In the UK, where tree cover is only 12% of the land, the Government has announced the start of a new West Country forest and plans to plant 20 million trees over the next few decades. This follows the successful Midland forest which planted trees in industrial wasteland to link of patches of ancient forest at a cost NZ$120 million over 30 years or NZ$4 million a year. Not a lot of money when spread over decades.
In 2014 a report by Maria Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations claimed that the world would run out of topsoil in 60 years which was pretty frightening and has largely been ignored.
In surveys people are very concerned about water quality both in the taps and in rivers, which is commendable, but our topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate and, as it only replaces at the rate of 2mm per thousand years, it has to be considered a none renewable resource, whereas we are not running out of water, we just have lots of it in the wrong place.
According to Government statistics New Zealand is losing topsoil at the rate of 192 million tonnes a year which works out at 7.16 per hectare every year, an incredible figure. As we move rapidly into a time when bigger storms will carry away our topsoil and drought will decimate our crops,  we need to repair the damage of the past and try to recover the original environment.
New Zealand is alone not in this as land is traditionally cleared by burning the bush, which is indiscriminate but get a quick result with the minimum of labour. Mauri cleared a lot of land but when the Europeans started with logging on an industrial scale and also sheep farming when at least 45 million acres of hillsides were burnt to accommodate 80 million sheep. The bare hills covered in erosion slips are clear to be seen today and are unlikely to be used again productively.​
Flat farmland is not the problem as it is either covered in grass for cattle or growing crops and we need the food farmers produce, and the solution is not in planting spruce or pine trees for carbon credits as the trees are felled in twenty years and the land open to erosion.
We need a programme for landowners where low productivity land can be taken out of production and planted with mixed native trees which will be there for centuries. Not necessarily in huge projects but including small patches that fill gullies and link to other woodland.
There is a huge amount of goodwill and enthusiasm for this type of project as we have seen from the John Key ‘Pest Free by 2050’. It may not be achievable, but it is making a huge difference to the wildlife. If we can do it with pests, we can do it with trees

A recent piece of research published in Science entitled ‘Abrupt sea level rise and Earth’s gradual pole shift reveal permanent hydrological regime changes in the 21st century’ by Luis Samaniego of Potsdam University, delves into the continuous circulation of water from the land to the oceans and has shown some alarming trends.
The basic circulation is well known but it requires accurate long-term records including sea level rise and terrestrial water storage including, aquifers, river flow, shrinking lakes and melting ice to understand how rising temperatures are effecting the moisture of the soil on a planet wide scale.
The research has shown a dramatic depletion of soil moisture which, in some areas, would require ten years of excessive rain to make good the loss, which is unlikely to happen.
The GRACE satellite program, which started in 2002, is a German built satellite funded and operated by NASA , is able to measure the changing mass of liquids and ice so that it can measure the reducing amount of oil in the Saudi oil fields, or the state of the Ogallala aquifer in the USA and the ice loss in Greenland.
What the research has discovered is that there has been a massive transfer of water from the land to the sea starting, most noticeably in 2000 when in two years there was a water loss of 1614 gigatonnes equivalent to 4.5 mm of sea level rise and, in an irregular pattern, this has continued. In the period 1993 to 1999 sea level was rising at 2.5 mm a year, during 2000 to 2010 the rise was averaging 3.4 mm a year, from 2010 to2021 it was 4.8 mm a year and in 2024 it reached an alarming 5.9 mm a year. Most of this came for water heat expansion and ice melting but the amount being lost from the land has alarming consequences in terms of drought and water shortages.
Water loss across the planet is not even, with places like the Central Plains of the US, the Amazon, China and central Asia suffering the worst but, surprisingly, Queensland, the West coast of India and some other areas gain water.
New Zealand is losing 192 million tonnes of topsoil each year, mostly from pastures where the land has been burnt off for sheep farming and land slips occur, and if you put that together with water loss due to heat and changes in rainfall our farmers are going to have a difficult time and we might wonder whether the planning of our reservoirs for drinking water are going to be sufficient, bearing in mind how far we are behind in our infrastructure.
Heavy rainfall and floods make good television, but drought is an insidious, long term, silent killer with failing crops, dying trees and drying rivers and lakes a steady reminder of the consequences.

CliEver since the IPCC started reporting on climate change and computer models have been forecasting the future they have consistently been wrong and the outcome has been worse than forecast.
As an example sea level rise was initially forecast to be in the range of 300mm to 900mm and now we are looking at up to 2200mm by the end of the century and that is without the collapse of the West Antarctic.
The problem has always been the lack of knowledge and the provable ramifications of change. Knowing the that Antarctic ice sheet has enough ice to raise sea levels by 60 metres means very little if it is going to take 1000 years. What we need to know is when are we going to get a sea level rise that will flood Aukland airport and cut Northland off from the rest of the country? Is it in the lifetime of our children or our grandchildren or is it sometime in the distant future?
The point we are reaching now is putting a scale to the sensitivity of the planet which can then express the outcome in time.
There are many scientists working on various aspects of climate change but Professor James Hansen, who is an atmospheric scientist, has been measuring various sudden planetary events, such as volcanoes, to measure the reaction of the planet to the sudden input of dust or water and the time it takes to recover to estimate the sensitivity of the planet.
His work on the sudden elimination from the atmosphere of sulphur by ships burning cleaner fuel is a measurable event and we have seen that sulphur has reduced from 11 million tonnes a year down to 2.5 million tonnes. The resulting measure of the suns heat to the planet from lower sulphur aerosols might be as high as 0.5 Watts per square metre, which is far higher than the current estimates of 0.05-0.15 Watts per square metre.
The current theory on the effects of the greenhouse gas CO2 is that a doubling of CO2 from 280 PPM to 560 ppm ppm ( we are currently at 427 ) would result in a temperature increase of 3C above 1880 levels while Hansen and colleagues say the increase would be 50% higher at 4.5C.
This is a very worrying scenario and there will be a lot of work done by the scientific community to prove or disprove his work.
At the moment we are due to hit an increase of 3.1C by 2100 but if the planet is 50% more sensitive than current IPCC projections then we could breach 3C by 2075 which is only 50 years away.
3C is a disastrous level of extra heat as it would mean a collapse of food production just as the worlds population is expected to reach 10 billion people. Not a good scenario.

​The European Space Agency has recorded January 2025 at a record 1.75 C above pre-industrial levels and, as there is no scientific consensus as to what is causing this sudden increase, there is substantial discussion amongst climate scientists.
James Hansen was a director of NASA climate research, and he has published papers showing that the unexplained part of the rise is due to a cleaner atmosphere, with less sulphur in it. This has substantially reduced the amount of cloud cover which reduces the reflection of sunlight and allows the sun to heat the land and the ocean.
This has caused some discussion from other scientists but Hansen has been proven right many times before and is probably right now.
Sometimes its easy to get lost in the detail of calculations and it can pay to go back to look at paleological records and se what happed the last time the planet was in a similar state with 400 + parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
New Zealand scientist, Tim Naish, of Victoria University is a geologist and has been researching Antarctica to discover what happened to the ice shelves, sea level rise and the temperature during the Pliocene period three million years ago, which was the last time the planet had 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.
He participated in the ANDRILL project that, remarkedly, took core samples from the seabed under the McMurdo Sound ice shelf and he and his team were able to study them, to work out what the climate was like. Sealife and detritus sink to the seabed and can be examined to deduce the conditions of the time. An ice free ocean would have sealife only found in an open ocean and other indicators such as pollen can indicate the temperature.
This showed that the ice had disappeared three million years ago and the temperature was in the range of 3 C to 8C warmer. The ice only recovered when the temperature reduced due to the biosphere locking up the CO2 in the soil and sea bed.
Having established a time period for this situation it was relatively straightforward to find places around the world to establish the height of the sea for that period and it was 21 metres higher than today.
For times les than 800 thousand years ago there are good records in ice cores taken from the 3 kilometre deep ice in Antarctica and these show how the planet has cycled though ice ages and brief warm periods every 125 thousand years. These show that in the last warm period, when CO2 was only 300 ppm, the sea level was 7 metres higher than today.
What is missing here is the sensitivity of the planet to change and here Hansen claims that the current climate models are much too conservative which is why they are consistently forecasting temperatures less than the consequent facts, even in the short time we have been conducting research.
 

A recent paper by Joseph Williamson  and colleagues published in  Royal Society Publishing  titled Clustered warming tolerances and the nonlinear risks of biodiversity loss on a warming planet, explains how plants and creatures are all affected by temperature and suffer equally in their region. This leads to a mass die-off of many different species all at the same time when critical temperature levels are reached.
Part of what the researchers were trying to discover was whether the die-off was a linear progression or whether it was when a critical temperature was reached and there was a mass collapse, as with a tipping point.
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There will be more research on the subject, but my personal reasoning is that 3C increase in temperature is sufficient change to kill most trees. It may kill many other things but in a world where all the trees die we are in real trouble. Clearly there are holes in that statement, but it is close enough to describe a world that is not as we know it, where the trees are dead and burning and agriculture is under severe threat, and that is not a pleasant thought.
The reasoned explanation for this is that the planet is divided into 180 degrees of latitude, 90 North and 90 South. If the temperature at the Equator is 25C and, at sea level at the Pole, it is -20C, then there is a convenient temperature range of 45C which means that the temperature changes by 1C for every 2 degrees of latitude. A degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles or 111 kilometres so every 222 Kilometres the temperature will change 1C and for 3C we need to travel 666 kilometres North or South.
​From Kerikeri in Northland, New Zealand it would take you down to Wellington or, from the South coast of the UK it would get you to Scotland, well North of Glasgow and in the USA from Washington DC down to Augusta in Georgia. Google Earth has a ruler to do instant measurements from near your home so its easy to check it out.
In the few times that I have checked this theory it has worked and, the trees in the new locality are very different from where I started, which simply shows that the trees where you started are not suitable in the new destination. Or, if the trees stays still and the temperature changes 3C the tree will likely die.
Another check is using altitude as with every 1000 metres of altitude gain the temperature drops 6.5 degrees Centigrade. If you go up a hill 500 metres the temperature will drop 3.25C and the vegetation will be different.
The scientist Steve Running does a very good lecture on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLL7t3tF7z8 which describes how the spruce trees are dying in Montana and helps explain why species of trees are dying from around the World.
Its pretty depressing but that what research shows us.

Back in 2012 James Hansen wrote a paper in which he said that the aerosols in the atmosphere, which include soot from burning coal, sulphur from burning oil and dust from farming, was cooling the planet by as much as 1.5C. In other words the temperature has risen by 1.5C, caused by the 420 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, but if we did not have aerosols in the atmosphere the temperature would have risen by 3C. This is an alarming statement and often derided by climate scientists, but Hansen has been proven to be right before and knows more about our planet’s atmosphere than most people.
I know from experience in the UK, how aerosols from aircraft making contrails can cloud the sky with a white haze and reduce sunburn and yet when I come to New Zealand with its clean atmosphere, I burn in twenty minutes.
Hansen wrote another paper in which he predicted that the planned reduction in sulphur in the atmosphere from the laws forcing shipping to burn cleaner fuel from January 2020 would increase the temperature by 0.2C.
Independent of this, the temperature in 2023 reached 1.5c above preindustrial levels and 2024 will probably clear 1.6C. Initially this was attributed to the El Nino but the rise was too big and so scientists are looking for other causes.
A recent paper shows that low clouds in the Northern oceans have reduced in 2023  and 2024 and the lack of bright reflective clouds has caused the sun to warm the oceans.  
Clouds are caused by moisture in the atmosphere and can coalesce around an aerosol of soot or sulphur and form a cloud droplet. For 200 years , as we burned copious quantities of coal and oil, we have benefited from increased cloud cover to keep the temperature down but now, as we clean up our polluting output, the sky is clearing, and we are beginning to experience the true effect of burning fossil fuels. This is what Hansen called the ‘Faustian bargain’ where, as we move to a cleaner energy, as we must, we experience the damage that we have already done.
Shipping is not the only cause of a cleaner atmosphere. The USA has reduced its reliance on electricity from burning coal from 51% to 10% in a decade, Europe is replacing coal, gas and oil as quickly as it can and the China has a massive amount of solar, hydro and wind energy and is cleaning up its cities very quickly and has already started to import less oil and coal.
New Zealand should be doing the same as we have a monthly oil bill of $1 billion dollars and if we concentrated on importing only electric cars busses and trucks we could halve that figure in five years which would save $6 billion a year.

Recent research published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, by Franz Philip Tuchen of  Earth Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA shows how the Pacific Equatorial currents have increased over the last three decades.
Using records from satellites, drifting buoys and moored buoys the researchers found that the increased speed of the trade winds across the Pacific along the equator in a westerly direction, from the South American coast towards the Philippines, increased the near-surface current  by 20% % and where it turns Northwards it has increased by 60% and the branch to the South by 20%. This near surface current extends down about 200 metres.
This increased wind speed drives the surface water towards an area in the West Pacific, between the Philippines and Australia, leading to weather events where the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and the increased heat of the sea can generate increased rainfall and more powerful storms.​
There is no indication at the moment that this increased activity is having an effect on frequency of occurrence of the El Nino/La Nina although these are difficult to quantify due to their irregular pattern.
When this information is put together with research on Southern Ocean winds which have increased in speed by 40% over four decades, we can’t help but wonder what is in store for New Zealand as these big changes must have a significant effect on the storms that hit the country.
The country’s Southerly location makes us vulnerable to powerful Westerly storms, which are becoming more frequent, but the Southern Alps give protection to the more densely habitated farming areas on the South Island Canterbury plain.
The top of the Noth Island is vulnerable to tropical storms coming down from the Pacific and we have had some bad flood events on the North Island East coast, where the clockwise rotation of a low-pressure storm has driven excessive rain events into Hawks Bay and Auckland but so far we have avoided a full blown tropical cyclone giving us a direct hit.
The movement of atmospheric circulation and the combination of high and low pressure systems are extremely difficult to predict in a climate model but the overall circumstances can indicate likely risks. Changes in water temperatures and wind patterns can have profound effects in regions far away from the causes and monsoons on which millions of people depend for their annual rainfall
As the oceans warm, they make more heat available to power tropical storms and the shifts in warm zones can change wind patterns which can cause droughts and atmospheric rivers such as a string of rain bearing systems coming in a long line from the Queensland vicinity and collectively flood our North East coast.
These events have been more pronounced in California where they have caused extensive damage but we have experienced similar smaller events here and we don’t want them becoming stronger and more frequent.
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The 2024 floods in Spain and storm Bert in the UK have highlighted how climate change is making storms considerably more extreme than they would normally be.
The obvious culprit would be that the planet has been at, or over, 1.5C warmer than the long-term average and probably warmer than the last 120 thousand years, but there are other factors at work that influence the weather in Europe.
In the last few years, a number of papers have been published that deal with the North Atlantic part of what is referred to as the Great Ocean Conveyor. This is a huge system circling the world, both on the surface and in the depths of the ocean and it distributes heat and nutrients around the globe.
The part of the Ocean Conveyor that is causing concern is the surface water that leaves the African coast, goes to the Gulf of Mexico and then passes between Florida and Cuba, up the East coast of the USA and then across the North Atlantic to Europe.


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This current is in two parts of which the major one is the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) and a smaller proportion is the Gulf Stream. The AMOC is a big wide current that reaches down 1000 metres and is the water that sinks into the deep when it reaches the Polar region, while the Gulf Stream spreads into a multitude of eddies and eventually sheds it heat to the atmosphere and the remnants head South down the Spanish coast.
A string of buoys has been measuring the Gulp Stream between Florida and Cuba and the current has reduced in speed by 4% in the last forty years.
The AMOC is measured by taking core samples from the seabed in the North Atlantic around Greenland, Iceland and Norway and this shows that the AMOC has reduced by 15% since the 1950’s.
Further evidence is the “cold blob’ or coller patch of the Atlantic just South of Greenland which indicates that the AMOC is not delivering as much warm water as it used to and the area is cooler. There is also the additional cold, fresh water flowing out of Greenland as the ice melts
The worrying part is that some recent research shows that, if the AMOC flow collapsed, it would cause a 40C drop in the temperature in Norway and a 5C drop in temperature in the UK.​
Although scientists are looking for a tipping point that would collapse the system for centuries, a 14% drop in the conveying of warm water from the Equator to Europe must have a detrimental effect on today’s weather and causing major storms.
There are other aspects af the changing weather pattern such as the slowing polar vortex which causes changes in the flow of weather or causes storms to stall, in position, and either create a drought or excessive rain and floods in this highly populated region. 

A 2024 report from Columbia University titled ‘Key Ocean Current Contains a Warning on Climate ‘by Kevin Krajick details a massive research project that took 40 scientists on a research ship in the Southern Ocean over five years, drilling the seabed for sediment cores and the research has taken another four years to publish so it is a massive undertaking.
The research team of 40 scientists used the Joides Resolution research vessel and they took sediment cores from seven locations in remote parts of the Southern ocean. The cores were 150 to 200 metres deep, and the record goes back about 5.3 million years. The core samples were examined carefully and showed that with a strong ocean current there were more large items of debris deposited and in a slow current smaller pieces were found as they could settle in the slower water speed. In this way they could correlate with other data such as the Andril project that collected 1250 metres of sediment cores with records that went back went back 20 million years. The Andril project was looking to see when the ice repeatedly disappeared from the Ross ice shelf which is all part of the same scenario.
The Southern Ocean is the biggest atmospheric and ocean system on the planet and yet, because of its remoteness and extreme conditions relatively little is known about it, so that if we are to get a proper handle on climate change, we need to understand the mechanism of the ocean and its relationship with Antarctica.
The Antarctica Circumpolar Current (ACC) travels uninterrupted around the world, from West to East (Left to right looking at it from the South pole using Google Earth) , driven by the powerful winds that blow constantly and the current reaches right to the bottom of the ocean. This is a massive current of water as it is mostly 3000 kilometres wide and 3 to 4 kilometres deep and moving at 4 kilometres an hour making it the biggest driver of the global conveyor.
​The wind driving the current has increased by 40% over the last 40 years but so far this has not resulted in an increase in speed of the ocean current as it takes a lot to move such a vast body of water, but it has increased swirls and eddies.
What the research shows is that as the planet warms, the speed of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current speeds up and as it cools the ACC slows down. When combined with other research, speeding up of the current coincides with the loss of the Antarctic ice shelves, which are melted from below by warm water being brought up from the deep by the increased wind and currents.
Looking at Antarctica on Google Earth it is apparent that the Weddel Sea ice shelf is protected by being downstream of the West Antacrtica peninsular, while the Ross ice shelf is more exposed and will suffer melting sooner, which is exactly what is happening.

James Hansen of Columbia University is probably the leading scientist who alerted the world to climate change. He initiated a NASA project to investigate the atmosphere of Venus but when the satellite was on its way he realised that we did not know enough about the climate of our own planet so he resigned from the project and started studying Earths global warming and has been publishing papers for thirty years.
His latest paper released on 14/06/2023  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/ElNino2023.14June2023.pdf discusses the coming El Nino and the current conditions that combine to make it very concerning. Much of Hansen’s work is on the biosphere and the thermal balance that measures how much heat from the sun is captured to create global warming.
The Earths atmosphere is a big and complicated subject but there are certain events that alter the atmosphere and can be measured and one of these was the Pinatubo volcano that erupted in 1991 the second-largest eruption of the 20th century. The ash plume height reaching more than 40 km (28 mi) high and ejecting more than 10 km3 of magma and the ash plume, plus the sulphur, cooled the planet by a global decrease of about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F).
The ash and sulphur in the atmosphere reflect the suns heat back out into space and cool the planet counteracting the CO2 that is warming the planet. The ash and sulphur are described as aerosols and they are not the only ones that help cool the planet. Coal fired power stations, dust from farming, industrial activity and jet planes are also contributors and as we switch to cleaner forms of energy, we reduce their cooling effect and it is this that Hansen describes as a Faustian bargain, and he suggests that a significant payment in accelerated global warming is now coming due.
Although we are most concerned about the atmosphere, 90% of the heat from the sun is absorbed into the oceans and here we have a fleet of 3500 Argo floats which are spread around the world’s seas and measure temperature and salinity of the top layer of the sea. They have a pattern of sinking one kilometre and stay there for ten days to get an idea of current flow and then they dive to two kilometres before coming to the surface to send the data to a satellite in space and then relayed to the Argo project.
Measuring the combined results of the Argo float from 2005 to2015 shows an energy imbalance for the planet of +0.71C watts per sq. mt but this has risen to +1.18C wattspsqm in the last decade but +1.33C Wpsqmin the last four years.
Hansen admits that there are many complex forces at play but the underlying figures show that we are in a very bad position with global warming and if we get a strong El Nino it may very well be much worse than predicted and go well beyond the 1.5C forecast.

A recent report in Nature Communications entitled ‘Observationally-constrained projections of an ice-free Arctic’ shows that even if we manage to curb our burning of fossil fuels to a moderate level we will still have an ice free Arctic ocean as early 2030 and almost certainly within the subsequent twenty years, to 2050. This is considerably earlier than the IPCC report which were estimating somewhere between 2080 and 2100.
The IPCC reports are the gold standard on climate research but their failure is that the report is made from almost every country on the planet and many of the countries have big oil and coal industries including the USA, Australia and Russia and they will not allow a report that impacts their industries adversely.
Being close to the heavily populated areas in the northern hemisphere the Arctic is one of the most comprehensively monitored regions on the planet and we have good satellite observations for some forty years. Climate models are becoming increasingly accurate and the Korean researchers combined the observations from several satellites and used three different models and no doubt a very powerful computer to crunch the data to get a series of results and they all came out with essentially similar results.
A Blue Ocean event in the Arctic would be a massive milestone to the planets climate as we have already lost 40% of the sea ice and it is influencing the weather of the USA, Europe and Asia by changing the polar vortex and bringing extremes of weather. As the ice disappears the dark blue ocean absorbs the heat from the sun and raises the temperature of the region.
The atmosphere to the top of the troposphere is higher at the equator than it is at the poles because the air is warmer at the equator and consequently thinner and to get a barometric pressure of 1000 millibars you need a higher amount of air than you do at the cooler poles.
In the stratosphere air flows from a high point at the equator towards the lower level at the poles and because of the spin of the planet the upper winds flow from the west to the east in a circular ring at 60 to 80 degrees of latitude in both north and south hemispheres.
If there is a good differential of temperature the Vortex flows in a steady ring but as the poles warm faster the differential gets smaller and the Vortex slows down and starts to wonder in big loops. It can also stall so that there is no progression of weather. The problem here is that if you have a rainy wet event it can stay for days or weeks and cause a serious flood. An extended dry period will become a serious drought and cause massive bush fires that burns thousands of acres of land.
These events are already happening increasingly more frequently with only a 40% loss of ice and we don’t want a milestone event like a Blue Ocean. 

The recent flood in Nelson and the other floods on the West coast illustrate how our weather has changed due to climate change and yet we have only increased the temperature by 1.1C whereas we are expecting 1.5C or even 2C within fifty years.
With the benefit of apps which show the weather pattern for the whole of the West Pacific it is possible to get a good overview of the what caused the flooding on the West coast of the South Island.
The warm, moisture laden weather originated near the equator and came in a stream down to New Zealand. We have had many tropical storms or cyclones come down from that region and we have been very lucky that most of them miss us but, of course this last event hit Nelson and had devastating results.
Using the website  https://earth.nullschool.net/ it is possible to see the satellite information for the whole world in real-time and get an overview of what is happening.
This last storm came down in a narrow line and missed Northland and Auckland by about four hundred kilometres but what if it had hit Auckland which has a population of 1.3 million people?
A quick look at Auckland Councils flood mapping https://geomapspublic.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/viewer/index.html  which is similar to our FNDC flood maps shows that there is an alarming amount of infrastructure, South of the bridge that is susceptible to flooding including Auckland airport, motorways and housing. Spending a bit of time looking at the flood maps with overlays that include flood prone areas, flood plains and overland flow paths I would suggest that thousands of houses will be flooded and this is not sea level rise, which is pretty bad, but rainfall.
The reason Auckland is so important to us is that it is one third of our economy and if it is incapacitated, we all suffer economically.
Damaging floods vary considerably from area to area so that Nelson has devastating floods with 271nn while Kerikeri had 209mm with minimal damage in the same period. This is because Kerikeri is accustomed to heavier rain storms, it is hilly and drains quickly and a major factor in flooding is the rate at which the rain falls.
My website http://climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/   explains how the rate at which rainfall causes floods but if Kerikeri floods at a rate of 25mm and hour I suspect that Auckland would flood at only 15mm an hour because it is so flat and there is nowhere for the water to drain away quickly.
The main point is that we can’t rely on what has happened in the past to predict the future but must build and protect for what is likely to come and, as we are finding, it is becoming very urgent and very expensive if we do nothing.
In the upcoming Mayoral elections, the contenders are talking about making millions from developing the waterfront but nobody is looking at the risks the city is facing. 
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​COP stands for the Conference of Parties which is a United Nations organised project to bring the world’s countries together and find a global consensus into solving the problems of climate change. The science shows us, and the worlds countries agree, we are heading towards a massive destruction of our civilisation unless we can stop burning coal, oil and gas and get our energy from greenhouse gas-free sources.
We have now had 27 meetings since the first in 1995 and are beginning to get some recognition that the problem is real and that it is cheaper to fix the problem than have to pay for the damage from the problems we are causing.
The problem is that the richer, CO2 production countries, such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Russia and the middle eastern countries send teams of lawyers and politicians to defend the money these countries make from the sale of fossil fuel products and these are also among the richer countries that donate money to the poorer countries that are going to suffer huge problems.
The COP27 meeting that has just concluded, managed to agree to provide a fund that would help the nations most likely to be affected by climate change and these would be, typically, the Pacific Island nations that are going to be flooded by sea level rise or the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is the first time that the consequences of burning fossil fuels and producing CO2 has been recognised as a serious danger so that, despite my pessimism, the worlds countries have made a common agreement to acknowledge the problem and signed a declaration to do something.
COP27 had a massive participation by the oil and coal lobbyists, which is where the abundance of jet planes delivering executives came from, and it was reported that their number exceeded those from the ten smallest nations. There are powerful forces at work and we were lucky that Biden was the President of the USA, that Russia was disgraced by the Ukraine invasion and Australia has a new government.
This type of negotiation is a slow and painful business but the UN is the only way to get the 193 recognised countries in the world to work together for a common good. The internet has made the world a more connected place and, despite the explosion in alternative facts, a science-based approach prevails. The USA pulled out under Trump but the people of the USA threw him out and a similar fate befell the Liberal government of Australia.
Our form of democracy is not adopted by China but the government has to deliver benefits to the people or they will rise up, just as Mao did, and the results can be catastrophic to the leaders. Killing citizens as Iran and Myanmar do to keep in power is not an option against 1.3 billion people so a form of democracy exists even in China. 

Recent research by NASA, published in Nature, Climate change, shows that insects will decline by 65% over the next 50 to 100 years if the temperature continues to rise as forecast. The scientists built a model based on what is known about the climate and then introduced insects that has actual research on their behaviour under increasing temperature conditions.
Many insects are in decline due to the destruction of their habitat, such as frogs disappearing due to wetlands being drained, but there is also research that shows a decline where the habitat is unchanged. An example would be some Monarch butterflies who live at higher altitude where their habitat was intact and yet their population still declined as the temperature increased.
At typical scenario would be that prolonged exposure to temperatures outside the creature’s critical thermal maximum would increase deaths and push their numbers below replacement rate leading to a steady decline.
Humans are warm blooded mammals and can survive in a wide range of temperatures by adjusting diet or habitat. Insects are cold blooded and, largely do not have the luxury of travel or the ability to change diet.
There are already many studies showing a serious decline in insect numbers but most research is short term and does not have the luxury of going back 50 years or more and insects are not a glamourous subject like lions or polar bears so funding for research is scarce. It is also not helped that we spend most of our time trying to kill insects in agriculture and in the home which makes the concept of protecting insects a difficult thing to grasp.
However, insects are vital to out survival as they pollinate our crops and without them our farming of crops for food would not be possible. Living in a horticultural region we are already familiar with the practice of introducing bee hives to a kiwi fruit orchards to pollinate the fruit flowers but if we had to do it to fields of wheat the immense scale would make it impossible.
Of the 550 gigatons of biomass on Earth most are plants and bacteria, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons.
While humans are statistically a tiny part of the planet’s biomass, there are 8 billion of us and we are rabid devourers of the planets resources and have a profound effect on the environment by draining wetlands, keeping vast herds of animals for food, shifting millions of tonnes of rock and soil for mining, agriculture, roads and buildings. Most importantly we have already raised the temperature of the planet 1.1 C and with an additional 1.4 C or more to come.
The UN, COP27 meeting in Egypt is supposed to solve this problem but it looks very doubtful.  
 

An epoch is a period where geological evidence of activity on the planet can be clearly seen in the layers of rocks. To put time into context the previous geological period was the Pleistocene epoch which lasted from 2.5 million to 12,000 years and was noted for its succession of ice ages and warm periods which cycle every 125,000 years. During the warm periods it was roughly the same temperature as today and 5C colder in the more common ice ages and the sea level would have ranged over 125 metres as water was locked up in ice or melted back into the oceans. CO2 levels ranged from 180 parts per million in an ice age to 280 ppm in a warm period. Evidence of this activity is clearly shown in rock and silt samples.
The Holocene epoch about 12,000 years ago during which the temperature has not varied more than 1 degree centigrade, CO2 remained at 280 ppm and sea levels have been very stable. It was during this period of stable temperature that humans flourished and spread further around the world and we have recorded history for most of it confirmed by archaeological digs.
Humans have always burnt the bush to regenerate plant growth and to make space for hunting and gardens and as this timing coincided with the Holocene epoch, I have always considered that the Anthropocene epoch commenced 12,000 years ago and that the two were the same. If it walks like a duck, it swims like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it’s a bloody duck. But apparently that’s not the case.
In order for the Anthropocene to be considered as a separate epoch there needs to be evidence in the layers of soil which can be clearly seen in thousands of years’ time. The whole process has to have evidence presented to a geological committee of peers and the evidence carefully considered before a decision is made.
Getting facts together indicates a start time of 1950 (when I was 10 years old) and this is because that was when modern human activity really took off. This is when the population expanded, water use and fertiliser use increased, ozone depletion started, there was an increase in floods, a big increase in paper production and car numbers, international tourism started and loss of the rain forests.
This activity is clearly shown with radiation dust from atomic bomb testing in the 1950’s, evidence is also in ice core samples with layers of carbon each year from burning coal and oil, evidence is in the sediment of ponds showing an increased number of floods and in the ocean floor with a layer of plastic.
Our activity is clearly shown in the samples taken from sites all round the world and we have changed the planet in ways that could not be anticipated when I was a boy and we really are in the Anthropocene epoch.