Global warming = Alarming Blog

Sorry ! I just cannot help myself.
This carbon credits thing has really got me going. Are we going to see cattle trucks adorned with native trees in planting boxes? Will dairy cows be saddled with bonsai trees?
Have we gone completely and absolutely bonkers. Okay, so our government, along with a few other guilt ridden, politically correct, absolutely bamboozled countries, decided to sign up on the Kyoto protocol and make their presence felt in Carbonhagen. Yes, we should be planning for an environmentally safe future. I am ready to concede that the world is going through a warming cycle (The emphasis on ‘cycle’) an observable fact that is also affecting other planets in our universe. However as always we Kiwis, without venturing to challenge the reasons why, will sit back and take what is dished up. I am not a meteorologist but I, along with a growing number of skeptics, have a feeling in my gut that we are being frightened into accepting huge changes and as always, if we conform, someone somewhere is going to make an obscene amount of money. Remember the carless days fiasco (oil barons made a fortune out of that) and who can forget the Y2K Millennium bug that convinced us the crash of computers would send us back into the stone age. Thankfully, one New Zealander had the knowledge and professional qualifications to stand up and be counted regarding the current fear mongering. I refer to Mr. Augie Auer, a well respected professor of atmospheric science who has sadly passed away. He co-founded the ‘NZ Climate Science Coalition along with a Mr. Owen McShane who made this statement at Augie Auer’s funeral:
“It’s very sad that Augie will not live to see the fulfillment of his conviction that good science will triumph over the false hype and over exaggerated propaganda about carbon dioxide being a pollutant and a cause of catastrophic global warming. When the day comes when science prevails, and there are many who predict that it will happen within the next five years, we will not forget the leadership shown by Augie Auer in the fight against the corruption of true science”.
Augie’s views aside, let us say that this country must do their bit to freshen up the atmosphere, sorry, I just do not get it. Maybe you do. The simplest of researches will show that a whopping thirty percent of this green and pleasant land, New Zealand, consists of carbon (co2) gobbling, forest. We are blessed with ten national parks covering over five million acres, a massive amount of trees in any ones language. Couple the Native forest with approximately a further five million acres of planted forest, not to mention every tree in every garden, every council park, every farm woodlot and the sea (yes, that also takes in carbon) that’s a veritable carbon munching machine. A couple of facts that are worth noting….. A fully grown pine tree is made up of approximately fifty percent water and fifty percent carbon. Apparently two and a half acres of radiata pine sequests twenty five tonnes of co2 per year. This strange word ‘sequests’ in this context basically means gobbles up. Okay so this is getting boring, my point is this, our little country is more than doing its bit, digesting millions of tonnes of carbon and belching out oodles of oxygen. Our carbon footprint is the size of a premature infant compared with ‘Big foot’ international industry. Are we being sucked in, taken for a ride? Would it not have been more sensible to challenge the main industrial polluters, notably China and the United States, to demonstrate a responsibly environmental attitude, prior to NZ capitulating to green pressure. To put it rather crudely, surely a tangible case for New Zealand to say, ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’. I cannot help thinking that the hidden agenda is almost totally political. You scratch my back and I’ll massage your political ego.