I dusted off the jacket of a book that has been sitting in my bookshelf for years and browsed through its pages. The book is Wimp Walloping, written by Bob Jones. It is a collection of columns Jones composed for Wellington’s now discontinued daily newspaper The Evening Post some years back. Jones’s columns were always worth a read. Outrageous but entertaining; he mixed extreme right wing views with the odd sprinkling of uncharacteristic liberalism which made him hard to categorise. He now writes for the NZ Herald and I scour their website weekly to devour his offerings.
A chapter that caught my eye in Wimp Walloping was entitled The Greenhouse Effect and discussed the hot topic of the day: global warming, the hole in the ozone layer and the subsequent outcomes. Jones expressed great concern. He described Wellington’s weather as being a clear indication that climate patterns were amiss and suggested four-day southerly storms which had traditionally lashed the capital three or four times a year had become a thing of the past as Wellington bathed in almost permanently all year round balmy weather. Spring flowers he said were appearing two months earlier than usual, heating bills were way down, skin cancer was on the rise and numerous other changes were readily observable. Across the nation he reported temperatures were breaking records and the northern hemisphere had experienced a searing summer resulting in either devastating droughts or in some cases unusual sustained downpours causing large-scale flooding.
There was at the time a great deal of diverse speculation as to the likely future impact of global warming, but Jones did see some good news for New Zealand in the inevitable outcomes. He forecast that our ski industry would benefit because Australian ski slopes would be completely eliminated. Ours he thought would have to be rebuilt at higher levels. Our base agricultural industries could benefit as much of the Northern Hemisphere’s rural regions turned into dustbowls. He particularly foretold of an economic upsurge for the South Island.
All of this was not going to be without a cost. Sea walls would have to be built around our coastal settlements; these would pose particular problems for places like Wanganui and Lower Hutt with their sizable river outlets. Smaller low lying communities like Raglan would probably be doomed he thought, not being of sufficient size or importance to justify the expense of saving. Raglanites would presumably become refugees in their own country. He also opined that nuclear power stations, then unloved because of the Chernobyl disaster, would be back in favour and he forecast widespread construction of these generators.
He called for a government agency to be set up of “damn good thinkers” to monitor the situation and the editor, in a footnote to the column, said the government had heeded his advice and a group had indeed been established.
The column was written in September 1988.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but none of Jones’s predictions, good or bad, have come to pass.
The weather in the intervening twenty-five years has ebbed and flowed, just as it has done for centuries. Since time immemorial we have always had our doomsayers and I’m surprised that Jones fell for the dire predictions, given his disdain for the scientific community as espoused in another of his tomes on my bookshelf, the excruciatingly funny Full Circle.
Wellingtonians would have been surprised to know that they were in for a lifetime of balmy weather and will be disappointed that the spring flowers have resumed blooming in spring. If they bloomed earlier in 1988 then this must have been an aberration, not repeated, as far as I can recall, in the gardens that I fall into.
It might have seemed that global warming had finally reared its head this last summer, but the autumn brought things back to normality and since Jones’s soothsaying column, all manner of weather, good and bad, has been experienced.
In the meantime my heating bills have gone skywards.
The ski industry will be bemused with his predictions. Last time I looked - actually I have never looked - the ski lanes and chair lifts were at the same level and Australia’s snowfields will have continued to prosper. Nuclear power stations, despite their reliability, are still not favoured by most cowed communities.
Jones would not have been the only commentator to have got it wrong. I haven’t scoured my bookcase for other in-depth predictions because there will be a dearth of such writings in shelves reserved for much lighter fare. A search of the newspaper archives of the day however would show similar forecasts, all wide of the mark.
This begs the question: What dire prognostications are being made now, that will look ridiculous with the passage of time. The widespread use of 1080 and genetically modified food slowly killing us all come to mind and there will be others.
In Biblical times false prophets were stoned to death. Today we are more circumspect. We dare not question the harbingers of bad tidings for fear that one day they may be proven right. The modern prophet meanwhile relies on our poor memory retention, and assumes that we won’t dust off old books in our bookshelves and discover that they knew less about the future than we did ourselves.
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