We’re being hammered from all sides by climate change proponents and made to feel guilty for everything from driving cars to the most innocuous activities.
But the climate has always constantly changed without any human input. Think the Ice Age for example. Archeologists are constantly unearthing evidence of now hot places once being cold, and the reverse.
Over my 85 years I’ve witnessed massive differences.
Take the seasons. When I was a child in the post-war years it was an annual ritual by boys to peel their burnt skin off at the end of November, after a month of hot summer days.
Sun creams were unheard of in our working class milieu, albeit if they existed, no-one could have afforded them.
The consequences all these years later, are two or three visits annually to a dermatologist mate, to chop-out the dangerous outbreaks, the giveaway being they’re painful.
But what I’ve observed is say a flood occurs causing havoc and invariably being told it’s the worst since 1923, or some such long past date. In other words it’s a perfectly normal phenomenon.
The difference today is the mass movement to city living, compounded by population growth, meaning that such floods now have a huge impact on people.
This year, for the first time in my life, Wellington (and Christchurch) have not had a summer. So too in Britain last year. But I have no doubt that would have happened if New Zealand was uninhabited.
There’s another aspect to this constant change and that’s something I first wrote about 20 or so years ago, in my then weekly newspaper column.
That is, it’s long overdue to recognise the movement in our seasons, specifically that unlike when I was a boy, summer today only really starts in February.
That’s when children return to school. At the time, in response to my article, to my surprise, a Cabinet Minister (I can’t recall who) popped up and said he was the Minister responsible for holidays and would look into it. Nothing however happened.
So today school children start their faux summer holidays about the 10th December, which carry on through until they return at the beginning of February, just as summer arrives.
Is it any surprise to read over this period of so many family violence occurrences. It’s certainly a busy time for the women’s Refuges.
These atrocities are largely the domain of the poorer classes, particularly maoris living crammed indoors in crowded small, state homes.
It’s long overdue to acknowledge these realities and as a critical first measure, align our major public holiday with Europe, that is time off for Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, but as in Europe with August, begin our summer holiday in February.
16 Comments
i recall the peeling skin, that wounderfull feeling as along strip gets peeled away…followed with real alovera smoothed on liberaly. Is the only topical theme missing from this sustainbility ?.
Any life long hunter , fisherman or gardener likely doesn’t have a clue as to what the sustainability rhetoric is about, as they move with the seasons , only the shop-atarians who have severed their link to nature, can be so easily hoodwinked with such rhetoric
The problem is that those tasked with governing us still believe in the climate change mantra that it can only be fixed by taxing the general populace.
100% spot on Sir Bob…..I remember back in the 80’s sailing out to Great Barrier Island on Boxing Day in a howling westerly wind (fantastic sailing conditions) when we tried to come home 3 weeks later the wind was still howling from the west (not a good point of sail direct into the wind) Other summers in the Bay of Islands where we got absolutely fried in the searing hot sun during early January; not so this summer, cool and windy. Varium et mutabile semper femina is a Latin/Greek phrase that translates to “a variable and changing thing, always a woman” Same could be said about the climate.
Totally agree regarding the climate hysteria, of course the proponents of “the climate crisis” conspicuously fail to mention past climatic variations which were obviously nothing to do with human activity. It is taken as gospel by these people ( and they expect all of us to do the same)
that all climatic events that appear to deviate from the expected norm are caused by human-induced climate change.
Bob
Caused by the wobble of the earth’s axis known as the Precession of the Equinoxes. Been around since before Noah was a deck boy on the Ark!!!
I remember at primary school in the 1970s being taught that the next ice age was imminent.
Then in the 1980s the human race was doomed as the acid rain was going to wipe out all the crops.
In the 1990s we were all going to drown because the hole in the Ozone layer was going to melt all the polar ice caps.
After all these years the sun keeps shining.
The only trouble with this idea is the retired mightn’t agree with this, as they would no longer enjoy the summer to themselves…
These baby boomers really do know what’s best for them…
I just paid the $100 tourism levy so that I can visit New Zealand next week.
Please tell the minister in charge of weather that I request constant sunshine over Piha and Christchurch for the last week of January and first week of February.
Have a nice day and do you accept Americans dollars?
I’ve been nominated the sun warden for Christchurch this year (it’s a rotating role shared around so as not to over burden one New Zealander for too long).
I’ll see what I can arrange – for a suitable processing fee of course.
American dollars most welcome.
Totally agree Bob – or at least commence holidays mid January
It’s OK Bob. If we pay more tax, stop having children, stop driving petrol-powered cars, stop using airplanes to go on holiday and make lots of other compromises in our collective lifestyle, we’ll fix the problem.
/sarc
We won’t of course mention cruise boats which visit Auckland and which are solely responsible for the degradation of air quality in Queen St when they visit, since they need to keep their engines running 24/7.
Lots of other hypocritical examples also, among which are the climate change activists/greenies who fly internationally to climate change conferences to bemoan the fact that not enough is being done to save the planet and we’ll reach a tipping point from which there is not coming back from in xx years (and the “xx” seems to change every few years when it becomes obvious even to the climate change activists – who are generally a bit short on brainpower – that the doomsday date won’t arrive by the previously published date)
Build on a flood plain odds are you will be flooded.
Build in a high risk fire zone,where there’s been fires annually for centuries and its odds on you’re at risk.
Population growth causes the housing ‘crisis’.
when i was a kid in the 60s it was said that the best weather started when the kids went back to school. nothing new.
when i was a kid in the 60s it was said that the best weather started when the kids went back to school. nothing new.
About that “But…” introducing the second paragraph.
Climate scientists have never suggested that Earths climate was unchanging. Far from it-these folk know better than anyone that Earth’s atmosphere is easily altered. Ergo their concern is that our approach to the production of waste gases is starting to look a bit like a mistake.