29 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.
29 September 2025
I was intending to do further blogs on esoteric climate related subjects such as the recent articles from the Guardian on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) changes that may be responsible for very significant alterations in the climate over the next century. Ocean currents are very much in the climate change news, and are certainly altering - likely due to the climate crisis - and have altered in the past, contributing to ice ages in the North and warming in the Southern hemisphere, documented from ice cores and other evidence.
1 September 2025
I recently attended the yearly meeting of Ora Taiao: The Aotearoa New Zealand Climate and Health Council. This is a body made up of health professionals, organisations, and supporters who advocate for equitable, rapid, and regenerative climate action. The society is a not-for-profit politically nonpartisan incorporated society. Its objective is to lead by example in advocating for health-enhancing climate action.
9 June 2025
It's been interesting to see the world's richest man going toe to toe with the world's most powerful man. Nope, actually, interesting isn't the right word. I'm not sure what you call it when you can't tear your eyes away from two influential grown men acting like spoiled children. Maybe disappointing? Like when you tell your child you're disappointed in them. Anyway, Trump's still not pressed the big red nuclear button, and we're already nearly an eighth of the way through his presidency, so maybe we'll survive this yet.
12 May 2025
There are so many things going on in the climate space at the moment that it is difficult to keep up with them all. My sources of recent information are Dr Catherine Dyer, Bernard Hickey, and Peter Bale from the Kākā - a weekly podcast on political economy, climate change, and international affairs (from Dr Robert Patman University of Otago), together with invited guests each week from other areas of interest including economists and politicians. I believe this is a worthy site of usually peer-reviewed information concerning these topics. I would like to make a plug for the Kākā, which unfortunately is a pay site (but most reliable news these days is). For under $20 a month, one receives a daily briefing and a set of links to other sites (also often unfortunately behind paywalls). Many people might say it is mildly left of centre, and it is certainly not particularly complimentary of our present government. It is available through a platform called Substack, interestingly enough run by a young expatriate New Zealander.
28 April 2025
I intend this episode to comment on several issues.
31 March 2025
Further to my previous articles on climate change, this week I will talk about several short topics from recent publications.
17 March 2025
This week I will comment on two articles. The first is an article from Science Advances by Richardson et al. 9 from 13 September 2023. This is a research article with the title “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. This article is a collaboration between multiple climate scientists, including those from the renowned Potsdam Institute (Rockstrom et al).
18 February 2025
The IPCC report of 2022 notes that climate change is a major risk to planet Earth. (IPCC 2022). New Zealand's Net Zero Carbon Act has been passed by parliament, and has been accepted by the National party, Labour Party, Green party, ACT party and Te Pati Maori. The NZ First Party is ambivalent. This would suggest that very urgent and far-ranging changes are necessary to our society in New Zealand within the next six years, to try to get to 1.5° C of global warming by 2050 - or preferably earlier. It should be noted that we are already close to that target in 2024, and atmospheric greenhouse gases have increased rather than decreased year by year since then. These have led to year-on-year increases in record temperatures, with associated increases in floods, droughts, wildfires, strength of storms, sea level rise and catastrophic effects in many countries including New Zealand. The most affected countries are in the “Global South”, yet they produce the least greenhouse gases. New Zealand is the 7th highest producer of greenhouse gases per person in the world.
21 January 2025
I have been a member of this group for a few years. I joined because I was tired of ill-informed, anti-scientific nonsense in our media especially stemming from our politicians. I am a 78 year old retired Orthopaedic Surgeon who has worked in science since my initial Zoology degree in 1967. I do not belong to any (anti)social media.
11 November 2024
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published the AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023 in 2023, which summarises five years of reports on global temperature changes, fossil fuel use and likely climate impacts.
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.
28 August 2023
OK, so another item related to climate change. I've recently started listening to an entertaining podcast - The Climate Denier's Playbook.
28 August 2023
This week I'm concentrating on climate change misinformation through a bunch of slightly connected items.
28 August 2023
One of our members emailed us last week asking about a climate change denier's blog article.
28 August 2023
This weekend the Yeah… Nah! Podcast crew - that is me, Mark and Bronwyn recorded an interview with Melanie Trecek-King who is one of our international guests at our conference in November. (You can get tickets here!) We've released the podcast as a bonus episode.
10 July 2023
Max, one of our regular podcast listeners, messaged us to let us know that Groundswell NZ has recently sponsored a visit by climate denier Dr Tom Sheahen.
27 February 2023
It's hard to believe it's the end of February already, and the official end to summer, at least on a calendar month basis. With all the rain and weather events we've had, it's hard to think that this summer has been a classic one. Still, it may well have finally made some of the more sluggish members of the population wake up to the reality of climate change. And what a reality it is, with the massive destruction that took place in Hawke's Bay and other areas. The cost of replacing infrastructure seems that it place a big burden on our economy for some time.
31 October 2022
In depressing (but expected) news this week, it seems that it's highly unlikely we'll be able to constrain global warming to 1.5C, and that we're on a path of irreversible damage to the climate which may well lead to catastrophic failure of the climate and likely extinction of vast numbers of species including humanity. It may not happen in my lifetime, but I do worry for the future young people today.
3 October 2022
This past week has been replete with stories related to climate change. Firstly, there's Hurricane Ian which has wreaked havoc and destruction and loss of life in Florida most recently, but previously in Cuba and Puerto Rico. It's fairly obvious that extreme weather events are exacerbated by climate change, and that living near the coast is going to be an increasingly risky proposition for large numbers of people.
19 September 2022
Finally this week, I received my local body elections pack. I have the opportunity to vote for candidates for the Mayor of Auckland, and members of the Auckland Council, for a local board, and also a liquor licensing trust (where I live in Auckland, we're a “dry” area - where we can only purchase alcohol from licensing-trust-run businesses).
25 July 2022
This past week has seen the alarming heat waves in Europe, with the UK seeing highest ever temperatures, exceeding 40C.
25 July 2022
This week I take a look at a media attack on our friend Dr Siouxsie Wiles, and talk about the European heat wave and climate change.
27 June 2022
This weekend I took a look at the FutureFit website. This site is designed to make people aware of their carbon footprint - the amount that their household is contributing to climate change through Greenhouse gas emissions.
8 November 2021
Last week Mark published an item from Stuart Landsborough, from Wanaka's Puzzling World about his recent epiphany about how we can deal with climate change. I found Stuart's item contained some great points, and it resonated with me. I'm worried about whether we'll be able to prevent catastrophic climate change.
16 August 2021
This past week has seen the release of the IPCC's 6th assessment report on climate change. The report is issued every seven years. It's become increasingly obvious with successive reports, that the world is in danger of severe consequences of climate change, and it's increasingly certain (to the point of virtual certainty) that humans are the cause of it.
19 July 2021
Over the past few weeks there have been various extreme weather events that are now being attributed to climate change, whereas once scientists were more cagey on the issue - saying that it's never possible to blame any one event on climate change. But the evidence is stacking up, and we see temperature records being broken - 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record.
19 July 2021
Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
16 November 2020
You probably already heard that Exxon knew about climate change back in the 70s and 80s, and chose to double down on the misinformation, but now, as an EV driver myself I was interested to learn the latest news to come out about climate change denial relating to big Auto, specifically Ford and GM. In the first part of an investigation by E&E News, we find out that the automakers were well aware that car emissions caused climate change 50 years ago. Their own scientists were telling top executives that emissions from the vehicles they were producing would lead to climate change.
1 November 2019
A quick word to let you all know that our project to promote herd immunity through vaccination is still in the fund-raising stage. We have been working behind the scenes to secure funding from a large donor, but still need your help.
1 November 2019
How to be a Global Warming Skeptic
1 November 2019
Skeptic summary: A brilliant piece on CEASE therapy, the bogus autism 'cure' made from watered down vaccines. CEASE stands for the Complete Elimination of Autisim Spectrum Expression, and was invented by a homeopath, Tinus Smits, who followed the basic (false) principal of homeopathy that like cures like. So assuming that vaccines and toxins cause autisim (which they don't—the cause is still unknown, and there is no link between vaccines and autism), it was thought that diluting vaccines and toxins (which ones?) would cure autism.
1 August 2019
With that odd title out of the way, I want to get to the heart of what our role should be as skeptics, and how to properly do scientific scepticism.
1 August 2019
I am a long time member of the NZ Skeptics. I wish to respectfully raise a point of concern that I have regarding the direction that the NZ Skeptics appear to be going. Over two decades ago I walked away from Greenpeace when I realized that they had become political activists and had abandoned rational scientific debate. In recent editions of the NZ Skeptic magazine I have been seeing similar warning signs.
1 May 2019
Skeptic summary: Despicable. When people are in a vulnerable situation, it is harder for them to be sceptical. We need to support our family and friends to avoid these tragedy vampires.
1 May 2019
The morning of the 15th of March I woke up ready for a positive day with my son at Cathedral square, to attend the school strike for climate.
4 June 2017
Although there is a history in skepticism of people being "skeptical" of climate change, modern skepticism understands that there is a broad consensus amongst scientists that climate change is both real and caused by humans.
21 August 2016
Brian Cox argued with Australian senator Malcolm Roberts on TV show Q&A about climate change, accusing NASA and other organisations of "corrupting" temperature data.
3 July 2016
A recent article on Ken Ring's Predict Weather website, presumably written by Ken, has told people not to trust anything they read in the media. In a particularly conspiratorial tone, the article says that you should not trust politicians and you should consider not taking a cancer treatment that the medical profession recommends to you.
12 June 2016
There is now a second panel that has been convened to review Christchurch Council's "Tonkin Taylor" coastal erosion report. The panel has been instructed to:
21 February 2016
In the United States, the Texas board of education is very important because the state is so large. This means that the board has a large sway over which textbooks are used nationwide in schools. Historically Texas has been a battleground for creationism, with efforts to get as many fundamentalist Christians onto the board of education as possible.
11 October 2015
He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate's sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.
27 September 2015
Dane Wigington, lead researcher for GeoEngineering Watch says:
1 November 2014
I note the raft of letters in the last magazine on anthropogenic climate change (ACC). While I, on the committee, am perfectly happy with the position statement and scientific consensus. (ie, Mankind is generating large quantities of CO2, - this entraps solar radiation and causes temperature to increase) I don't understand the massive spread and uncertantity of this increase: 1 to 5 degrees. Hundreds of percent? In fact you can easily find other scientists that say 0.7 to 8 degrees, and even a couple more that claim these figures are half what they should be! They all claim they have good data. Who to believe? Can't climate science please do a little better?
1 August 2014
In the Autumn 2014 NZ Skeptic, Martin Manning stated:
1 May 2014
At TAM 2013 the last talk was by Peter Boghossian and it was on Authenticity. One of the take-away messages I got from that talk was that you should stand by your words and if someone is offended by them let them know that you're sorry that they were offended. But stand by what you said, if you really trust in it.
1 May 2014
The game is … on. I've recently rewatched the new Sherlock and my partner always reacts to that misquote.
1 May 2014
Human carbon emissions have been described as a planet-wide experiment with a sample size of one. Are there ways for science to accept uncertainties and just point at what could happen, while not testing the theory? This article is adapted from a talk at the NZ Skeptics Conference, in Wellington, 7 September 2013.
1 May 2014
It is difficult to know where to begin in response to Jim Ring's letter (NZ Skeptic 110), but somewhat reluctantly, here goes.
1 May 2014
1 February 2014
Keith Muir (NZ Skeptic 109) ends "I rest my case." But he never makes a case; he only quotes opinion. This is unacceptable in Law or Science.
1 November 2013
Keith Muir responds to Barry Brill's article, A Climate of Hope, in NZ Skeptic 108.
1 August 2013
If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch, says a recent article in the_ Economist. _Barry Brill looks at recent climate sensitivity estimates and considers the possibility of a downgrade.
1 May 2013
Real science operates by collecting data, inventing theories, developing models and making predictions that can be tested. If predictions fail, theories must be modified or discarded.
1 February 2013
Do you believe in climate change? Based on my past readings of NZ Skeptic of course not. After all this is the skeptic's magazine.
1 February 2005
SCIENCE has not "progressed only by slow cautious steps" as Piers McLaren claims (Forum, Spring 2004), but by great bold ones. Scientists should resist new ideas but it is a myth that they do so irrationally. Contrary to Maclaren's letter, quantum theory rapidly won the day. Planck published in 1900, Einstein in 1905, in 1913 Bohr produced a quantum structure for an atom. By 1922 all three had won Nobel prizes for work on quantum theory.
1 May 2004
When I sent my letter to the NZ Skeptic (Spring 2003), I did not expect vehement denials in the next issue. Such debate is, of course, healthy and occasionally useful. My letter, though, was not intended to cover the whole subject; merely to offer some points to ponder. The responses have been rather more thorough, and I feel I must defend my position.