NZ should declare an 'Emergency of Political Stupidity'

She is totally correct !!!
We need rational people like Jane Smith, to step up and enter the political arena, urgently.
If people with skills we need don’t step up, we will be heading down the same track as Venezuela.

The millennials are the ones being filled with propaganda, they just accept what they are told at university without question.

From an Oamaruvian sadly living in the city of Tauranga where the Councillors still believe money grows on trees you have hit the nail on the head. They are are the leaders in stupidity with a blind spot involving reality. Your assumptions are extremely accurate and you are saying what everybody either knows or thinks about in private and are to afraid to say in public. The Council staff who usually instigate these brainless ideas all go to the same conferences with the same guest speakers talking about these usually baseless ideals and these same staff have proved more than able to convince the usually lazy and uniformed Councillors to agree without a whimper of any educated reasoning in response to this type of nonsense. The least you could do is stand for the Otago Regional Council and help us all to slow the, what will be, an unreasonable grab of the Tax/ratepayers money in the near future.

Great. Finally an article to balance the climate change train-wreck being pushed by spineless councilors.

Jane addressed it briefly, but the anxiety being thrust upon the young is a crime. The kids should be filled with hope and a desire to build a better future. The ambition to take on responsibility. Build a family. Take a risk.

We are sitting on the precipice of great change, yet many seem despondent and empty, whereby we should be hopeful and expectant. I think this might be laid somewhat at the foot of the broken families, the single parents, the absent fathers. Suck it up and be a man. Speak truth.

Climate has changed for billions of years and it will continue to. Pathetic humans.

Enough is enough. Climate change is real - always has been, always will. It's a natural process influenced by thousands of variables. Human activity is minor and it is only our egos that embolden us to claim we can make any difference. We pollute the air and water but we can't change the climate. CO2 generated during thermal maturation of coals is leaking from our fractured continental crust all the time but is not even considered in IPCC models. NZ has 18 sedimentary basins, all containing huge volumes of coal (around a million sq km, only 4% of our continental crust is above water). A lot is held as hydrates in deep cold water but has a very limited temperature stability - warm the oceans slightly and you release this CO2. And to pre-empt the Al Gore evangelists who claim the rate is higher than ever , measure the rate of temperature change over 24 hours. Its huge, but will it be evident in a million years? No. Because it is noise on long term planetary and solar cycles. Stop listening to meteorologists who are extrapolating short term trends and talk to earth scientists to get things in perspective.