Playing leapfrog with our understanding of climate change.

To gain some reality training, my face rescue team visited A&E to help prepare us for what we might need to deal with in the mountains. It jumped my thinking way beyond anything I’d imagined.

Similarly, anyone serious about our future could do worse than spend 18 minutes watching climate guru Johan Rockstrom’s TED Talk, “The tipping points of climate change – and where we stand.”

Big stuff is hurtling down the climate pipe towards us, and the sooner we start jumping our thinking into a new reality, the better.

Rockstrom outlines seriously sobering facts, then pauses. “Is it surprising,” he asks, “that we scientists are getting really, really nervous? But there’s more, so much more.” We soon learn that recent leaps in ocean temperature exceed anything the scientists had modelled. We also learn how far out on the tightrope our blinkered leadership is taking us and how deep is the climate abyss opening up beneath us.

Mind-jumps like that parallel other experiences on climate issues, too. We’re always in catch-up mode, and just as we get a climate response in our head, we find it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Take trees and “offsets”. Anyone booking flights will know the “buy offsets” button. Click it and, for a pittance, pay for trees supposedly soaking up those pesky flying emissions.

But science reveals that offsets should only be a last resort after we’ve racked our brains over actually reducing our emissions. Leapfrog “offsets” and land in “minimise flying”. Otherwise, we’re probably offsetting our conscience, but not our carbon.

And research increasingly shows “carbon forests” rarely perform anywhere near expectations. “Our analysis of nearly 100 million carbon credits,” reports independent researcher source-material. org, “found that only a fraction of them resulted in real emissions reductions.”

New Zealand’s ETS scheme has the same Achilles’ heel. Ditto for the huge liability the government would like to keep under wraps: the unbudgeted tens of billions of dollars that NZ Inc (that’s us, folks) will need to pay offshore for under-performing “offsets” because successive governments have been chronic under-performers in actually reducing our emissions.

So just when we think “trees are the answer”, we find they’re not, and we have to leapfrog our thinking beyond them. To what? To slashing emissions asap.

This column has done hydrogen to death, but it’s in the leapfrog game, too. Despite hoo-ha from industry and politicians about its glowing future, just like the emperor’s new clothes, its long-term benefits will be invisible. More leapfrogging. To what? Different energy carriers and reduced transport.

Now for EVs, that panacea for decarbonising transport while keeping on keeping on driving. Sure, their emissions are heaps less than fossil fuels, but transitioning our whole fleet to EVs is also a long-term nonsense – logistically, environmentally, economically and energetically. Leapfrog EVs to what? To compact cities with great public transport and much less need for private cars.

I could go on, but you have the drift. Once we engage with Rockstrom and grasp that climate reality is way over the horizon of our current thinking, we’ll also grasp the sort of mental leapfrog we need to get playing. Urgently. “1, 2, 3, JUMP!”