Who is Rob Painting?

He's new to Frogblog, commenting for perhaps the first time today (so far as I've noticed) but he sure knows his AGW! Rob's explanations are clear and sure and make the 'opposition' seem dull-witted.
Here is a collection of his responses from today, trimmed a little to fit :-)


Posted March 14, 2013 at 7:55 PM


A climate change denier is not one who denies climate changes, but one who is unwillingly to accept the overwhelming consensus of scientific evidence that humans are now causing climate to abruptly change due to the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas. Something known as the increased Greenhouse Effect.

Maybe Bill English falls into this category, or maybe his world view is so self-centred he really doesn’t care about the harm and suffering that climate change is causing. Difficult to judge thus far.

Russell Norman should also add ocean acidification to the list of near-term issues that New Zealand is going to have to face. Oyster farmers on the North American Pacific coast are already confronting seawater so corrosive that it is killing juvenile oyster larvae. We may not be prone to such strong upwelling of corrosive deep water, but it’s still going to be a huge problem for New Zealand in the decades ahead.

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Rob Painting
Posted March 14, 2013 at 8:25 PM


“What specific policies does the Greens Party advocate to make the climate change so as to prevent the occasional drought?”

I’m pretty sure the Green Party understands that drought is normally a natural event. Global warming however, leads to the poleward expansion of the sub-tropical dry zones – areas each side of the equator which are drier-than-average due to nature of the planet’s large-scale atmospheric circulation. Expansion of this dry zone over New Zealand is not going to be helpful for farmers.

Secondly, La Nina and El Nino are likely to become more extreme due the the greater moisture holding and redistributing capacity of the atmosphere. So La Nina is going to get wetter on average, and El Nino drier.

Thirdly, as the atmosphere warms the drying power of the air increases too. When a wind warmer than before blows through, it will dry out the soils it comes into contact with much more quickly.

The Earth is in energy imbalance, so it must warm up until equilibrium is restored. We therefore have decades of warming in front of us, and drought will become increasingly more prevalent in New Zealand. But so too will floods – a difficult concept for many to grasp, and I’ve yet to see this explained well enough, but simple enough when you understand a few of the basics.

Bottomline: National policies will make New Zealand much poorer, both financially and ecologically. (They appear to be in denial of the science, or simply are too selfish to care)

Green Party policies wish to prevent this gloomy scenario from unfolding. True, many Greens are a tad bit naive on some of the fiscal policy issues, but their hearts are in the right place even if their heads sometimes aren’t.
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Rob Painting
Posted March 14, 2013 at 8:44 PM


Tony – yes it is very odd that politicians are doing nothing substantive to slow greenhouse gas emissions. Ever since the Kyoto Protocol was enacted greenhouse gas emissions from industrial activity have sky-rocketed.

Medical science provides us with an apt analogy:

Suppose the parents of a child notice he is feeling poorly. They take him along to a doctor who diagnoses a life-threatening condition that requires urgent medical intervention. Not happy with this diagnosis, the parents trundle the child off to a succession of doctors who all give the same diagnosis. Out of one hundred doctors, 97 give the same diagnosis of urgent medical intervention. Of the remaining three medical experts, two aren’t sure, and the third reckons the child is fine – despite the tell-tale signs he is not.

The National party seem to be ignoring the 97% of experts. As in the analogy no good will come of this, the climate is bound by maths and physics and has no regard for human ideology.