A bit late with his climate crusade . . .

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

The Gisborne Herald is a keen supporter of free speech rights, the need for balance in reporting, and the importance of being a forum for information that is factual — we publish a correction if we find we have erred in this regard.

Opinions being what they are, there is more leeway on this page — especially when it comes to politics, as there is so much subjectivity involved — but your editor does try to ensure the views expressed and discussions here are based on facts, and not clearly wrong, misleading or deceptive.

The writer of today's letter who claims there is a ban on “factual/evidential/scientific discussion” on climate change in this paper “that doesn’t conform to the common narrative” has timed his run a bit late.

Being a free speech advocate, in his early years your editor published a lot of views from sceptics of anthropogenic climate change, with responses from climate scientists. That was up until 10 years ago, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented “clear and robust conclusions” in its 2013 Physical Science Basis report, including that the science then showed “with 95 percent certainty that human activity is the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century”.

The scientific evidence has only strengthened since then; we have also had all of the 10 warmest years since humans began directly measuring the temperature of the planet 174 years ago — in this order: 2023, 2016, 2020, 2019, 2015, 2017, 2022, 2021, 2018, 2014.

Along with that 2013 IPCC report solidifying the case that climate change is the greatest threat to life on Earth, and humanity needs to respond because our activities are the main cause, your editor also judged that the benefit for readers of having the arguments of sceptics publicly debunked had run its course.

So in November 2013, this paper introduced a policy to severely limit publication of the views of climate change sceptics — with scope, though, to question policy responses from the standpoint of a sceptic. In recent years your editor has increasingly rejected anti-science arguments in general, always requesting supporting evidence, peer-reviewed and published in a respected scientific journal.

To clarify the sort of “evidential discussion” our correspondent today is talking about, he has recently tried to claim in online comments (which weren’t published) that “agricultural emissions are a complete hoax”, “the IPCC have admitted methane is about 400 percent less harmful than previously reported”, and that “it is without proof that net zero will have any noticeable effect on the climate” — the first two claims are flat wrong; the scientific case for “net zero” as soon as possible is overwhelming.