No more frosty pitches

OPINION: Being from down south it seems laughable that we should have to contend with global warming. What will we do, asks Mark Wilson in this week's Mate.

Replace the cabbage trees along Tweed St with palm trees, fire a fake sand beach out the front of the Sea Scout Den and watch as Scandinavian backpackers turn their back on Queenstown for the yellow sands and balmy weather of the New River Estuary.

While it may be cold down south it has its benefits, lower levels of disease in our stock and soils, we can grow great swedes and most of all we don't have to pack as much when going on holiday because we are tough from walking barefoot in the snow uphill both ways to get to and from school.

Will Global warming put these great southern qualities at risk? There is some form of debate over whether it even exists, it's all a conspiracy theory, the world is actually cooling, it's all natural forces, scientologists are causing it etc and while I don't know what Ken Ring thinks on the matter it would be a fair guess old man moon thinks that moon is causing it!

To throw my theory in, I'm a skier and I grew up playing rugby on frost covered fields, since my childhood there is less reliable snow and softer footy pitches, case closed.

What do we do to stop this impending doom of tropical fruit, topless sunbathing at Oreti Beach and children going soft? Many people think New Zealand should pack up its 0.1 per cent of global CO2 emissions in its old kit bag and trudge off to Copenhagen and lead the world in emissions reduction to save our clean green image.

Noble it may be but while we may look great it's hardly going to save the planet.

Someone in Brazil can wake up and clear fell some colossal chunk of Amazon rain forest and our whole year's efforts are wasted in a week.

China grows by over 7 million people a year and pumps out more C02 in two days than we do in a whole year.

So little old New Zealanders wake up, pay the power bill plus the extra 20 per cent to save Earth, fill their car plus the extra 8c a litre to offset India having to clean up its act and then head down to the back paddock and start corking sheep bums so Brazil can cut down some more trees.

We were by no means a major cause of global warming, we will face just as many consequences as the rest of the world if not more and yet New Zealand is being asked to suffer to set an example like some form of climate-crusading martyr.

Yes, we have a problem, it needs fixed; maybe the best way to do this is to tax each company on Earth regardless of where they are from a very small amount, put that into a research fund where the technology invented is owned by all citizens of the world or maybe the Stags just need to add the Air NZ Cup to the Shield and hell will well and truly have frozen over.

» Mark Wilson is a true southern man who took on the job of escorting a Speight's Ale House during a 10-week voyage to London in 2007.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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Wig   #4   04:58 pm Nov 26 2009

Not 'conspiracy theories' Ken, 'crazy conspiracy theories'

Ken Ring   #3   03:00 pm Nov 26 2009

Conspiracy theories? Ever heard of ClimateGate? Google it cheers Ken

Wig   #2   08:31 am Nov 25 2009

Though I don't believe with Ken's crazy conspiracy theories, I think the correct term is 'climate change' Global warming is misleading.

Ken Ring   #1   01:04 pm Nov 21 2009

Mate, sorry to disappoint you, but global warming is a myth, a poor excuse being putting the blame on the climate for the world’s poor collective memory that weather is cyclical like the tides, and a shallowly disguised reason for seeking to impose a tax that promises only to address an international shortfall in banking capital. Just look at recent cooler weather patterns. They have not been bizarre, unusual or extraordinary. Late winter snows and unseasonal cold have happened often before as a bit of research legwork would speedily reveal. 1867, 1903, 1939 and 1975 were years with similar unusual late winter cold patterns in NZ, showing that such events have a regular 36-year cycle and have nothing to do with changes in climate. Because the fact is not headline-grabbing does not make it less valid. Sooner or later the world is going to wake up to the fact that the next Ice Age is what we're heading for, but even that is about 10,000 years away from being felt. The rate is about a 1°C drop in temperature over 8,000 years. However there are small signs that this is happening. Antarctica has been thickening in the middle for the past 20 years causg a build up of pressure which is why chunks have started breaking off at the ends and floating north. The Pacific sea level has been declining as the water has been taken to form the ice. Yes, declining. Tuvalu is not sinking. Just google Antarctica thickening or sealevels declining to read up on the science. The whole global warming scare is an attempt by the United Nations to fulfill the dream of a world government with them in charge. The international banking cartel compromising International Monetary Fund(IMF) and others like the WMO underwrite the UN. They are all using the global warming scare to extract billions in the form of taxation with the promise of helping underdeveloped nations. Yet these banking organisations and the UN have been around for a while and these underdeveloped nations are still living in abject poverty. Go figure. Ken Ring www.predictweather.com

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