Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 22/23
This is a call out and invitation to all those who want to get involved in planning a Climate Camp in Aotearoa New Zealand. The sense of urgency is upon us and the time is ripe for a grassroots mobilisation to stop those responsible in their tracks and demonstrate that a sustainable alternative both possible and necessary.
Please read the proposal below and discuss it with others who wish to be involved - it is meant to be a starting framework for people in their communities to use as a basis for formulating ideas to then feed in to a national hui to be held in November.
It is proposed that a hui/meeting be held in Wellington (to make it as accessible as possible) on Saturday and Sunday the 22/23 November. The
Newtown Community Centre has been booked for the venue.
Idealy as many people as possible will be able to attend or send theirthoughts through a representative so that we can start turning the idea into a reality!!
PLEASE EMAIL climatecampnz@riseup.net to confirm your attendance or interest in further communications about the camp.
A Climate Camp for Aotearoa?
For the first time in human history the North pole can be circumnavigated. Scientists are warning that the Arctic ice cap is entering a 'death spiral'. The first evidence of millions of tonnes of methane gas being leaked into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic ice cap suggests that runaway climate change is perilously close, but despite twenty years of calls for action by climatologists, environmental organisations, politicians, indigenous people and many more of us we're still facing a business as usual situation with out of control emissions and little signs of real progress. Legitimate and reasonable climatologists are telling us that if we don't manage to get human output of greenhouse gases to peak by 2015 [at the latest] this will guarantee runaway climate change. In turn this will lead to mass social chaos, global fresh water shortages, hundreds of millions, quite possibly billions of refugees and above all else the extinction of MOST of the species that inhabit the planet. This is not just about polar bears and light bulbs anymore.
New Zealand is one of the world's highest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet per capita and per unit of GDP. NZ is clearly punching the climate well above its weight. Despite the fact that New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions are escalating faster than that of the United States and despite recent scientific observations, surveys here in Aotearoa suggest that people's appetite for action on climate change is waning. What to do??
There are a few places in the world which stand out as places where progress IS being made on building real demand for action on climate change. All of them have one thing in common, a loud, fearless and tactical grassroots movement. It sorts the industrial and political spin from the terrifying reality of the situation by attacking the problem at its root and therefore calling for immediate and radical transformation of society. These folks understand that anything less will mean that all other previous social and environmental struggle will look like a birthday party compared to what is to come if we fail to address this one. The UK, the United States, Australia, Germany and Canada have all hosted 'Climate Camps' and from within these places screams a grassroots movement with the guts and the foresight to look this situation straight in its face, get together and do something about it.
Less than one month ago, for the first time in the history of Climate Change activism a bunch of climate activists in the UK were acquitted of taking direct action against a filthy new coal power plant because in court they proved that the consequences of not doing so would mean catastrophe. Two months ago a thousand Australians took mass direct action to block a train line feeding coal to the worlds biggest coal export port in Newcastle Australia. Coal fired power stations are regularly being shut down in the United States and Australia.
But what is happening in New Zealand? Why is it that New Zealand, with its impressive history of environmental activism has one of the worst climate records in the world, while at the same time receives awards for its supposed action on Climate Change? What gives New Zealander's the right to cause 16 times the damage to the climate as people in Bangladesh who will suffer in their millions as a result of this carbon and dairy feast? Some have suggested that there is a massive hole in wafer thin Climate Change movement here in Aotearoa and that is why the NZ government has gotten away with introducing such weak climate policy here, with little critical appraisal of its inadequacy to slow down New Zealand's sky rocketing emissions.
If we are going to confront the most catastrophic social and environmental collapse humans have ever experienced we have to take the first steps towards building a strong core of people willing to stand up and fight against this insanity in New Zealand as well. It is for this reason that many Climate Change activists are calling for a climate camp here in Aotearoa aimed at taking the first steps towards fighting back against the corporate dominance and economic suicide that is causing it.
Proposal
Firstly, it has been proposed that those who are interested in building something get together to plan how, why and even if we should build a Climate Camp here in Aotearoa.
It has been proposed that the following issues and tasks required to get such a camp together should be addressed collectively at a Climate hui.
It is clear from the experiences of those who have been involved in the creation of such camps overseas and to those who have shown an interest in making this happen in New Zealand that the creation of this camp will not be an easy task for those involved. It will require many months of hard work and dedication by all to drive this forward and make it a reality. The good news is that many experienced, capable and dedicated people in New Zealand have already expressed a strong commitment to going ahead with this and there is a wealth of experience and learning available from the formation of the UK and Australian camps available to help us along. [not that we necessarily want to duplicate exactly what has happened in these places].
Principles of previous Climate Camps
• grassroots – autonomous decision making and self management structures
• direct action focused
• people focused: a chance for ordinary people to assert our right to a future free from dangerous climate change
• climate justice focused
• aimed to be an inspiring example of a sustainable and participatory community
• physical setup of the camp is as sustainable as low impact as possible
• people to come with their own creative ideas and plans for direct action
Proposal
In order to ensure that a camp can be created by people collaborating on a national level while organising, promoting and preparing various 'components' of the camp at a regional level it has been proposed that we break the following 'components' of a camp into the following categories and discuss how each geographically [or otherwise defined] affinity group / action group can work on adding to each of these 'components'.
Once these important issues have been talked through, gaps filled in and collective decisions made we should begin to understand how this thing can become a reality.
Camp 'Components'
•Food
•Shelter / Tents
•Fun Stuff / Interactive Games / Learning tools
•Outreach - Infoshop
•Workshops
•Energy
•Sanitation
•Why a camp?
•Venue
•Communication & Decision Making
•Politics
•Camp Vision
•Climate Action / Movement building vision
•Media Strategy
•Web Strategy
•Safer Spaces
•Legal issues
•Finances
Related
Comments
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
the national party is organising a climate change hui?
Ill be blowed!
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
About time we had a Climate Camp here! :)
Check out this Video http://wakeupfreakout.org/
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
wrong post? How does everyone feel about a Climate Camp for Aotearoa??
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
I'm hoping ACT gets a hold of the ETS and abolishes it. Al Gore's carbon empire is not welcome in NZ.
All the people that support the global warming hoax should do the planet a favour & stop breathing out.
Dan
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
Global warming has not happened in 10 years. Why waste your time talking about the weather?
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
I'm looking forward to a chance to meet other activists and plan the climate campaign for the next few years. Time is short - lets actually start reducing emissions in Aotearoa.
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
That website is a crack up man.... it only lets you in if you agree to wanting to stop climate change, IE reversing the 4 billion year history of this planet by somehow preventing the inevitable.
Duh!
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: "We're at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]".
Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there's been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.
So it's disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri's presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.
Later that night, on ABC TV's Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are "flat-earthers" who deny "the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence". But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier?
In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming sceptics is shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate when questioned about it on Lateline. Still, there's no doubt a majority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.
Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such a state of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. If we're right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How could this be?
This question was addressed in September in a paper by Professor Richard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably the most qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that a number of changes in the way science is conducted have contributed to the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.
Central to this is the importance of government funding to science. Much of that funding since World War II has occurred because scientists build up public fears (examples include fear of the USSR's superiority in weapons or space travel, of health problems, of environmental degradation) and offer themselves as the solution to those fears. The administrators who work with the scientists join in with enthusiasm: much of their own funding is attached to the scientific grants. Lindzen says this state of affairs favours science involving fear, and also science that involves expensive activities such as computer modelling. He notes we have seen "the de-emphasis of theory because of its difficulty and small scale, the encouragement of simulation instead (with its call for large capital investment in computation), and the encouragement of large programs unconstrained by specific goals.
"In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and [computer] programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage."
Lindzen believes another problem with climate science is that in America and Europe it is heavily colonised by environmental activists.
Here are just two examples that indicate the scale of the problem: the spokesman for the American Meteorological Society is a former staffer for Al Gore, and realclimate.org, probably the world's most authoritative alarmist web site, was started by a public relations firm serving environmental causes.
None of this is necessarily sinister, but the next time you hear a scientist or scientific organisation warning of climate doom, you might want to follow the money trail. Sceptics are not the only ones who have received funding from sources sympathetic to their viewpoint. (And yes, Lindzen did once receive some money from energy companies.)
Lindzen claims that scientific journals play an important role in promoting global warming alarmism, and gives a number of examples.
Someone else who's looked closely at scientific journals (although not specifically those dealing with climate science) is epidemiologist John Ioannidis of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. He reached the surprising conclusion that most published research findings are proved false within five years of their publication. (Lest he be dismissed as some eccentric, I note that the Economist recently said Ioannidis has made his case "quite convincingly".)
Why might this be so? Later work by Ioannidis and colleagues suggests that these days journal editors are more likely to publish research that will make a splash than that which will not. They do this to sell more copies of their publications and of reprints of papers in it. Ioannidis believes these publication practices might be distorting science.
It's possible the forces described by Lindzen and Ioannidis have imbued climate science with a preference for results that involve (or seem to involve) disastrous change rather than stability. Rajenda Pachauri's recent Sydney lecture suggests that in this relatively new field, inconvenient truths to the contrary are not welcome.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michael-duffy/truly-inconvenient-trut...
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
Despite very eloquent claims and clearly not so elegant claims to the contrary global warming is a very real threat. The global temperature may have decreased over the past year which is fantastic but it is the most minor change imaginable like an exterminator claiming to have got rid of your termite infestation by killing just one termite. The fact is that the earth goes through cycles of hundreds of thousands of years where the world's temperature peaks briefly and the troughs for considerably longer. This period we are currently in is pertty much as long as the peaks put together for the last few hundred thousadn years. This is not a brief peak it is a plateau and thus global warming is most definately a concern for the whole planet.
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
the climate has and always will change
only the dumbest of the dumb think they can stop climate change.
Re: Climate Camp NZ - Proposal and National organising hui Nov 2
"only the dumbest of the dumb think they can stop climate change"
History will spit on people like yourself