Starting today, the world has 999 days to peak emissions if we want to limit warming to 1.5C with no overshoot.

That's the big takeaway from the latest IPCC report - emissions must start to fall before 2025.

This is the best path we have left:
newsroom.co.nz/world-has-999-… There's a gap between current policies and government pledges - what the IPCC calls the "implementation gap". But even those pledges are a long way away from consistency with 2 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5. That's our "emissions gap".

The world can still limit global warming to 1.5°C, but it will require immediate action to slash fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. My overview of the latest #IPCC report:
newsroom.co.nz/we-are-pretty-… There's a lot in the report! But two charts stood out to me to start with:

1. A few hundred million wealthy people emit far more than billions of poor people

2. Many forms of clean energy are now *cheaper* than fossil fuels - the financial barriers to transition are falling

Overseas, Omicron has upended conventional wisdom about how to respond to the pandemic. It will do the same when it arrives in New Zealand. We must have a new playbook ready before it takes off - and we're running out of time.
newsroom.co.nz/long-read-how-… #nzpol #Covid19 #Covid19nz Three key things when Omicron gets here:
1. We won't be able to control it like previous variants, only slow it.

2. Even if we slow it down, far more people will be infected than in any previous phase of the pandemic, leading to labour shortages.

We are now suppressing the virus, which means a goal of keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed by #Covid19 patients rather than reaching zero cases. But there are three major threats to the success of our new approach:
newsroom.co.nz/prepare-for-th… #nzpol #Covid19nz The first is outbreaks in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated populations, like children (not yet eligible) or Māori and Pasifika. It's no coincidence that the 11 district and city council areas with the greatest proportion of Māori residents are also among the 15 least vaccinated.

Since the start of the pandemic, the police have pointedly not cracked down on anti-lockdown protests even when they violated the rules. The arrests of a handful of extremists in August were a departure from this, as I wrote at the time. 1/4 newsroom.co.nz/police-face-ca… The police justification for this departure at the time was that the extent of the outbreak was unknown so gatherings represented a legitimate public health risk. There are questions to be asked about why today's larger event didn't pose that risk, in police's view. 2/4

This morning, I examine at the widening gap between Māori vaccination rates and those of the general population, why the Government's excuse for this gap doesn't hold up and how the situation might even be worse than it appears:
newsroom.co.nz/the-stark-ineq… #nzpol #Covid19 #Covid19nz Just 19 percent of eligible Māori have been fully vaccinated, compared to over 30 percent of those in the "European or other" category. About 25 percent of Pasifika are fully vaccinated.

Friendly reminder that if we had listened to Damien Grant and opened up last August, thousands of people would have died from a virus for which we developed an effective vaccine just months later. Other requirements/consequences of a Sweden-style strategy:
-Closing secondary schools for months
-A six month (!) ban on visits to nursing and aged care homes
-As many as 30% of cases experiencing long-term, possibly debilitating, symptoms
-Again, thousands of avoidable deaths

Because NZ is going into lockdown, the international hot takes brigade will be out in full force. Some useful comparators:

Unemployment
NZ: 4%
US: 5.4%
UK: 4.7%

Debt-to-GDP in 2024
NZ: 28%
US: 111%
UK: 101.5%

#Covid19 Deaths Per 1M
NZ: 5.2
US: 1,893.8
UK: 1,964.1

#nzpol If the UK and US had New Zealand's death rate, they'd have had 347 and 1,707 deaths, respectively. Instead the UK has seen 131,269 people die of Covid-19 and the US has seen 621,635. Most of these were preventable.

#BREAKING: The community case is a 58-year-old man from Devonport in Auckland. The infectious period is considered to have started on Thursday, August 12. Still no obvious link to the border or MIQ. Genome sequencing not due till tomorrow. #nzpol #covid19 #covid19nz The Government is treating the situation as if the case has the Delta variant. This is highly likely - all of the cases in MIQ over the past three weeks and all but one since late June have been Delta. i.stuff.co.nz/national/healt…

Labour is promising to reduce 1.9 percent of 20 percent of our emissions by 2035 and calls it climate action. Anyone else feeling gaslit? #climatechange #nzpol

https://twitter.com/henrycooke/status/1313631625075331072

Transport is responsible for 20 percent of our emissions and is the fastest growing sector in that regard, but diesel buses (public AND private) are responsible for just 1.9 percent of that!

A fact-check of Simon Thornley's appearance on @NZQandA yesterday. Thornley begins by citing the "Ioannidis study" showing a #Covid19 death rate "only marginally higher than the standard flu viruses". I believe this is the study he's referring to. (1/16) medrxiv.org/content/10.110… In the paper, Ioannidis conducts a meta-analysis of antibody surveys to determine how widespread Covid-19 is in different places and then compares the deaths associated with those places to arrive at an estimate of the IFR (see explainer) of 0.24%. (2/16) who.int/news-room/comm…

New Zealand wasn't ready for this pandemic, having scored 54 points out of a possible 100 on an international preparedness assessment and running our response off the "wrong plan". Given this, why/how have we managed to weather the storm so far? #Covid19
newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/29/114… What you need to know: No country was truly prepared for a pandemic, as the global situation shows. The Global Health Security Index (GHSI), released in October, was the first comprehensive international assessment of pandemic preparedness. Just 5 countries scored above 75/100.

A short thread on #BeKindNZ and my interaction with an anxious reader: On Saturday, after the PM announced the alert level system, I wrote an article examining Michael Baker's case for putting New Zealand straight to level 4. newsroom.co.nz/2020/03/21/109…