us into Trump territory, and who wants to go there?

Stuff appended the following editor's note to my column:

Stuff has not shut down discussion on climate change, but we will not provide a forum for its factual existence to be countered with fictions and call it "balance".

It added: Stuff accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by human activity. We welcome robust debate about the appropriate response to climate change, but do not intend to provide a venue for denialism or hoax advocacy. That applies equally to the stories we will publish in Quick! Save the Planet [a Stuff project highlighting climate change] and to our moderation standards for reader comments.

The scariest scenario of all

(First published in the Dominion Post, July 11.)

 

FOR ALMOST as long as I can remember, experts have been warning us to brace ourselves for catastrophe.

For decades it was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear obliteration that threatened us. In the 1970s we shuddered at the prospect of a nuclear winter, in which soot and smoke from nuclear warfare would condemn the planet to decades of frigid semi-darkness.

And who can forget the alarm generated by predictions that acid rain would denude vast areas of forest, kill marine life and even cause buildings to collapse?

Other recurring doomsday predictions revolved around over-population and famine. As it turns out, the world now has more obese people than malnourished – a fact that has given the experts something new to harangue us about. 

There have been other scares, too, including Aids and the Millennium Bug. It was seriously predicted that the latter would create universal chaos the moment the clocks ticked past December 31, 1999.

We’re still waiting for the grotesque mutations foreseen by opponents of genetic modification. And then there was peak oil, though the dismalists seem to have gone quiet on that too.

There are always experts loudly predicting the worst. But none of the above prophecies came to pass, either because they were scientifically unsound or greatly exaggerated to start with, or because human ingenuity and good sense intervened.

Even when terrible things have happened – such as Chernobyl and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – the eventual outcome has almost invariably been less apocalyptic than the prophets of doom foresaw.

In the circumstances, is it any surprise that people tune out when they hear the shrill cries of the global warming alarmists? The words “boy” and “wolf” come to mind.

The most worrying thing about global warming proponents is that many want to silence the other side – always a danger sign. They argue that because scientists who believe in climate change outnumber those who don’t, newspapers shouldn’t give space to sceptics.

The science is settled, the warmists cry. But back comes a quietly insistent reply: science is never settled.

Scientists have got it wrong before. There was a time when the overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion was that the sun revolved around the earth. You challenged that consensus at your peril, as Galileo learned.

For decades, physicists believed the expansion of the universe was slowing down. Now they have concluded that it’s actually accelerating.

So we need to leave open the possibility that experts can get things wrong, and we need sceptics to challenge established wisdom. The more we are panicked into believing we are at imminent risk from some existential threat, the more willing we are to allow “experts” and zealots to save us. And that’s the scariest scenario of all.

* * *

IN MY LOCAL medical centre recently I saw a sign in the men’s toilet reminding people to wash their hands. That makes perfect sense, except for one thing – it was in Maori.

Does this imply that only Maori need to wash their hands, or perhaps that only Maori need to be reminded to wash their hands? In either case, Maori would be entitled to take offence.

If neither of those explanations applies, then what’s the purpose? According to recent figures, only nine percent of Maori speak the language fluently. The rest wouldn’t have a clue what the notice says, were it not for an accompanying picture.

Virtually everyone, on the other hand, can read English. So wouldn’t it make more sense to have a notice in the language that everyone understands?

My medical centre shouldn’t be blamed for this patronising, expensive tokenism.  My guess is that the signs were issued by some useless but well-meaning government agency. It’s reassuring to know our taxes are being put to such good use.

* * *

A NOSTALGIC article in this paper recently reminded readers of how Rongotai Airport was built in the 1950s.

It involved flattening a substantial hill, moving 160 houses and bulldozing three million cubic metres of fill into the sea. Look at a photo of Evans Bay in the pre-airport era and it’s almost unrecognisable. It was a massive undertaking that completely reshaped the landscape.

I wonder how far the promoters of a project like that would get today. Not far, judging by the interminable delays faced by projects such as Transmission Gully, the Kapiti Expressway and the Basin Reserve overpass.

Few people would argue for a return to the development practices of the 1950s, when the Ministry of Works was all-powerful. But you have to wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far the other way, to the point where public interest considerations routinely get swamped by the cries of objectors.

 

 

 

 

Confessions of a dinosaur

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 8.)

My wife reckons that if I had been alive in 1893, I probably would have opposed women getting the vote.

Ouch. That’s a bit harsh. I would, of course, prefer to think it’s not true – but how can I be sure? It’s unknowable.

I have never thought of myself as sexist; quite the reverse. The people I most admire and respect have been strong women. I have never identified with the Kiwi bloke culture that thinks women should be kept in their place, whether it be the kitchen or the bedroom.

But as I say, who knows? My thinking has been conditioned by a century of liberal democracy. Attitudes were different in the 1890s and had I lived then, I might intuitively have been against such a radical change in the established order as votes for women.

My wife’s accusation arose in the context of Louisa Wall’s same-sex marriage bill. She supported it; I didn’t.

I didn’t exactly lie awake at night burning with rage over the bill, but it would be fair to say I was uncomfortable about it. I’m cautious by nature. I believe there are often good reasons why society has evolved the way it has over thousands of years and that we need to think very carefully before giving way to the fashionable impulse of the moment.

So, had I been an MP, I would almost certainly have lined up with those voting against the bill. But at the same time I could see that the arguments from the other side were hard to counter.

I realise too that human civilisation can’t always be relied upon to evolve in desirable ways, and that sometimes the status quo has to be overturned for society to progress.

There was a time when slavery was accepted as part of the natural order, and the brave minority who challenged it were seen as dangerous radicals. But who would now question the moral correctness of William Wilberforce and his followers?

The same could be said of any number of issues that once polarised conservatives and liberals, but which have now been settled.

To conservative white American southerners in the 1950s and 60s, civil rights for black people were unthinkable. Even more recently, white supremacists tried to justify the subjugation and oppression of the majority black population in South Africa. Anyone proclaiming such views today would rightly be regarded as some sort of Neanderthal.

Does same-sex marriage fall into the same category? We don’t know.  To use a cliché, the jury is out. Either we have made an awful mistake, or future generations will look back in bemusement and wonder what all the fuss was about.

In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama – a man who, because of his skin colour, would have been able to enter the White House only as a cleaner or butler if society had stood still – used the phrase “the wrong side of history” to describe those who are left behind by the currents of change.

Will people who opposed same-sex marriage be regarded in future as having been on the wrong side of history? It’s possible.

My wife’s accusation (it was a joke, but she was making a serious point) caused me to reflect on whether I’d stood on the wrong or the right side of history on other causes.

The first issue that came to mind was the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986. Although I didn’t march in the streets or attend rallies opposing it, I admit I was uncomfortable with that change too, which may seem extraordinary now.

Was I on the wrong side of history? Undoubtedly. I suspect hardly anyone now would seriously argue that homosexual acts should be treated as criminal. But at the time, it seemed a very big leap and the country was torn. The legislation eventually passed by only 49 votes to 44.

It would be unfair to characterise all opponents of Fran Wilde’s ground-breaking bill in 1986 as knuckle-dragging troglodytes, just as it was wildly inaccurate to portray those opposed to same-sex marriage (as National MP Maurice Williamson did) as bigots and religious fundamentalists.

On other issues, my record is mixed. I opposed the Vietnam War and the 1981 Springbok tour, which probably puts me on the right side of history.

I broadly supported the radical economic reforms of the 1980s, although I recall being apprehensive about the sheer scale and speed of the changes. Like many New Zealanders, I was probably so accustomed to living in an over-regulated society that the prospect of being liberated from all those suffocating state controls seemed almost scary. East Germans must have experienced a similar sensation when they were reunited with the West.

Here again I believe I was on the right side of history. What was then considered radical policy is now accepted as mainstream, although the Left continues to fight a dogged campaign of resistance. (Helen Clark pandered to the Left by referring to the failed reforms of the 1980s, but strangely left them intact.)

Nuclear weapons were the other great defining issue of that era, and while some anti-nuclear rhetoric verged on hysterical, I believed New Zealand was entitled to take the stand it did. In the end, it became a matter of asserting our right to chart our own course and resist bullying by bigger powers. That’s another tick for the “right side of history” box.

On some current issues we just don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong. The climate change debate, for instance, is so ideologically charged that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish propaganda from reliable science. 

Treaty settlements? Those who support them may yet turn out to be on the right side of history, provided settlement money is wisely used to raise Maori achievement levels, lift Maori out of poverty and contribute to economic growth. Ngai Tahu seems to be on the right track. But scepticism will persist if settlement proceeds are used to promote separatism and enhance the standing and power of tribal elites, as too often seems to be the case.

On the current issue of paid parental leave, it strikes me as contradictory that when so much has been done in the past 30 years to roll back the state’s intrusion into people’s lives, there is mounting pressure for it to assume the role of a super-parent.

On that issue too I’m sure to be seen as a social dinosaur, stubbornly resistant to progress. But at least my wife agrees with me.

 

Get used to it, Prof

People are such exasperating creatures. Why can’t they just accept what their betters tell them? That was the tone of an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report this week in which American biology professor Kenneth Miller bemoaned stubborn opposition in the United States to the teaching of evolutionary biology.

Even in New Zealand religious groups were encouraging resistance to evolutionary theory, the professor complained. Dammit, why must these people insist on defying the experts? It’s plain inconsiderate.

Asked by Geoff Robinson whether it really mattered, Prof Miller insisted it did, because if people rejected scientific consensus on fundamental matters such as evolution, it became easier to disregard scientific consensus on other issues such as (and I could see this coming) … climate change.

Sorry, Prof, but a free society allows people the right to disregard orthodoxies of all types. It’s downright subversive, I know, but there it is.

I don’t line up with creationists but neither do I trust academic zealots, who can be just as intolerant of dissent as the most rigid fundamentalists. The illustrious professor should get used to it.

Wallowing in death

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, August 3.)

YOU CAN SEE what Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell was getting at when he said teenagers who kill themselves shouldn’t be rewarded by having their lives “celebrated” on the marae.

It was a statement that caused pain to the families of young people who have taken their own lives. But desperate situations call for blunt speaking, and Mr Flavell was no doubt moved by despair at the high rate of youth suicide, particularly in his own Waiariki electorate.

He was also right to highlight the temptation for the young to glamorise death, whether it’s by suicide or other means such as car crashes. It’s not hard to imagine troubled teenagers regarding an emotional tangi as a suitably glorious end to an unhappy life.

But romanticising premature death is not a problem confined to Maoridom, or to those who kill themselves intentionally. Earlier this year I drove past a young Pakeha woman grieving at the foot of a power pole where her friend had been killed in a car crash a few days before. Flowers, balloons and scrawled messages – artefacts that are now de rigueur wherever young people have died tragically – had been left at the scene.

This has become a familiar pattern. On most weekends, somewhere in New Zealand, young people kill themselves in high-speed smashes. They are often drunk and not wearing seatbelts.

Invariably these tragedies trigger an extravagant public outpouring of grief. Friends gather at the scene, weeping volubly and clutching each other for support.

Tributes are posted on Facebook pages, usually written in the primitive sub-language favoured by texters and tweeters. “Luv u 4 eva,” they say – an emotion of no use to the departed, so presumably expressed purely for the cathartic benefit of the griever.

Public displays are part of the grieving ritual. The sorrow of the young woman I saw sobbing beside the road would have been no less real had she wept at home, but the death cult demands that people mourn conspicuously.

There is something unsettling about this death cult. While grieving for those who have died, the mourners are also celebrating the lifestyle that killed them – a lifestyle characterised by behaviour that invites disaster, such as drinking too much, driving too fast and not thinking very much.

Those who grieve for their friends wallow emotionally in death yet seem incapable of learning anything from it. You get the feeling that this week’s mourners could be next week’s victims.

* * *

I ASK YOU – who are the real deniers when it comes to global warming?

Climate change alarmists are fond of dismissing sceptics as denialists – a potent word, because people associate it with the lunatic fringe that insists the Holocaust never happened.

But who’s really running away from the climate change debate? Why, it’s the alarmists.

They don’t want to confront leading British climate change sceptic Lord Monckton on his visit to New Zealand because to do so might be seen as conceding that the other side has a case. That would never do.

The alarmists peddle the line that the scientific debate is closed – that all the facts are in, and to continue arguing the toss only gives credibility to the sceptics.

This is the basis on which the Greens and National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) principal scientist James Renwick have said there’s no point in engaging with Lord Monckton. In Dr Renwick’s words, “there’s nothing to debate”.

This overlooks the inconvenient truth that there remains a large body of reputable opinion that challenges the science behind global warming hysteria. Perhaps the alarmists think that if they ignore it, it will go away.

This to me is real head-in-the-sand denialism. If they are so convinced of their correctness, what do they have to fear from people like Lord Monckton?

The alarmists should be reminded of the poet Milton’s resounding call: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

* * *

ONE OF THE least surprising pieces of news in recent weeks was that ticket sales for the Rugby World Cup are running well below expectations.

The explanation is simple. New Zealanders love their rugby but are repelled by the greed and rampant corporatism surrounding this event.

They resent having to pay extortionate prices to see their own team play, especially when they are already generously subsidising the event as taxpayers and ratepayers.

They resent the state-sanctioned corporate bullying which sees the creation of Orwellian-sounding “clean zones”, patrolled by government enforcers, to ensure that the tournament’s big sponsors aren’t upset by competitors.

Their resentment deepens when they learn that even the cash-strapped St John’s ambulance service, which for generations has provided first aid for amateur sport, has to cover its own sponsors’ logos on ambulances and uniforms so as not to fall foul of “ambush marketing” laws.

They also see the game being corrupted by the intrusion of commercial agendas – such as the promotion of fluoro-coloured boots – that show no respect for the traditions of the national team.

They know the Rugby World Cup has precious little to do with the true spirit of the game and they are showing their disapproval in the most logical and forceful way – by staying at home.