Not unravelling, not standing down . . .

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

Opinion

Abusing this position by declining to be a forum for misinformation?

Gaslighting? For readers who are unsure, this is loosely defined as making someone question their own perception of reality; or more seriously, “a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind”.

The reality of human activities causing dangerous climate change is clear in the science and increasingly in what is happening to the global temperature and weather, and is widely accepted — by about 80 percent of New Zealanders. So who is gaslighting?

Our correspondent today who claims your editor’s “climate crusade is unravelling” should check the veracity of claims by other climate change sceptics before parroting them.

Mid-last year a number of people in New Zealand were making this claim about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change changing its stance on methane’s warming effect, after former politician Barry Brill did so in a couple of opinion pieces. It is misinformation, referencing a discussion of different metrics for comparing short-lived and long-lived gases in the IPCC’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report.

This is an important discussion that could potentially lead to a significant change in New Zealand’s emissions profile and the now almost 50 percent contribution of farming, but for the time being GPW100 remains the globally accepted metric for comparing different greenhouse gases.

It is true that our correspondent does occasionally provide references to legitimate science when he wants to back up a line of argument (unlike another correspondent with similar views who has no filter when it comes to source reliability), but it is normally cherry-picked as part of an attempt to question climate science in general, and accompanied with other unverified and untrue claims.

That is not a debate, it is science versus attempts to rubbish the science and it appears very much like trying to purposely mislead readers.

There is plenty of information on the internet expounding climate conspiracies, but they don’t stack up and it doesn’t take much to work that out — which does call into question the motives of those who promote them.

Your editor has a little sympathy for sceptics, in that there is a concerted and ongoing climate change denial effort by some conservative media organisations and private individuals (quite often retired scientists who may or may not have have worked in a field associated with an aspect of climate science).

People can readily consume this misinformation elsewhere if they so wish, but it has no place in publications that care about the facts, their reputation and their readers.