Are We the Scabs?
Mark Honeychurch - 29th September 2025
I’ve just spent an enjoyable week on holiday in Taupō celebrating my 50th birthday. It’s amazing to think that this massive lake is actually the caldera of a supervolcano that, for the last 30,000 years or so, has erupted on average around once every thousand years, and that it last erupted about 1,800 years ago. Staying in a property overlooking the lake certainly made me think a little about my own mortality, and my family’s wellbeing. Given that, according to Wikipedia, the last eruption “devastated much of the North Island”, I guess it’s more than just the local residents who will be affected when the volcano next erupts.
While we were in Taupō the kids and I took advantage of this geologically active area and managed to collect some interesting volcanic rocks from Kinloch beach, along with a few decently sized chunks of black obsidian glass from a road cutting. However, that’s not all we collected - I returned to Wellington with a nasty cold, so I may sound a little bunged up on this week’s podcast.
In this issue, we’ve received an angry missive from astrologer Don Murray - he’s really not happy with Craig Shearer’s article about him from last year, and thinks we’re all “scabs”. Patrick has reviewed a couple of recent climate change books that argue that it’s not all doom and gloom, but the sooner we act the more we can mitigate some of the worst consequences of our rapidly changing climate. Katrina has looked at some preliminary research into the keto diet in mice, as a follow-on to an article she wrote on the diet a couple of years ago. I’ve tried to answer the question of why Melanie Petrowski from Napier thought the world as we knew it was going to end last week (spoiler: it didn’t). And, finally, Bronwyn has felt the irresistible urge to look into Trump and RFK Jr’s most recent medical claims, that paracetamol use during pregnancy has caused the recent autism epidemic.