Climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger worries for the future of his four grandchildren - but hopes it's not too late to combat climate change. Photo / File
Climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger worries for the future of his four grandchildren - but hopes it's not too late to combat climate change. Photo / File
Opinion
Prominent climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger has spent much of his long career researching climate change. Now he worries about the future his four grandchildren may face under it. He writes a heartfelt letter to them here.
Dear Matthew, Jasmine, Timothy and Dante
I am writing this to you after what has been the warmest summer in 150 years. It has been quite remarkable really being 2C above average with heatwaves, droughts and floods.
Our glaciers shrunk yet again with the heat.
There has been one recordable death and a spike, compared with previous few summers, in tummy bugs and mumps.
I am writing this letter because this is what New Zealand's climate could be like, if no action is taken in time, in 2060.
Temperatures could be 2C warmer, like this summer.
You and your cohorts including babies Ardern-Gayford and Genter-Nunn will be older than yours and their parents today, and may have your own children.
Heatwaves have been frequent, with Niwa reporting that Auckland had 47 hot days above 25C, Wellington 17 days, Christchurch 42 days and Cromwell 56 days.
Current averages are two in Wellington and 35 in Cromwell.
Climate projections for around 2060 for the business as usual scenario indicates two to three times the increase.
And our glacier snowlines could be about 200 metres higher on the upper slopes of the Southern Alps.
So this will mean Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud, may become Aoteapoto, Land of the Short White Cloud.
Dark clouds hang low over Mana Island and Cook Strait, viewed from Plimmerton, Porirua, as former Tropical Cyclone Gita approaches on February 20. Photo / Mark Mitchell
And the huge deluges caused by two cyclones caused flooding, and slips cut off communities in South Westland, Dunedin, Golden Bay and Kaikoura.
So the current summer is an example of the future that we baby boomers are bequeathing you if we keep continuing the emissions of greenhouse gases that we have been doing in the late 20th and early 21st century.
I studied climate change before you were born, and about the time Mum and Dad were born, and recognised when they were children that climate change causing global warming had begun.
This motivated me into researching it, and speaking about it at every opportunity so that we baby boomers, your parents and the millennials had been warned to take action.
I have been working on the change of political will in this country to address climate change before it's too late. But alas those in power attempted change at times, but the action was too little.
I am in great hope that we are not too late.
This may be what David Korten has dubbed "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community" a time when we realised the ways that we are damaging the planet through global warming and sea-level rise, and turning it around.
I am very hopeful that current millennial Parliamentarians such Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter take sufficient action now with Climate Change Minister James Shaw.
The Prime Minister has labelled "Climate Change as the Nuclear Moment" for her generation.
Minister Genter is actively working on transport options to transition Kiwis into electric vehicles.
Minister Shaw is leading the charge into moving New Zealand into a zero-carbon economy.
By the 2060s, babies Ardern-Gayford and Genter-Nunn are in their forties and you will be approaching or in your fifties – I certainly won't be here.
Let's hope that by then we will have succeeded and that you are not living in a time of climate disruption like the summer of 2017-18.
