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Views from Auckland: Take Another Look At Climate Change  

 
Dev Nadkarni 
 
One of the unintended consequences of the global financial downturn is bound to be its 
effect on climate change initiatives of countries across the world.  
As their economies hurtle into recession, governments are being hard-pressed to come up 
with urgent bailout plans ranging from the merciless slashing of interest rates to the direct 
injection of billions of dollars into their banking systems while simultaneously engaging 
in belt tightening across the board.  
 
Climate change—and the associated costs of committing to its schemes—will 
undoubtedly be on the backburner at least for some time. 
Putting its reputation as one of the world’s greenest nations on the line, the newly elected 
National Party-led government in New Zealand is already taking a hard look at the 
climate change policy formulated by the previous Labour-led government—something it 
had promised to do in the run-up to the polls. 
 
Rather than commit to a policy that will ultimately lead to an increase in taxes by 
millions of dollars and potentially put the country’s important farming sector at a severe 
disadvantage, the new government has said it will now put all things on the table for 
careful consideration before it comes up with a new policy. The rest of the world will 
closely watch its moves with great interest over the coming months. 
This slowdown in climate change initiatives wrought by the financial downturn may be a 
good idea for many countries to take a breather and a long hard look at the whole 
scenario—particularly from the point of view of new emerging science that is 
increasingly at odds with the science on which current climate change initiatives are 
based. 
 
Perhaps more research on climate change has been done since the Kyoto Protocol than 
ever before and a lot of this research is bringing alternative causes for the world’s 
changing weather patterns to the fore than the prevailing view of anthropogenic (man-
made) global warming as a consequence of carbon emissions. 
In the next few years, if further scientific research tilts towards non-anthropogenic causes 
and proves that to be indeed the case (as many indications already point towards), then 
the whole business of carbon taxes and emissions trading would have been based on mere 
conjecture. And economies that have gone down that path would have much to regret. 
Climate science is too new and there is too little we know about its real causes and how it 
affects the world. Realisation is slowly dawning that it would be wiser to consider as 
many scientific views as possible before committing billions of dollars to schemes based 
on imperfect science and conjecture. The New Zealand Government has undoubtedly 
realised this. 
While considering conflicting scientific views, governments will have to be wary enough 

 

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to see through the politics within the scientific establishment and consider all theories 
dispassionately. 
 
Other viewpoints 
Almost all debate on climate change today is based on the prevailing anthropogenic 
carbon emission view. Little consideration, if any, is being given to other points of view 
based on sound science—perhaps for fear of upsetting the anthropogenic applecart on 
which a whole commercial model has been built. 
For instance, little appears in the mainstream media about the fact that as recently as 
6,000 years ago the world was three degrees warmer than it is now.  
There is also strong evidence that as the world came out of the millennium long ice age 
about 11,500 years ago, temperatures went up by 5 degrees in just about 10 years. Now, 
how does that compare with the 0.6 degrees that the world got warmer by in the past 
century, according to climate scientists? And remember, there were no industrial carbon 
emissions then. 
 
Little also appears in the media on the relationship that scientists are increasingly finding 
between solar activity and climate patterns on earth: there is a correlation between 
fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and our weather patterns. This correlation is far 
more pronounced and immediate, according to scientific observers, than that between 
carbon dioxide and change in weather patterns. 
According to these scientists, the sun is to enter one of its weakest 11-year sun spot 
cycles in the past couple of centuries and they predict that temperatures all over the world 
will be cooler.  
This is expected to happen in just over a decade, in the years following 2020 when the 
sun enters the sun spot cycle (also known as the Schwabe Cycle).  
So according to this scientific view, we are in for a period of global cooling rather than 
global warming. 
In light of such continually emerging research, it would be impossible to predict with any 
certainty how climate change will actually pan out in the next 100 or, say, even 50 years. 
Each theory’s modeling throws up a different scenario and it would be premature for 
countries to formulate complex trading systems like carbon credits based on any one of 
these theories. The fact of the matter is that science is too young and that we simply do 
not know. 
It would not only be wiser but also immensely practical for the world to set up a fund and 
a mechanism to develop strategies on addressing the tangible and clearly visible effects 
of climate change.  
 
There is no denying that climate change is a reality. What we don’t know is what causes 
it. As scientists sort out the science part (which may take decades simply because more 
research gives rise to more observations and newer theories), the world needs to evolve 
strategies to address the vagaries of climate change at the practical level. 
The Pacific Islands representatives who joined the citizens of other low-lying countries of 
the world in putting up a united voice at the climate change conference in Poznan, Poland 
last month were right in bringing the human factor in the spotlight. 
People affected by climate change must desist from pointing fingers at the developed 

 

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world for having caused sea level rise because of their carbon emissions. That argument 
may not hold true as new scientific discoveries unfold in the not too distant future. 
Instead, people from the islands—especially threatened atoll ecosystems like Tuvalu and 
Kiribati—need to put ever-increasing pressure on the world community to focus on the 
practical problems that they face as a consequence of climate change on purely 
humanitarian grounds and the human rights angle.   
Based purely on the human aspect, that indeed is a far more compelling proposition than 
finger pointing based on any imperfect scientific theory. 
Happy New Year, all.