John Roughan: Coming to terms with climate change

OPINION

Like many thousands in Auckland this week I have been on my hands and knees, cutting up sodden carpet and throwing it out. We have decided it will not be replaced. This is called coming to terms with climate change.

Climate science has been telling us to expect storms of the ferocity we have just experienced and it stands to reason, a warmer atmosphere absorbs more water from the ocean and our weather is definitely warmer.

For the past three or four years, summer has been starting in November and lasting six months. It has been balmy, but this summer feels like the payback. Auckland has never had a January as wet and never a day like last Friday, January 27.

Many suffered much worse damage than us. We have relatives in Northcote who saw their land slide away in front of their house, which has now been red-stickered. A tennis friend with a car yard in Wairau Valley was looking at losses on all his stock.

All around Auckland, households and businesses will be planning to adapt to climate change with urgency now. Surely nobody is building or buying homes near cliff tops anymore, or in flood-prone basins, or constructing houses without raised foundations.

Our house is on a sloping site and the lower level, a half-storey, stands on a platform of concrete flat on the ground. Last Saturday morning was not the first time we have woken to find the floor wet. After the first time we did some drainage work around the platform that kept us dry for 18 years. But a coil in a scoria trench could not cope with the volume of water that fell on us last Friday night.

As I hacked into the carpet I wondered who it was who decided it would be a good idea to build straight on to a concrete slab. Possibly the same architectural school that decided roofs didn’t need eaves. That was decades later. Slabs have been around so long that younger generations might not know there was a time when all houses had air under them and steps up to their doors.

Contractors try to clear surface flooding on Porana Road, Wairau Park, as heavy rain hits Auckland. Photo / Brett Phibbs

I will miss a carpeted bedroom, especially next winter, but I console myself with the memory that when I was a kid in a house with proper foundations we had no carpets, just mats on wooden floors. “Wall to wall” carpet was one of the many comforts that came with rising post-war living standards. My parents got it when they bought a newly built bungalow in 1962.

So like all adjustments to climate change, this one feels like a step back in time. But it mightn’t be so bad. The new floor covering cannot be polished timber such as we have in areas upstairs but there appear to be “laminates” on the market that claim to be waterproof. Lino, I guess.

Or maybe we’ll just grind the concrete to a smooth surface and throw some attractive mats on it – the dungeon look could catch on.

This is just one of the many ways we will come to live with a warmer, wetter climate, I think. We will adapt. We will give some ground to extremes of weather but we won’t give up too much. We won’t give up automobiles, aircraft or, most important, electricity that can still be available when lakes are low, wind is not turning turbines and night falls. If all else fails, there will be nuclear.

We will get used to floods and droughts, we certainly won’t need the precautions urged by the authorities this week that reached pandemic levels of overkill - stay home, avoid non-essential travel, don’t enter floodwater or the sea. Schools were ordered not to reopen this week until somebody talked sense to the Ministry of Education.

Civil Defence now seems to be run by a National Emergency Management Agency complete with a monogrammed polar fleece. It was slow to wake up on the day of the deluge and it left the new Prime Minister looking like a dumbstruck staffer at the Auckland Mayor’s appalling press conference.

We ought to expect better weather warnings. For all the money and attention given to climate science over the past 30 years, it does not seem to have advanced weather forecasting very much. Nobody knew precisely how much water that “river” of low pressure was bringing down from the tropics last week. It seems to me scientists ought to have known.

If they devoted less of their time and effort to catastrophic predictions and more to advancing knowledge of atmospheric convection, I might have time to lift the mats from my new fashionable concrete floor in future.