Over the next few months local government councillors will attend refresher courses aimed at improving their ability to make good decisions when hearing Resource Consent applications. Such a programme is welcomed because there continues to be a need for those hearing applications to operate in an objective and professional manner and in the past this has not always been the case.

However, good decision-making can only occur when people are trained correctly and given the correct information. Recently local government councillors received information on the topic of climate change from the Ministry of Environment’s ‘Making Good Decisions Programme’.

The ‘Fact-Sheet’ produced by the Ministry makes the following claims. That we must plan for sea level rises of at least 50cm and consider the possibility of sea level rising as high as 80 cm. Also physical effects that may occur in New Zealand include increased storms, flooding, droughts, and coastal inundation.

However, how factual are the facts? There has been a stream of peer reviewed articles stating that sea level rise is not a threat and has forced the IPCC to reduce its upper extreme estimate and admit that humankind having any influence on sea level at all is little better than 50:50. The fact-sheet ignores the fact that sea levels change naturally and have been 7m above today’s sea levels in the past and any future change will only occur over several thousand years. The IPCC’s extreme level is 50cm but we are treating it as the likely rise and even suggest 80cm, which no one is predicting outside Hollywood. In fact mean sea level has risen at a uniform rate since the 1860’s and there is no indication of any acceleration due to human industrialisation.

Similar dissenting arguments can be made for increased storm events and droughts. Insurance losses, as a percentage of coastal areas in the path of major storm events, were lower in 2005 than they had been in 1925. In 2006 Lloyds of London posted their biggest ever profit - $3.6 billion pounds!

No doubt the government will argue that they are taking a precautionary approach. However, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a temperature change in the range of 1.5 degrees to 6 degrees which is a 400% variation. Would you build a house at the beach if the builder gave you a quote of between $100,000 and $400,000 so why are we making expensive planning decisions based on such inconclusive data?

The government also talks about scientific consensus but have we? It has been reported that of 528 total papers on climate change published between 2004 and 2007 only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

When politicians talk about consensus they cleverly never define what they mean. The definition they actually use does not require support that man is the "primary" cause of warming or support for "catastrophic" events. In fact of all papers published between 2004 to February 2007 only one makes reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

Whether you believe that human activity is affecting our climate or not all should agree that those empowered to make decisions that effect communities or the lives of individuals should be briefed on ‘truthful’ facts so they can do their job properly.