Bruce Bissett: Time to think of the children

Bruce Bisset

Adding having a baby to the already huge task of being Prime Minister may or may not be something Jacinda Ardern is capable of handling, but if nothing else it should thoroughly test her commitment to what she has described as her generation's "nuclear moment" – climate change.

Because there's nothing like producing a child to make you pause and reflect on the world you've just introduced them to, and whether they will thank or curse you for what they must inherit.

In short, becoming a mother may rescue what to my mind is so far proving to be no more than a throw-away campaign line.

Stack the damage that will be done in the name of "free trade" under the CPTPP up against a grossly-underwhelming climate change policy – the "sector" barely got a mention in the "first 100-days" plan – and you can begin to see what I mean.

If this is how her generation treats an incipient extinction event, then god help us when the end-game comes along.

Oh, wait.

Cynical, moi? Hey, I grew up under the bomb. I know the paranoia and bleak depression induced by constantly living minutes away from holocaust.

Just as I also understand why the lemmings can remain so happy as they run toward the cliff: no one stays quite sane if they spend their days contemplating the end of the world; better to meet it full-tilt and uncaring.

Certainly that's the drive behind the climate change deniers. And they have the added advantage of thinking that somehow man's indifference to nature is better than man's inhumanity to man – even though the result will be exactly the same.

Which is the greater madness? Irrelevant question; it will happen whether we believe it or not.

Unfortunately we're already in the post-disaster management phase; we just haven't realised yet that the "tipping point" is behind us.

That was the one advantage of the bomb. You knew if and when it went off. Climate change is a lot more subtle – but by no means less real.

Still, the weather is doing its best to let us know it's hit the fan.

Last year was the second-equal (with 2015) warmest on record, just short of 2016's highs. Subtract the fact the other two years were within an overall-warming El Nino effect, while 2017 was supposedly entering an overall-cooling La Nina, and it was one out of the box.

This month's record temperatures merely add an exclamation point. 32C in Invercargill? Over 40C in Central Otago? Yet the change has barely begun.

These are the first winds stirring the beach, hinting at the calamity to come – the ferocious destructive power of the world-changing tsunami even now gathering itself higher far out at sea, rushing landward in an unstoppable cataclysmic wave that will erase our petty civilisations and grind them into sand.

By the time that wave hits with its full force and fury, it will be far too late to think of somewhere to hide, somehow to survive.

Yet surely we now feel it approaching. Surely.

Perhaps Ms Ardern's pregnancy is the unconscious sport of a need to bring forth a living legacy that might, against all odds, live through the coming Apocalypse.

When the child is born she will look into its eyes and know, beyond the fleeting joy, a boundless sorrow.

And then, perhaps, realise her throwaway line is the only thing worth caring about, and move what she can of heaven and earth to try to conjure us a future.