New Zealand's plan to prepare for inevitable climate change impacts

I have very little hope that our government will improve no matter who is voted in. They seem determined to slowly make things worse, not matter what direction they pick.

For example, Labour banned guns, insulated and ventilated cold/moldy rental homes, vaccinated >90% of the population (while simultaneously keeping covid at bay until that was achived), and a lot more https://old.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/wvifwk/so_what_...

They also embarked on a massive program to fix the water quality issues you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Waters_reform_programme

So, nannies they may be, layabouts they are not.

I've always been deeply frustrated at Green's unwillingness to work with National. By playing kingmaker like NZ First did, the party would have had much more impact on the environment, had their primary focus actually been environment.

I know that this would never happen because Green is not an environmental party but an actual left wing party that a Labour should have been instead of...generally doing nothing.

It’s been staring us in the face for 60 years. Maybe 100.

Accept your fate like the rest of us, and make sure you stock up on dissociatives and pain meds for when the time is nigh.

Nobody cares!

The simple reality is that we have already demonstrated that we can drastically modify climate in a very short time span. Not for the better unfortunately and arguably unintentionally. But how did that happen? Simple: economics. Dangling a carrot in front of people gets them acting really quickly and enthusiastically. We started burning fossil fuels at a truly massive scale during the industrial revolution.

Basically, getting to zero carbon is now about economic survival. Doing so has some nice side effects like reducing emissions. But it's basically gone from wouldn't it be cute to have some solar panels on my roof to, I'd better put some solar panels on my roof because I'll be paying through my nose for gas and save buckets of money. Nothing like some economic incentives to get even the most staunch climate change deniers investing in roof top solar and other solutions. Now world + dog is installing batteries, solar, wind mills, etc. Not because they are cute but because they provide something desirable: cheap energy. Ever since the cost curves crossed, people have an insatiable demand for this stuff. To the point where once ambitious and seemingly infeasible goals for carbon reduction are being moved forward. Because reality is out pacing ambition. Even the most optimistic predictions a decade ago are now being surpassed.

That's a trick that can be repeated. Identify some solutions, make it profitable for people to implement those. Sit back and relax while they get really creative doing those things and working out better ways to do those things. It worked for energy. It's working for transport (EVs are booming nicely). It could work for agriculture, and other sectors. There's a lot that is enabled by cheap plentiful energy too and we're starting to get that. Renewable energy is pretty awesome from a cost point of view.

Actively reducing carbon in our atmosphere is the next big challenge. If you look at it from an economical point of view the simple reality is that capturing carbon is a lot of work without a lot of economic reward. There are plenty of ways to do this technically but the main challenge is incentivizing people to start doing those things at scale. Letting nature take its course is going to take too long. So, the key challenge is figuring out the economics. Once we nail that, the rest might happen rapidly.

Anyhow, for a bit of perspective, NASA's own research on potential sea level rises argues that in the worst case scenario for climate warming, we should see a rise of just over a meter by 2100 and a possible rise of 5 meters by 2300. Now, if you like, go to, for example (though it only focuses on the United States) NOAA's map tool for visualizing different levels of rising water. (1)

See for yourself what a one meter rise looks like and then also a completely drastic 300-year 5 meter increase. To be sure, both would be major problems for millions of people and huge tracts of coastal land, but bear in mind that these people and the governments/private interests/individuals responsible for those areas would have from ONE TO THREE centuries to prepare.

This is a lot of time even for slow measures at current technology and resources to prepare remarkably well. It's reasonable to suppose that over the next 100 years (barring some other different catastrophe), we'll have even better technology and resources at our disposal, especially if the water visibly starts to go up and coastal fresh water table salinity starts to grow large enough to cause crop failures. At least as far as sea level rises are concerned, solutions are completely manageable.

The doom scenarios for rising oceans are grotesquely overblown by a large base of people who just can't seem to emotionally help themselves in not specifically and forcefully insisting on catastrophic situations, despite millennia of humanity showing just how adaptive it is and despite the literal best science on the matter arguing for something that is much less catastrophic when actually examined.

1. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/10/-11581024.66377982...

NASA sea level rise predictions https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating...

In the grand scheme of things, solar geoengineering is cheap. There are many entities in the world that could afford it on their own without coordinating with anyone else. For some of them, it would be cheaper than preparing for the consequences of climate change. And some of those may be willing to take the risk.

Shipping things from countries that have natural resource advantages is fine. Shipping things from other countries because they do things that are illegal in your own country (whether that’s labor rights, environmental regulations, lack of democracy, slavery or whatever) is bad.

What's more, the areas that will fare best for precipitation and temperature rise are also the areas that tend to be sparsely populated and have cheap(er) housing. Though those sandflies in the South Island can be vicious.

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resou....

Look at what a few million Syrian refugees has done to German and French politics during a period of relative abundance. What do you think will happen if you multiply that number by 100, and add in some economic turmoil and hyperinflation? You get some modern iteration of the Russian Revolution or Nazi Germany. But this time, everyone has nukes.

- Make slight adjustments to urban and infrastructure planning to accommodate for expected changes, e.g., updating catchment forecasts and flood and tide maps are probably some of the big ones (although the former two are wildly unpredictable at the best of times).

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/o...

Note that so far, politics has led them to be conservative in their predictions (no tipping points for good -- cheap renewables -- or bad) but it still makes economic sense to prevent the impacts.

> The report further identifies two types of limits to adaptation: “hard adaptation limit,” when no amount of money or technology can solve a problem, and “soft adaptation limit,” which means that the required technology or policy intervention will be too costly to realistically implement. Hard limits include irreversible, large-scale changes to the Earth system or ecosystem functions (for example, the loss of glaciers feeding major inland water systems). Soft limits include changes to local climatology. Working Group II notes, for example, at 2⁰C it is expected that some staple crops may reach soft adaptation limits to changes in temperature and precipitation across the tropics, which will make them prohibitively difficult or expensive to grow.

This alone is an incredibly difficult problem to solve, as evidenced by the fact that the entire history of our species has been spent trying to solve the food problem.

Only very recently have very wealthy western nations overcome food insecurity for most people, while the rest of the world (and poor people in wealthy nations) are already struggling with food insecurity, without adding more crop failures due to climate change on top. The Haber process was only discovered in 1909!

> Move people away from the oceans as those rise

Given that a very large percentage of the world population lives near the ocean, what makes you think relocating hundreds of millions if not billions of people and their jobs and communities is not a hard problem?

They're not really. They're just using this as a selling point on many social changes they're making in favor of equity.

It is certain that more energy, originally from the sun, will be captured and held out the earth | sea lower atmosphere layers due to the increased insulation effects of increasing greenhouse gases.

This will have significant impact on the global climate cells about the planet, precisely where what will happen is difficult to predict, the general pattern of the kinds of things not so much.

What we can do is reduce the insulating increase by putting less up there, capturing more, etc.

What we can also do is prepare for change, eg here we have been increasing the divrsity of seed varieties for wheat | canola | barley | etc across the board, building a database of tested seeds against temp and humidity variation.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a30169...

If literally all the ice on the planet melted and ran into the ocean the ocean would only rise 70 meters [0] (so 100s of meters is genuinely physically impossible).

The current WORST case scenarios as modeled by the IPCC would put us on track for <4 meters of rise by 2300, 280 years from now [1]

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating...