The amusing emails we get…

Craig Shearer - 24 October 2023

As I’ve written before, we occasionally get people emailing the NZ Skeptics committee with their various “theories” about how things work.

One of our previous emailers has recently contacted again spouting unhinged theories about Covid and climate change. The person seems to consider themselves a comedian:

“Scams used to cost you money … now, they’re about to cost you a lot more than money …

The NZ Police used to warn the NZ public about scams … and try to stop the criminals that were perpetrating them … but, for some reason … they haven’t done so for the ‘Climate Change Scam’ … and the ‘Covid 19 Scam’ …“

Anyway, this person seems to have some mental health issues, or at least a huge amount of time on their hands, having emailed us exceedingly long screeds. I won’t bore you with all the unhinged details, but a couple of graphs stood out.

Firstly, we have one related to the supposed “Climate Change scam”:

It’s interesting they have to scale the x-axis to 140 million years to promote the idea that decreasing CO2 will be a bad thing, and eventually there won’t be enough to support plant life.

Then there’s this one:

The implication is that there’s a causation between the amount of atmospheric CO2 and the number of deaths related to climate. Of course, our technology has advanced over the last century, meaning that improvements in the standard of living, and communications, has meant that natural disasters are now less likely to be deadly. But none of this supports the erroneous assumption that reducing CO2 would then make climate-related disasters more deadly!

Somehow, I don’t think the NZ police are going to be investigating these so-called scams. And, notably, they contacted the NZ Police Association, not the police. I think they’ll probably just delete the email.