Planting Pineapples in Otautau
21st October 2006


I have become a victim of global warming, or rather a victim of the media storm about global warming.

It’s like the signs of aging. For years you look into the mirror and nothing about your appearance changes. Then one day you spot a grey hair and suddenly all you see are grey hairs and wrinkles and yellowing teeth.

Global warming has crept up on me the same way. One day I noticed it and now I see nothing else. I open a newspaper and my eye falls on a story about global warming. Turn on the radio or TV – global warming.

Then the imagination takes over and each story, each shift in the weather gathers new meaning. The nor’west gales have ‘global warming’ printed all over them. June’s snowfall is sinister rather than freakish. October’s soaring temperatures and sudden storms are pregnant with foreboding.

Like a fuel injected engine my imagination is fired by media statistics and images. Twenty of the 21 hottest years on record happened in the past quarter century. Mountains covered in glaciers a decade ago are now bare rock and dust. Siberian perma-frost thaws to become a vast, carbon-belching swamp.

Recently my imagination, as it often does in moments of crisis, has slipped effortlessly from the malign to the ridiculous. I woke up the other night thinking about Otautau.

To any Southlanders reading this story I hasten to say that Otautau is a charming little town.

What is ridiculous is the connection between Otautau and global warming. It goes like this. When I was growing up in Western Southland Otautau hosted the first A&P show of the season, at Labour Weekend. The showgrounds, Holt Park, lay on western edge of town, a great grassy field ending abruptly in a steep bank that had been terraced and set with wooden benches as a natural grandstand or amphitheatre.

Every Labour Weekend we’d make the trip over the hill to the Otautau show. It was awful. I remember huddling under blankets on those grassy terraces gazing down on a scene of flapping canvas and cowering livestock, their backsides turned into the jaws of a southerly gale.

This probably only happened once or twice but in my memory it went on for years. Actually it must have done because the organisers of the Otautau show eventually gave up on Labour Weekend and shifted to mid November, but by then we’d given up on the Otautau show.

Now, in global warming hysteria, it dawns on me that Otautau could seriously contemplate recapturing Labour Weekend. After all, with global warming won’t some of the world’s climatic hell-holes become our future tropicanas?

I know they’re anticipating this in Southland because my sister sent me an advertisement for a coastal subdivision at Orepuki, on the south coast between Riverton and the end of the world. Forgive me, but Orepuki really is ridiculous. The views are stunning - when you can see them – but don’t waste your time building a deck on your seaside holiday home. A couple of modules from Scott Base would be more apt. But, who knows, perhaps in five or ten years it will be the new Kaiteriteri.

There are scientists who continue to deny global warming. There are even a few who argue its benefits. Their most famous manifesto is the 1998 Oregon Petition, a highly marketed refutation of climate change signed by 17,000 scientists world-wide that urged the US government to reject global warming. It has been cited by almost every politician and stakeholder in the status quo ever since.

The Oregon Petition enjoined us to reap the benefits of global warming. “We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase,” its authors claimed. “This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.”

If this seems “yeah, right!” unbelievable to you then you’re on the button. The Oregon Petition originated out of a private research institute funded by ExxonMobil, a company that sells nearly $2b of oil a day. Anybody with a degree could sign it. Most of the signatories had no more idea about climate change than you or I.

The Oregon Petition and similar rubbish-science would have withered in the avalanche of evidence supporting global warming if it had not been for the election of George Bush. His administration, powered by big oil companies, has blocked all attempts to address climate change.

Bush’s people have constantly smudged the real picture. The head of his environmental agency was forced to resign after he was caught changing the wording of scientific papers – he got a job with ExxonMobil the following day.

Perhaps I should be grateful. Bush and co. kept the voices of reason at bay and earned me a few more years of ignorant bliss. How alluring it is to associate global warming with golden days on the beach at Orepuki, or planting pineapples in Otautau.

I fear the reality will not be so gentle.