A report on research by scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal drew some interesting conclusions about where climate change is heading.
The problem starts with the old story about a butterfly’s wings fluttering in the Amazon can affect the weather a continent away which is of course an exaggeration but to a degree that is what happens.
Mathematicians are constantly working with weather forecasters to develop computer models which take what is known about atmospherics and applies it to a detailed weather map complete with atmosphere pressure gradients and fronts. In its simplest form this would give a forecast for two or three days ahead but farmers, fishermen and many other industries and people are looking for longer periods.
If the old forecast used detailed information in squares of the earth surface which are 100 kilometres on each side, then to achieve a longer range forecast more information is needed and by the use of satellites, weather buoys, aircraft, ships and automatic weather stations forecasters are able to get squares down to one kilometre on each side. This is 10,000 times as much information and with all the information and calculations it requires some of the biggest computers on the planet.
Even this is not sufficient because there are slightly different ways of calculating weather which might give different emphasis to pressure, or clouds or wind strength or the upper atmosphere and so the forecasters might run fifty or a hundred different models to see what the differences are. If thirty say a different outcome is expected then that can be taken into account and a warning given.
If more information is available, say down to 250 meters on each side of the square, as it might over land where there are a lot of stations, then fuzzy logic can be applied. This is when the extra information taken into consideration in the main program but it becomes so vast that this entails leaving some of the information out so that fuzzy logic fills in the gaps.
Weather forecasts are not the same as climate change predictions but it does entail vast amounts of information being applied to known laws of physics and chemistry and what has happened in the past and then run foreword into the future and this gives us a fairly good idea of the future.
What the Porto scientists did was used was used phase transitions which is where a material, such as water behaves in a certain way when as a liquid but behaves differently when it becomes a gas after evaporation.
When this is applied to climate change the world is predictable to a certain point, like an increase of 3C, but then it swings violently and chaotically into severe storms or drought, and then returns to near normal for a while.
These swings are triggered by tipping points and when they are exceeded nothing is predictable again and the climate performs in a chaotic pattern which is outside our forecasting and comprehension. 

​Back in the 1990’s there was a lot of discussion about Peal Oil and how we would manage without our main supply of energy. Peak oil was supposed to happen in about the year 2000 and we waited for the crash but it never happened, or did it?
Conventual, easy to extract, cheap oil did diminish almost everywhere, except the Saudi reserves and we are not even sure about that, and for many years around 2010 we were burning oil at a higher rate than we discovered new sources but two things happened that hid the problems. These were the discovery of fracking practices in the USA which enabled the extraction of shale oil and propelled the USA into, once again, the biggest producer in the world, and the abundance and increasing use of gas.
A new book ‘Disruption. Hard Times in the 21st Century’ by Prof Helen Thompson of Cambridge University examines how the three pillars of Energy, Economics and Democracy are all intertwined and shape our macro world.
We all know that oil is a finite resource and we must run out eventually but because there are such huge finances involved in the production of oil and the massive economic and political consequence of every country that flow around it, that it is difficult to get real facts.
Russia produces about 14% of the worlds oil and gas supplies and supplies much of Europe’s supply of gas through pipelines that go through Ukraine but Germany and Russia have been building new pipes that go through the Baltic to reach Germany. The invasion of Ukraine has stopped that and now Europe realises that Russia is and unreliable trading partner and has declared policies that speed up the development of renewable energy and nuclear to reduce its dependence on Russia. This also brings forward the conversion to an electric economy which was bound to happen eventually anyway.
While all this happens the oil and coal industries, who have been a huge part of the worlds economy for a hundred years, are now having to relinquish this power to the new renewable energy companies which are much more scattered and located in each country independently.
New Zealand is typical of this shift in energy with an abundance of solar, wind, geothermal and hydro much of which is already in production. Rio Tinto at Tiwai point in Gore use 13% of our electricity production and get it really cheaply by threatening to leave but it might be better to let them go and use the electricity to start a hydrogen plant which we can then, either, use the hydrogen or export it and give the workers new employment.
This whole transition is going to be very disruptive as the power base of oil producing countries diminishes and new countries arise. The oil companies are not going to go quietly and will use their political clout to disrupt our democracy. This is not over by a long way.

Back in the 1990’s there was a lot of discussion about Peal Oil and how we would manage without our main supply of energy. Peak oil was supposed to happen in about the year 2000 and we waited for the crash but it never happened, or did it?
Conventual, easy to extract, cheap oil did diminish almost everywhere, except the Saudi reserves and we are not even sure about that, and for many years around 2010 we were burning oil at a higher rate than we discovered new sources but two things happened that hid the problems. These were the discovery of fracking practices in the USA which enabled the extraction of shale oil and propelled the USA into, once again, the biggest producer in the world, and the abundance and increasing use of gas.
A new book ‘Disruption. Hard Times in the 21st Century’ by Prof Helen Thompson of Cambridge University examines how the three pillars of Energy, Economics and Democracy are all intertwined and shape our macro world.
We all know that oil is a finite resource and we must run out eventually but because there are such huge finances involved in the production of oil and the massive economic and political consequence of every country that flow around it, that it is difficult to get real facts.
Russia produces about 14% of the worlds oil and gas supplies and supplies much of Europe’s supply of gas through pipelines that go through Ukraine but Germany and Russia have been building new pipes that go through the Baltic to reach Germany. The invasion of Ukraine has stopped that and now Europe realises that Russia is and unreliable trading partner and has declared policies that speed up the development of renewable energy and nuclear to reduce its dependence on Russia. This also brings forward the conversion to an electric economy which was bound to happen eventually anyway.
While all this happens the oil and coal industries, who have been a huge part of the worlds economy for a hundred years, are now having to relinquish this power to the new renewable energy companies which are much more scattered and located in each country independently.
New Zealand is typical of this shift in energy with an abundance of solar, wind, geothermal and hydro much of which is already in production. Rio Tinto at Tiwai point in Gore use 13% of our electricity production and get it really cheaply by threatening to leave but it might be better to let them go and use the electricity to start a hydrogen plant which we can then, either, use the hydrogen or export it and give the workers new employment.
This whole transition is going to be very disruptive as the power base of oil producing countries diminishes and new countries arise. The oil companies are not going to go quietly and will use their political clout to disrupt our democracy. This is not over by a long way.

​​In 1998 a mathematics graduate, Irakli Loladze, was in a biology laboratory at Arizona State University when he observed an experiment where a test tube of algae, which are the very base of the food chain and are fed upon by zooplankton, was exposed to extra light. This stimulated the growth of the algae and the zooplankton in the experiment thrived and multiplied on the new algae growth but after a while the zooplankton started to struggle and would not thrive.
This was the start of a puzzle that took years to gain interest for research but which eventually led to a very disturbing conclusion finally published in Nature entitled ‘Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition’.
The conclusion of the research was that, although CO2 stimulated plant growth, the plant had a higher level of carbohydrates but a lower level of micronutrients like zinc, potassium and iron which are vital to health.
The World Health Organisation reported that although malnutrition world wide had reduced by 15% the overall picture was not so good which led to the following statement. ‘Today, nearly one in three persons globally suffers from at least one form of malnutrition: wasting, stunting, vitamin and mineral deficiency, overweight or obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases.
This is a condition called ‘Hidden Hunger’ where we are missing the essential building blocks of life. For many of the poorer nations, where people are on a mainly plant based diet, a deficiency can have fatal results. 
Research on the subject is complicated because there are many factors at play that can reduce micronutrients such as deficient minerals in the soil from relying on artificial fertilisers, new strains that emphasise bigger growth of the crop and elevated levels of CO2 which stimulate growth and the glucose content of plants.
Research has been split into two eras, 1850 until today when CO2 grew from 280 parts per million to the present at 420 ppm, and from now until mid-century when CO2 is expected to reach 550 ppm.
One experiment in the USA, on the earlier period, used the wild plant Goldenrod where there were old samples of seeds and it had not been modified. Goldenrod flowers late in the summer and the bees use the pollen as a store to see them through the winter. The results showed a decline in nutrients of one third which might explain a poorer survival rate of bees through the winter.
Experiments that compare plants grown to day with CO2 at 400 ppm and with CO2 at 550 ppm show elevated growth, increased hydrocarbon content and a reduction in micronutrients of 10% to 15%.
In New Zealand where we have plenty of good food available it emphasises how important it is to have a balanced diet and just eating plenty does not guarantee good health and how important it is to look carefully at the contents of food and include plenty of green vegetables and adequate portions of dairy and red meat.  

We are all familiar with the way that we are changing the atmosphere by burning huge quantities of oil and coal and by doing so creating a greenhouse gas that is warming the planet but we are not so familiar with the way that the excessive production of the fertilisers, nitrogen and phosphorous, are altering the growing cycle in the wider environment.
Although nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere in its gaseous form it can not be used by plants and so needs an intermediary process to transfer it to the soil.
The various natural way of transferring atmospheric nitrogen to the soil where plants can use it is by lightning strikes, the breakdown of rocks by frost, erosion and glaciers, plus the growing of legumes.
With broadacre crops such as wheat and maize, nitrogen is an ideal fertiliser and in 1909 the Haber-Bosch production used nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia which could then be used to deliver nitrogen to the fields.
There is no doubt that the production of ammonia and by extension nitrogen in huge quantities has increased food production many times over and moved many countries into self-sufficiency for food and massively reduced starvation.
The downside of nitrogen is that we produce over 100 million tonnes of synthetic nitrogen annually and only 50% is absorbed by crops and the rest is washed into the rivers and streams. This causes streams and lakes to develop harmful algae which steals the oxygen and kills aquatic wildlife.
Farmers are aware of the problem and are being more careful with the application of fertiliser and also aware that continuous use of nitrogen to stimulate growth depletes the natural minerals and fibre in the soil and they are moving towards the use of legumes and clovers to fix nitrogen in the soil and slowly regenerate the soil. Farmers are also reserving a riparian margin on the streams and planting trees to filter out nutrients and eroded soil to protect the stream and improve water quality. The trees also provide shade and keep the water cooler.
There is also a problem in that modern varieties of crops such as a short wheat and most modern varieties of vegetables have a lower content of minerals compared with the traditional old varieties. Farmer are paid by the weight and the look of their produce and not by the nutritional value of the food they produce so it is possible for apparently well-fed people to suffer from nutrition starvation.
On the upside there are huge improvements that can be made for more efficient food production so that we can use less land to feed our growing population and clean our rivers to make a better world. Scientific research can point the way to avoid disasters but as we have seen from climate change, businesses and politicians often prefer to take the money and forget about the future.
here to edit.

 Let me say straight away that I am not a vegetarian, although I eat less red meat than I used to, and I am not anti-farmer as I fully appreciate that farmers provide the food that sustains us, especially the big farms that provide us with cheap food. I also appreciate that farmers cannot manage huge acreages without the use of crop protection chemicals and fertilisers.
A recent report showed that of all the mammals on the planet, farmed livestock makes up 60%, humans 36% and wild animals just 4%. There is much more living matter than mammals, but it does highlight the huge number of livestock need to provide part of our diet and the massive impact this is having on the planet. We can’t do much about the number of humans, which at the moment stands at 7.7 billion and is due to peak at 10.9 billion people later in the century. Put together with climate change we need to do something about the burden we are putting on the resources of the planet.
In the wealthier countries people consume animal products to get protein as this is a quick and easy solution to a healthy diet but it is a very inefficient method. Effectively we put a cow in the field to eat tonnes of grass and then we eat the cow. The problem is that the cow has to eat 24 calories of food for us to get one calorie in return, pigs need 15 calories and chickens about nine. It also takes 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef.
Taken all together it shows that farming animals to get food is a very inefficient way of sustaining our diet and the time may come in the not to distant future when it will have to change, or it may be that, just like wind and solar electrical energy, the new sources are cheaper and cleaner and there is a market led change.
Scientists can analyse the nutrient content of meat and reproduce it as nourishing food and there are big strides being made in making it palatable and acceptable. The most likely type of alternative beef to be accepted is probably the minced beef we have in burgers and sausages but at the moment they are either expensive or not acceptable in taste. This will change suddenly when someone gets the formula right and commits to the volumes of production needed to get the price acceptable.
Milk is another product where alternatives are becoming available and oat milk is a good substitute for full cream milk in cereals or coffee. At the moment it is roughly the same price as cows’ milk but again, someone will get the price and volumes right and there will be a big change.
If we can get the formula right and make the change it will solve many of our water supply and quality problems and get us on a more sustainable path.
 

Predictably for 2021 the main thrust of the Labour budget follows the theme of Wellness and dealing with Covid with not a lot left for dealing with climate change. An allocation of $300 million is allocated for decarbonising the economy but the details of how it is spent will be critical. The plan for upgrading Scott base and converting schools that use coal for heating to a cleaner system is helpful but it pales into insignificance compared to converting our transport, which produces 47% of our emissions, to renewable home-produced electricity. 

​To give an idea of the scale of the problem, if we are to convert our car fleet to electric in thirty years, we need to import 70,000 battery powered cars a year. Its not expensive as we buy 100,000 petrol cars every year but we need a financial environment to achieve the changes as the upfront purchase price of an electric car is higher than an internal combustion engine vehicle. Batteries are coming down in price at the rate of 8% a year and should reach parity with ICE cars within three to five years but the market needs some short-term help to get the numbers up now.
​​A billion dollars on our ancient railway system will help improve or infrastructure but will it help with climate change? Our existing rail stock burns diesel and changing to electricity powered engines would be a game changer. Putting heavy transport on the rail separate this traffic from cars and saves lives and the cost of repairing roads from this heavy wear.  
New Zealand is starting from a reasonable position with each person producing 8 tonnes of CO2 a year which is similar to Europe and China and considerably better than Australians and USA citizens who are over 16 tonnes but we are not improving our position.
New Zealand has 2.5 gigawatts of wind farm energy consented, which is equivalent to two and a half Huntley power stations, but we do not need the energy because we are not using electricity for transport and instead we import $5 billion of oil a year. A few tweaks to our car import tax and GST could swing the purchase of cars to electric and we would be on our way.
We are burning coal at the Huntley power station because the climate induced drought means that our hydro dams are running out of water. We should have financial concessions for rooftop solar to boost home installations and save our hydro power for peak power when demand is greater than solar, wind and geothermal can supply. This would also manage our rivers better as we could supply water from the dam when the river needs it rather than use water to make electricity when electric power demands it.
Climate change is a relatively slow acting event but we have should have started forty years ago and now the situation is becoming urgent as temperatures are already rising dramatically.

Northland and other Eastern regions of New Zealand are currently suffering from drought and the worrying part is that it is becoming more common. So is this part of climate change and a permanent trend or just a short term fluctuation?
There are two pieces of research that would indicate that there are good reasons to believe that it is part of a more permanent climate driven pattern. The research with the longest record was started by Kevin Trenberth who as shown the long term wind direction records indicate a 20% increase in Westerly winds that bring rain the the West coast and drought to the East coast. http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/precipitation-changes-in-a-warming-world.html  .

More recent research regarding the Indian Ocean shows a trend of  warming of the water in the Western part of the ocean and a cooling of the Eastern side which has a similar effect as El Nino does to the Pacific Ocean, although the dynamics are completely different. 

The illustration shows the effect on the surrounding countries and although New Zealand is not shown on the graphic there would be some inclusion in the North Island. 
Most people are noticing the increases in droughts in the North and how food production is suffering and the number of trees that are dying and it is probably part of a climate change driven trend.    

Being confined to the house may be safe but it can become very boring and so a project is a great therapy. My daughter has recently moved to Kerikeri and needs a chook house to hold about six or eight chickens. The deciding factor is how many laying boxes are needs and we decided on three and they would be 300mm x 300mm and this decides the length of one side. 
​The overall dimensions are 1000mm wide x 1200mm long and 1000mm to the eaves and 850mm to the  ridge. From then on the design can be sorted out from Pinterest.
A chicken is about 300mm high so we need to accommodate that in the perch and in the nesting box. 
Step one is to get some materials. 

​Our son had some sections of fence which he needed to get rid of and these were broken down to recover the wood.

The first part to build is the floor to the right dimensions and the walls can be made to fit the floor. Make to two ends and put them in position with the ridgepole fitted to hold it steady..

Put up more of the roof joists and make the structure strong. The sides consist of the nesting boxes and the cleaning access door so they can be dealt with later.

I did another drawing of some refinements as the door aperture was too big and it needed some decoration. Here again Pinterest has stacks of ideas to choose from. 

With the structure fairly strong the roof can go on and in this case it was a sheet of ply last used for concrete mixing. It was a bit short and so some extra bits were added to make it fit and the watertightness will be solved by felting the roof later.
​The door aperture was too large and so I got a piece of ply to cover the hole and a doorway cut into that. The advantage is that the door is a feature and can be highlighted a special shape and painted with a different colour scheme.

The chook shed design required it to be on legs and also a pair of wheels to make it moveable.  I wasn't sure about this and did not have an axle so left it to later. The wheels came from a lawnmower repair and these could be bolted to the legs rather than a complete axle so they can be added now.

The door can be fitted to the frame and the access ramp put in position.

A few bits of wood jig sawed to add some decoration can make all the difference to the overall appearance of the project

  There is still the nesting box to be made and quite a lot of finishing to be done including waterproofing the roof, painting and making the nesting boxes but its well on its way.

Chickens need a space of roughly 300mmx300mmx300mm for living space and we need three nesting boxes for eight chickens. The nesting area needs to have easy access and be waterproof so here is what it looks like.  

This is what it looks like .

​Then I put a coat of paint on the roof to protect it and a pretty yellow door and its ready for delivery.

The main advice for avoiding the spread of corona virus is to limit personal contact with other people, especially at large gatherings, such as sports matches and concerts. The increasing use of the internet has actually been doing this for a few years and it may be that corona virus will accelerate this trend.  We sometimes forget that Google has only been in business for 22 years and the internet is still relatively new and not yet fully developed.
The USA has suspended passenger travel between the USA and Europe but there are many business people who need to conduct business between the two continents and if they can’t travel then they will set up Skype or other video service meetings and do business that way. This has been the case for some years and traveling to foreign countries has always been one of the perks of international business but it is expensive and time consuming so companies could insist on employees doing more without a physical visit.

​A big point of personal contact is at work, especially in large offices, and many people have been working from home, either permanently or for several days a week, but if a company was faced with closure how many staff could do their work from home? Once a company finds that it can manage with half or most of its staff at home would they go back to a big office or would they relocate to smaller premises and make the savings?
Doctors are going consultations by Skype to limit infection but we could get used to it and the doctors might find it more efficient and use it more. If we had reliable instruments at home for temperature, blood pressure and a mini electrocardiogram, as we have on a phone app, a diagnosis of simple ailments can be done without a personal visit.
Universities are putting a lot of lectures on line and this Covid19 disruption to education will lead to a big expansion in online learning. Making use of a really good online presentation does not detract from education and can help many students of all ages continue education by not being present in a classroom. It might enable university students get a good degree without the huge expense and debt of attending a university in a faraway city. 

​An increasing number of people are choosing to do their supermarket shopping on the internet and either have the food delivered or collect it from a secure locker at the store. To date most of these people are those that are short of time and do it for convenience but could a supermarket manage with 75% of its customers shopping this way, and if the customers like it would it continue for ever?
If a supermarket did not have to deal with customers would it move to an industrial estate and handle it’s orders like a spare part distributer or like Amazon? We would then have a fleet of small vans driving around the town delivering food. Expanding use of home delivery is why Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric vans from Rivian for last mile deliveries and with a warehouse roof full of solar panels supplying power and eventually autonomous self-driving vans, it would be a cheap delivery service.  It is all part of the growing trend for online shopping

​Attendances at sporting events, exhibitions, cinema and concerts have been falling for years as people have been getting a better experience from online and TV performances, the atmosphere of a live performance is worth going for but watching online will surely continue to grow.
Youngsters are using their phones for social interaction and people date and eventually marry via the internet. This trend towards online interaction has been growing for some years and is just a different form of living which will continue to establish itself in society.
Life is not going to be the same again.

The Covid19 crisis has highlighted a problem for the oil companies that was slowly unfolding but has now gone into overdrive. We passed peak oil somewhere around 2005 but it was hidden by fracking extraction techniques that enabled a lot more oil to be extracted. As a result, we have a had a mild glut of supply for nearly twenty years, particularly from the USA, Canada and Russia and this has kept the price slightly depressed to around $70.
Unlike most other commodity industries there is almost no storage in the system for oil and it relies on a steady progress of one hundred million barrels a day from the wellhead to the user.
Fracking is a more expensive method of extraction and needs a higher oil barrel price to make a profit but, because of the oversupply, some oil wells were making a loss and many were only breaking even. The banks were supporting the losses because most of the costs were in discovery and drilling and it is better to keep pumping and selling the oil than to shut and cap the well.
​Before the Covid19 crisis the demand for oil was already slowly falling and the price was going down and the price had fallen to $30 and now the Corona19 has collapsed demand and the situation is not going to change for some months.
For technical reasons oil wells cannot be switched off and on and, once they are shut and capped, a new well will have to be drilled. Once the storage tanks are full, and at a hundred barrels a day this won’t take long, wells will have to be shut down. Many of the oil fields are almost depleted and are not going to be reopened so there will be an instant loss of capacity.
Clearly the whole oil industry will be under extreme stress and the banking industry that has been supporting them with billions of dollars of loans will also be at risk.
When the world reopens for business and demand increases back to the old rates of consumption I suspect that we may be short of supply and the price could rocket, but whatever happens, nations will want to have a more stable and controllable supply of energy and will enlarge their renewable electricity capacity of wind, solar, geothermal and hydro.
Big changes have been forecast for some time but this is a real ‘black swan’ event and will bring changes that we were not expecting to see in our lifetime.
(A black swan event originates from the northern hemisphere and from a time when the only known swans were white and therefore black swans were not going to happen.)

​Tourism is a major source of income in New Zealand and all regions are chasing the tourist dollar so what can we do to get our fair share. We routinely see articles about Queenstown and sometimes you would think that there was nowhere else in New Zealand worth visiting.
Most tourists arrive by plane into Auckland and from there disperse by plane, bus, car, bike and campervan heading South or North. The majority head South so we need a major, not to be missed, destination in the North to bring them this way and I believe that we have one in the Bay of Islands.
Sixty years ago, long before the internet, when I was in the UK, I knew that the Bay of Islands was one of the most beautiful places on the planet and the iconic name still has a world wide reputation which we can capitalise on. If we could work on this world wide brand name the whole of the Far North would benefit, just as Wanaka and Invercargill benefit from Queenstown.
I manage two websites for walkers, the BOI Walkways and the Kerikeri Five Waterfalls and the BOI one gets six times as many page views as the Kerikeri one which illustrates the power of the Bay of Islands brand name.
We have five small towns in the Bay of Islands each with their own character and with a little bit of tweaking and marketing we could make a package that would be worthy of a ‘must do’ for tourists.
Kawakawa is the most southerly community and has the railway, the cycleway and the Hundertwasser toilets and now has the new tourist information centre which makes the town the gateway to the Bay of Islands. Opua is an excellent marina and yachting centre. Russell is an old and interesting whaling town. Paihia is a tourist centre with beaches and ferries to the islands plus of course about 65 cruise ships and the community has done wonders to promote the town. Kerikeri is the largest town of the group with the heritage areas of the Stone Store and Kororipo Pa plus its vineyards, fresh fruit and vegetables.
Towns do better when they have an identity and recognising these features and amplifying them gives tourists something to believe in, that they are going to see something unique.
These towns, plus the others in Northland, are all working hard to make their towns attractive and fine places to live in but individually they do not have the reach of an existing internationally recognised brand name like the Bay of Islands.
As a start I am trying to link the walking tracks in the BOI area together into a network and promote it as a walkers destination that features the Islands, the rivers and waterfalls, the heritage and environmental beauties into a single holiday  and we will see how it goes. 

​We all know that greenhouse gasses are warming the planet and we have to reduce them, but who is responsible and where can we make savings? The two big sources in New Zealand are burning oil for our transport and methane from cattle in our agricultural industry and they are both at about 40% each of the total.
Our greenhouse gas emissions per head of population are about 6 tonnes per person and this is roughly the same as Europe and China while Australia is about 18 tonnes and the USA at about 22 tonnes while India is down at 2 tonnes. Most developed nations are falling as they convert from coal to gas, solar and wind power for electricity generation, while the poorer nations are increasing as they industrialise.
New Zealand has a very large dairy and cattle industry compared with other countries at around 10 million head of cattle this amounts to 2 head of cattle per person. The UK for instance has around 5 million beasts against 66 million people or 0.08 head per person. If the UK had the same proportion as New Zealand, they would have 122 million head of cattle, but the UK ratio is similar to the rest of Northern Europe. New Zealand is clearly in a league of its own.
The problem for us is the way that we account for the emissions, in that the cows emit here and we have to account for this, even though we export 95% of the milk product. Australia on the other hand exported 380 million tonnes of coal which, when burnt, will make 800 million tonnes of CO2 at 32 tonnes per Australian, and they do not count this against their, already bad figures.
Our dairy and meat produce are all paddock grass fed and of the highest quality and when we export this, we give the recipient country a huge help in their trading emissions account. China for instance is the manufacturing workshop of the world and they have a huge emissions tonnage as they industrialise. We import finished goods from China and do not account for the emissions that they made in the manufacturing and so we should accept the ‘give and take’ in the balance of emissions and manufacturing. We get their manufactured goods emission free and they get our dairy products emissions free.
In my view, we should give the farmers a free pass on the emissions and concentrate on helping them with fencing, to keep cattle out of the streams, and in the longer term move away from cattle farming altogether and concentrate on using our fertile land for more intensive and productive arable and horticultural farming.
We also need to remind ourselves that only about half of the houses in New Zealand are connected to a sewage system and so we need to address that problem if we want to pump drinking water from the aquifers and from our rivers. 

​We need to convert our transport away from oil to electrical power as quickly as possible to stop producing CO2 which is causing climate change and will destroy our way of life.
Is it possible and is it likely?
​
​  Well, incredibly, there is a strong possibility that it is going to happen.
To understand the scale of the problem here are a few figures. We currently have around 1000 million personal cars on the planet and manufacturer about 70 million new cars a year which gives an average lifespan of the fleet around 15 years,

​There are currently less than 1% electric cars in the fleet and relatively very few in production so there is a long way to go. So what has changed that gives this optimism?
Electric cars use high specification Lithium Ion batteries that are expensive and make up a large part of the cars total cost and the battery’s capacity dictates the cars range, so it is the battery that is the deal breaker.
The price of batteries has been dropping rapidly and needs to get below $125 per Kilowatt of storage to be below the cost of petrol for delivering transport competitively.

There are other ways of looking at the same facts and they all point in a downward projection.

The technology in batteries is progressing so quickly that it will certainly be cost competitive against petrol within two or three years, if it has not already done so. The battery in the new Volkswagen iD.3 is reportedly below $100 per Kilowatt hour but that car is only just in production so we will have to wait a year before we find out.
Battery cost is one subject but the sheer volume of car production that is needed to make a difference is huge, but could it be achieved? The two manufacturers who have volume production at the moment are Tesla at around 270,000 a year and Nissan at about 85,000 while the popular Renault Zoe produces 30,000 cars a year and the Hyundai Kona a similar number. If we add in all the other manufacturers, we could be just over 500,000 cars a year.

​What will mark the start of a serious lift in volumes are the huge new factories being opened by Tesla in Shanghai and by Volkswagen in Germany where Tesla are starting with a target production of 300,000 a year which they believe could reach 500,000 and Volkswagen are starting at 300,000 and could reach 330,000.

This is a huge increase in production numbers and we have still not seen any movement by volume manufacturers such as Ford, GM and Toyota and it’s the real metal bashers that can make the difference. They are all pouring financial investments into electric cars but no signs of production yet.
If it all comes together as predicted battery prices will be lower than the comparable cost of petrol transport by about 2022 and hence there will be no point in an oil powered car. The volume car plants will convert to electric cars by about 2025 and we may have converted our entire vehicle fleet by 2040.
It may be earlier because, if we allow autonomous self-driving cars then many people will cease to have personal ownership of a car and therefore, we may not need to replace the whole 1000 million fleet because they would not be needed. 

​​We are so close to the dangerous limit of CO2 in the atmosphere that we are going to overshoot the safe levels and will have to make dramatic changes to maintain our way of life. There is not much that can be done about the population growing to eleven billion because, although we have passed peak birth rate, people are not dying as fast as they used to and it is the survival rate that is increasing the numbers.  Hans Rosling does a very good Youtube explanation of population growth.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg

​So where can we make the changes to manage the planet in a sustainable way and, without a major war, keep everyone going until the population numbers fall naturally at the end of the century. The first step is to stop burning fossil fuels and move to clean (and cheap) renewable energy. We must change our food producing methods so that we can produce more food from the same, or smaller area of land and with much less cattle farming. Stop cutting down forests and start planting native trees for forests that are not going to be felled. Replace iron and cement production with other materials. Stop plundering our oceans for fish and dumping our rubbish in the rivers and sea. Lastly, we must start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to stop the planet heating up.

​The good news is that rapid advances in technology mean that the solutions are available to us now even if they need scaling up of production and getting the production costs right. Transport has largely been solved so that petrol cars can be described as the walking dead, and are being replaced by electric batteries. Burning coal to make electricity is an expensive form of energy and is also on the way out. It is the scale of production of wind, solar and geothermal energy backed up by batteries that is the time limiting factor.  Tony Seba does a very good lecture on the rapid changes in the world.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0

​For those who doubt these changes, we are already using drills and other battery powered electrical tools that are not connected by electrical wire. Laptops are being dropped in favour of tablets. Mobile phones are smaller and longer lasting. Changes are coming very quickly.
There are two technologies that can make a massive difference to our way of life and these are Graphene and MOF’s (Metal Organic Framework’s).

​Graphene is carbon that is made in a sheet one atom thick and is 200 times stronger than steel. It will conduct electricity better than copper, it can be used to transfer electronic data nearly as fast as light, it is so thin that it is nearly transparent and can filter liquids such as sea water to take out impurities or can store hydrogen without leakage for fuel tanks. ( https://www.explainthatstuff.com/graphene.html )
These properties mean graphene can replace steel or aluminium in construction of planes or other vehicles, bridges and any structure needing strength and light weight. It will be used in the next generation of batteries to give increased power and durability for less weight. Imagine a solar/battery driven graphene plane. 

​Metal Organic Frameworks are in a metal powder form that acts like a specialist sponge. It can be made in a form that can absorb water from the atmosphere in a desert and produce clean water for drinking. It can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and then we can split out carbon for use or storage and return oxygen to the atmosphere. (  https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/mofs-find-a-use/2500508.article )

​Both these products are in their early stages but have massive, societal changing capability.

​Food production is not very efficient in many areas and we have degraded and abandoned about 25% of our farmland through erosion and bad practices. There are two ways of improving the conversion of land area to food productivity. One is by producing much more food in greenhouses where the climate is protected and there are no losses from weather and pests. They can be sited on poor quality land and even in deserts. ( https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/sundrop-farms-opens-solar-greenhouse-using-no-fresh-water/7892866 )

​The other area, which may not be so popular. is that we reduce our consumption of meat and dairy and eat alternative products made from vegetables. It takes 60,000 litres of water to make one kilogram of beef and we are running short of good water in many areas. Big improvements have been made in producing food from vegetable matter recently and when a minced beef, made from vegetable products that will make a suitable burger patty, the viability of the dairy sector will be undermined.
 ( https://sunfedfoods.com/ )

​The parts of climate change where there does not appear to be a solution are the state of the oceans, with fish stocks and ocean acidity, with sea level rise and changing weather patterns. All of these are extremely serious but we will have to deal with them while at the same time accommodating millions of people displaced from their homes.