Media release from PHA Communications

The New Zealand Climate and Health Council welcomes Justice Geoffrey Venning's rejection of the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust's (NZCSET) case against the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Spokesperson Dr George Laking says the medical profession recognises human-induced climate change as the number one threat to health this century.  Health risks of climate change start with injury from heatwaves and storms, more tropical illnesses, and ultimately threaten collapse of food supplies and political insecurity from crop failure, coastal inundation and ocean acidification.  Global food prices are already rising with the extreme drought affecting half of the United States.

"Yet it has been incredibly frustrating for us as medical scientists to see political action on climate change repeatedly obstructed by groups such as the NZ Climate Science Coalition and their wealthy backers, apologists for the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel and mining industry."

Dr Laking says climate sceptics have pretended there is scientific doubt where it does not exist. "They are no different from tobacco company executives, who as recently as 1994 testified that "nicotine is not addictive".

Ironically, NZCSET is part of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which  links with Big Tobacco. Tobacco giant Philip Morris funds the Heartland Institute in the United States, which funds climate deniers worldwide - including the NZ Climate Science Coalition. "Having tried to confuse and deny the evidence with tobacco, they are now doing the same for our destabilising climate, through people like the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.  Still peddling lies that kill, they are delaying action essential to protect human health", says Dr Laking.

The artificial climate of pseudoscepticism has made it very hard for the New Zealand public to understand how urgently we must move to a low carbon economy. Yet there are real health gains from low carbon measures including sustainable transport and local production of food and renewable energy.

"It is our responsibility to decarbonise the economy right now" ends Dr Laking.  "The technologies already exist.  We owe it to the health of current and future generations.  New Zealanders should see Justice Venning's ruling as a wake-up call, and not be lulled into complacency by the fossil fuel industry and its helpers".