Abstract
On Saturday, September 11, 1880, Wellington’s Evening Post reported that a terrible railway accident had occurred at 1 lam that morning in the Rimutaka Ranges 80 kilometres north of the town, with at least three people killed and numerous others injured. But this was no ordinary railway accident; the train was blown off the rails by a powerful gust of wind, causing the wooden carriages to cascade down and smash into the ravine 30m below. Was the severe north-westerly gale experienced that day normal for the area, a notoriously windy gully called “Siberia,” or was it something exceptional, or even some indication of a changing climate?
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This may have encouraged Mr. Upton in his role as Minister of Health at the time to initiate similar but ultimately much less successful reforms in the public heath sector.
This is reprinted in the Annex of this chapter.
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This project suffered from at least three glaring errors, first the absence of a valid survey technique, second the notorious fallibility of human perception of long term change in their surroundings, and third, the assumption that any observed changes were the result of human-induced climate change. The idea of actually analysing climate measurements did not seem to be part of the “study.” Predictably, the anxious in the community reported all sorts of unhappy trends and these were reproduced in Greenpeace newsletters for its members to read and further worry about.
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Basher, R.E. (2000). The Impacts of Climate Change on New Zealand. In: Gillespie, A., Burns, W.C.G. (eds) Climate Change in the South Pacific: Impacts and Responses in Australia, New Zealand, and Small Island States. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47981-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47981-8_8
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