Gisborne letters: Climate future in human hands, public sector job cuts, targets and nifty farmers

In his latest book, historian, journalist and author Gwynne Dyer interviewed 100 of the world’s top climate scientists to discuss the extraordinary measures we must contemplate to counter the irreversible effects of climate change.

Letters to the Editor

OPINION

We have the power, if willing

Normally, the Earth’s atmosphere acts like a cosy blanket, keeping the right amount of warmth around us. But lately, humans have been making changes that are like putting an extra-thick blanket on our planet – making it too warm.

When the oceans get warmer, they make bigger storms like hurricanes and typhoons. As the ice at the North and South Poles melts because it’s too warm, it makes the sea level rise, which can cause floods in places where people live.

On the back cover of Gwynne Dyer’s latest book Intervention Earth are these words: “Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising and weather is becoming more extreme. Most of us know the solution: cut our carbon emissions. There’s only one problem – we aren’t doing it.”

I agree. We continue to excessively spew out carbon like there’s no tomorrow.

In my July 18 “Hope for climate cause” letter responding to a Gwynne Dyer column, I wrote of precision fermentation – a developing technology that would enable half the land now used for farming to be returned to nature. A graph in Intervention Earth depicts humanity making up 36% of the world’s mammals by total mass, livestock 60% and mammalian wildlife a mere 4%.

In Intervention Earth, Dyer also details how human activity has massively increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 since the dawn of the industrial age – a massive increase by 1990, and more than doubling that during the 33 years since. Checking the rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 readings from the NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory verifies this. When I was born in 1932, ice core samples reveal the atmospheric CO2 level was 308 parts per million (ppm) and rising at less than 1ppm yearly. Presently, Mauna Loa readings reveal an annual increase over 3ppm and the level now at 422ppm – the highest level in 14 million years. Scary stuff?

Dyer’s book examines many intervention ideas not mentioned here.

All humanity must immediately reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Bob Hughes

False economies

I just read a story about a young woman who feels “defeated”. “I know New Zealand doesn’t have work for me, because that’s the economy right now.” She is tired of the endless cycle of attending the MSD (Ministry of Social Development) seminars and applying for jobs.

So far, 130,000 have left Aotearoa and we’re still bleeding. Often the ones leaving are the best qualified who we’ve spent money educating. They also know our culture and our ways.

As a result, we’ll need to educate more when our job market recovers because we can’t always rely on poaching from poor countries and putting more burden on to them.

We also need to look after New Zealanders so they can get decent jobs.

The act of sacking people and discontinuing government contracts to save money is a false economy.

Training replacement people is a lot more expensive and houses, hospitals, schools, roads, public transport etc will need to be paid for and built and staffed eventually. You can’t put that off forever.

Then there is the gap in between, where our overall productivity diminishes and we go backwards.

Our Government is again making illogical, short-term, ideological choices. Totally!

Mary-Ann de Kort

Nifty farmers

Re: Feds mark 125 years of service (Gisborne Herald, September 21).

I love the typo in the subtitle describing the organisation created to “unifty” farmers. We are certainly nifty!

And no, it hasn’t been easy, but let’s raise a toast to the farmers of New Zealand who have navigated the uncertainties of recent times – and hope they can do so in the future for the benefit of all in New Zealand. Unifties unite!

Judy Bogaard, A proud NZ farmer

Targets and such

If you’re the CEO of a consumer products company, it would make perfect sense to have quarterly sales targets to measure the success or otherwise of the products being peddled in the market.

It’s a bit different in the political sphere, however, as Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is finding out.

We’ve all been bombarded with “targets” the Government has been setting all over the place to measure its performance. How comical then for the PM to say, when the target’s looking a bit shaky, to blurt out “it’s not about the frickin’ targets”. Oh, ah, okay, let me “chunk” or “trunk” that down through my “”decision gates” to see if I understand that better. Sadly no. Frickin’ funny though.

And what about “back on track”, bandied about by the Government wherever and whenever possible, still. Even after the PM let the cat out of the bag by saying “we’re never going to get there, right?”

That falls into cynical manipulation territory.

As does the “we’re going to provide tax relief for lower and middle income families” mantra. The Government did lower taxes for lower and middle income families, but that is not the whole story – 64% of the tax cut went to the top 40% of income earners. As is always the way with tax cuts, top income earners get the lion’s share.

The PM can carry on sloganeering all he likes but now the mask keeps slipping, we can never be quite sure that he really does believe in what he is peddling.

What is the word to describe that behaviour?

Bruce Holm