A knighted, nonagenarian scientist adds his voice to the call for a climate election in October. David Williams reports.
A horror start to 2023 isn’t going to stop outspoken scientist Sir Alan Mark giving a serve to politicians about climate change.
“Right now, we’re not doing anything beneficial to the global ecosystem with greenhouse gases becoming more and more threatening,” he says at his Dunedin retirement village. “And it seems like the politicians aren’t able to deal with the issue.”
Dunedin-born Mark is mourning the loss of his wife Pat, who died last month, and is recovering from a fall, which saw him temporarily hospitalised. But the work doesn’t stop.
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Last week, the 90-year-old was a signatory to the Intergenerational Climate Ambassadors’ open letter to MPs, in the wake of deadly Cyclone Gabrielle.
Mark, an emeritus professor of Botany at University of Otago, was the second-oldest signatory, behind Sir Lloyd Geering, an emeritus professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, who turned 105 last month.
Last Friday, Mark was happy to be interviewed by Newsroom.
The letter was a sign politicians weren’t doing enough, says the renowned botanist, who was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1978.
What do politicians need to do?
“Act to reduce the production of greenhouse gases,” he says. Mark acknowledges the democratic process makes that difficult in New Zealand, because a party taking a strong line can be reined in by a smaller party, effectively acting as handbrake.
His message is clear: “Humanity’s got to act to deal with the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, which are having a major impact.”
Policies axed
As it happens, climate was front and centre of last week’s political conversation – other than the ministerial demotion of Stuart Nash.
Several climate-related policies were axed or slowed in Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ latest policy purge. And as the projected cost of Lake Onslow pumped hydro scheme, feted as a salve for New Zealand’s thorny dry-year problem, leaped to $15.7 billion, the Government admitted it was considering alternatives.
Mark’s not impressed with political arguments against climate action.
Yes, he says, the country earns a lot of money from farming – “that’s more reason why we need to do something to address the product of farming; the methane production particularly”. In saying that, it’s a difficult issue and farmers will need to be compensated.
The argument New Zealand emits only a small amount of global greenhouse gases isn’t a reason for inaction, he says. “All of humanity has a responsibility to respond to global warming, which is going to ruin the planet if it doesn’t take action.”
Mark’s not swayed, either, by the idea climate policies are too expensive to pursue.
“I don’t think [it's] the expense of dealing with it that’s the problem; it’s the impact on humanity that would result from not dealing with global warming.”
Given how much of his beloved South Island high country is now awash with pine trees, he’s not in favour of planting our way out of our high per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, or a fan of big incentives for carbon farming – for planting pines in particular.
Over governments of different stripes, Mark rates New Zealand’s response to the climate crisis as better than average, but still not adequate. (In fact, as Newsroom reported in 2021, New Zealand had the second-highest increase in net emissions since 1990 of industrialised nations, behind Turkey.)
Politicians need to understand global warming, as the most serious issue facing humanity, which is difficult because, as a global issue it’ll require a global response.
Open Letter to MPs - Intergenerational Climate Ambassadors by David Williams on Scribd
Up to this point, Mark metes out criticism even-handedly, but he then adds he doesn’t trust National Party leader Christopher Luxon to deal with climate change.
Why is that?
“He says he apparently understands climate change and wants to deal with it. But dealing with it, from his perspective, I don’t think is going to be very effective.”
In words that probably won’t mollify advocates for deep and rapid emissions cuts, as per the scientific advice, a spokesperson for Luxon responds: “We’ll announce our policies in the lead-up to the election, but we will be focused on a technology-led approach to reduce agricultural emissions, and support carbon capture, and promoting more renewable energy.”
National is “absolutely committed” to delivering on emissions targets, the spokesperson says, including under the Paris climate agreement by 2030 and net-zero emissions in 2050.
It signed the Paris climate agreement, and voted for the Zero Carbon Bill, which set net-zero and methane targets and established the Climate Change Commission.
“National supported the Government’s emissions budgets last year.”
The spokesperson says in their emailed statement that under Labour coal imports had almost tripled. “They have abandoned half of their climate change policies and their proposed new RMA [Resource Management Act] laws will make it even more difficult to obtain consents for renewable energy projects.”
Last week, Hipkins defended scrapping the climate policies, saying they weren’t cost-effective and the Government would make up the difference elsewhere.
But the move has caused friction between Labour, its support partner, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori. It reinforces the idea Labour isn’t following through with former leader Jacinda Ardern’s pledge to treat climate as this generation’s nuclear-free moment.
A Manapōuri guardian
Mark, the knighted botanist, has ruffled political feathers in the past.
In November 1969, his comments to a radio reporter about the clearing of trees on Lake Manapōuri shores, for a transmission-line road, led the Electricity Department to pull its funding for the University of Otago research.
After a shoreline survey of Lake Te Anau, predicting extensive destruction of forests as a result of raising the lake level, he and fellow scientists Peter Johnson, Jim Crush and Colin Meurk wrote an open letter to the Electricity Department in 1972, ahead of that year’s general election, demanding to know the official Government policy.
Mark’s involvement in the Save Manapōuri campaign is arguably his highest-profile moment.
The 13-year battle to preserve Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri from a plan to raise lake levels to supply electricity to an aluminium smelter at Bluff came to a head in the 1972 election, with concern fuelled by a Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society petition, presented to Parliament in 1970, which garnered 265,000 signatures.
Labour, under Norman Kirk, won the 1972 election, and conservation policies played a part in significant victories in South Island electorates.
(Mark, who admits he donates to Greenpeace, names Kirk as his favourite politician because he was “very much for the people”, and the underdog. His least favourite was National’s Rob Muldoon – “he was just a dictator”.)
Kirk’s government scuttled the plan for a hydro-electric dam on Manapōuri, and created the Guardians of the Lakes, a new statutory body. Mark was one of the original six appointments – “I call them the cream of the rebels,” the nonagenarian quips – and remained a member until 1999.
You could argue Mark’s activism was before his time – certainly it was well before 1989, when the Education Act required universities to accept a role as “critic and conscience of society”.
(A central focus of Mark’s published research was snow tussock – a plant the botanist admits today is his favourite. His research into water yield from snow tussock grasslands, including from fog, proved controversial, and he had to face down staunch opposition from farm runholders.)
Scientists must be activists, Mark argues. “They’ve got knowledge that greenhouse gases are allowing degradation of the world’s ecosystems, and the sooner we stop that degradation the sooner we’ll start to recover.”
Climate scientist James Renwick, a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, has been a lead author of IPCC assessment reports, and sits on the Climate Change Commission.
He says it’s a duty of scientists to be advocates, and a lot more are these days.
“Scientists are funded by public money and if they’ve got important things that they’re working on that affect the public then I think it’s absolutely our duty to speak out to the public about that.”
Renwick describes Mark as a well-respected elder statesman of New Zealand science. It’s no surprise he’s a signatory to the Intergenerational Climate Ambassadors’ letter, Renwick says, “but I’m very grateful he is”.
“Sir Alan Mark is somebody who’s studied and understood the climate and ecosystems of New Zealand for as long as I’ve been alive. He understands very clearly just what a threat climate change is to everything we hold dear.”
Does Mark still hold out hope the climate crisis can be turned around?
“I’m becoming less hopeful with time,” he says.
There’s never been a crisis like it, the scientist says, and, for it to be effective, any response by New Zealand has to be mirrored internationally.
“Whether that’s going to be possible remains to be seen.”
