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Maureen Pugh  (Image: Archi Banal)
Maureen Pugh (Image: Archi Banal)

SocietyFebruary 22, 2023

Some handy climate resources for the Maureen Pugh in your life

Maureen Pugh  (Image: Archi Banal)
Maureen Pugh (Image: Archi Banal)

Because we all know someone still waiting on ‘evidence’ about climate change. 

National MP Maureen Pugh began her day on Tuesday by espousing some pretty dodgy takes on climate change. When asked about the correlation between climate change and the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle, she first said something strange about people in Auckland not pruning their trees and then referred to 2018’s Tropical Cyclones, Fehi and Gita, as “just things that nature throws at us.” Asked if she actually believed in climate change, Pugh said yes. 

Things got worse when she was asked about the human impact on climate change. Pugh repeatedly said she was waiting to see “evidence”, as if James Shaw had been nesting on a secret dossier and didn’t want to waste paper photocopying it and sticking it in the internal mail. Pugh then added with a lyrical lilt that “we have cooled and warmed and cooled and warmed over millions of years.” This is where ears pricked up across the nation – who hasn’t heard a member of their extended family mutter that at a barbecue?

“We have an impact, but climate change has been changing for millennia,” Pugh said, doubling down. 

Within hours, Pugh was fronting up to media on the cool black and white tiles of parliament with an apology statement that definitely hadn’t been written for her. “I regret that my comments were unclear and would have led some to think that I am questioning the causes of climate change,” she said. “That is clearly not my position. I accept the scientific consensus that human induced climate change is real.” Pugh made this miraculous 180-degree turn in about three hours, and while that’s enough time for 410,958,904 metric tonnes of ice to melt off the world’s glaciers, we’re a bit sceptical. 

Unfortunately, just like Maureen Pugh was until Tuesday afternoon, many people remain sceptical about climate change and what is accelerating it. If you have a Maureen Pugh in your life and they don’t have a Christopher Luxon or a Nicola Willis in theirs to supply a reading list, here is a short selection of things to read, watch and listen to share that might help change their mind. If they do it faster than Maureen Pugh, let us know.

The B-B-bloody-C 

The BBC’s “What is climate change? A really simple guide” does what it says on the tin. It’s a factual, quick read that has a short, textable summary of what climate change is and why human activity has ramped it up.

Text Maureen this snappy summary from the BBC

NASA’s Vital Signs dashboard

Real time data on the planet’s vital signs from NASA including sea level rise and planetary warming over the last 150 years. A click away is a section labelled “evidence” with a graph that charts atmospheric samples contained in ice cores over the last 800,000 years, succinctly proving that climate change today is not a result of the planet doing its cooling and warming and cooling and warming thang.  If your Maureen believes the moon-landing was real and would trust the monitoring provided in hospitals to humans who are ill, this is highly convincing. 

This graph provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution (climate.nasa.gov)

This journal article

Get your Maureen a pot noodle and a toga because it is time to go back to uni with this one. “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming” analysed thousands of research papers examining the causes of global warming, and found that the scientific consensus was clear: “humans are causing recent global warming.” Helpfully, that chimes with the 2,400-page report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was summarised and approved by 195 countries. 

A human story

If Maureen loves to read, is a fan of autobiography and needs a human lens on this issue, Dave Lowe’s The Alarmist could provide a breakthrough. Lowe sounded the alarm about the climate crisis more than 40 years ago when he began charting atmospheric carbon dioxide above the southern hemisphere. The Alarmist won best first non-fiction book at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2022. This one is particularly good for helping your Maureen understand why some people are quite upset about climate change denial and it’s a cracking read.

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Further reading

We asked our terrific books editor Claire Mabey for her best climate change book recommendations and she delivered. The first is Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book, a collection of over 100 essays by scientists, economists, journalists and historians. One of the essays asks “how can we undo our failures if we cannot admit that we have failed?” Could be good, Maureen! Closer to home Climate Aotearoa edited by Helen Clark “outlines the climate situation as it is now, and as it will be in the years to come.” Finally, if you’re into sleepless nights, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells will do just the trick. 

100 Year Forecast 

For Maureens everywhere, we even made our own documentary series back in 2020 looking at the impact of climate change on Aotearoa. The first episode would be a good place to start for your Maureen because it asks the question “how do we know the climate is changing?” and then answers it with what we can only describe as evidence. In just one animated graph, it is extremely easy to see how global temperatures have changed with human-made trends such as the boom in population, the rise of mass production, factory farming, international travel and greenhouse gas emissions. But do watch the whole thing!

Bitches be crying about a carbon tax

Bitches be crying about a lot of things, including whether we should continue to allow scientists to rap, but this two minute tune called “I’m a Climate Scientist” clarifies who we should be listening to on climate change and contains the line “Climate change is caused by people” which is fairly to the point. It’s available to download as a standalone song for the purposes of subliminal influence in the petrol-powered car Maureen is still driving. Released in 2011, it’s twice as old as some of the kids at Granity School on the West Coast whose classrooms could very well fall into the sea because of coastal erosion

Sir David

If the BBC explainer went down well, you can follow it with a Sir David Attenborough chaser as he explains climate change in six minutes.

TED talks

Maybe your Maureen would prefer to get their climate change information from a nice old trustworthy salt-of-the-earth man named Ted (you don’t need to explain that it actually stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, we simply don’t have time for that). Pop on a playlist of TED talks for a range of expert-led perspectives on the human impact on climate change, including climate scientist Dr Ilisso Ocko on methane, environmental professor Jaime Toney on why there is so much urgency and climate scientist and author Katharine Hayhoe on why talking about climate change is an essential part of the fight against it. 

Climate podcasts

If your Maureen believes the ears are the windows to the facts [citation needed], there are a bunch of very good expert-led climate podcasts out there. Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet sees journalist Alex Blumberg and a “crew of climate nerds” look at the human impact on climate change across every industry from fast fashion to mining. TILClimate is produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Environmental Solutions initiative and is now in its fourth season, producing snappy 10 minute episodes across a range of climate change topics. 

Talking is also good

As utterly bloody frustrating as it is to still be framing this as a debate in the face of overwhelming evidence, climate change is also frightening and requires change to both adapt to it and try and mitigate it. No matter how accepting you are of the reality we face, most of us would sometimes like to lie under a weighted blanket, watch vintage Attenborough videos of him howling at wolves or the one where a gorilla sticks his bum in Sir’s face and pretend it’s not happening.

If you’re trying to have an entrance level conversation about climate change with your Maureen, don’t go hard on the scientific facts to start. Try an economic or jobs angle. Try personal observations about examples of what climate change is doing in your neck of the woods. It’s more ironic than getting struck by lightning three times when scientists think climate change could be causing more lightning strikes, but we happen to be swimming in those right now.  

Keep going!
person lying facedown on bed surrounded by laptop, pizza, books, shoes. quite messy, pastel colours, cute comics vibe
An absolute lack of sleep hygiene. (Image: Getty Images)

SocietyFebruary 22, 2023

Starting school later could transform teenagers’ learning – so why don’t we do it?

person lying facedown on bed surrounded by laptop, pizza, books, shoes. quite messy, pastel colours, cute comics vibe
An absolute lack of sleep hygiene. (Image: Getty Images)

Could later school start times make it easier for teenagers to learn, while also improving equity? Some researchers – and teenagers – think so. 

“Young people have two big activities in their day: time at school, and hopefully time in bed,” says Liza Edmonds (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whātua), a paediatrician who works at Otago University. Edmonds, a member of the School Start Times Study Advisory Group, is a co-author of a paper published in January in the New Zealand Medical Journal, arguing that making school start times later is one clear way to target some of the challenges teenagers face in attending and paying attention at school.

“It’s easier to zone out when I’m tired,” says Nina, a year 10 student in Christchurch. Nina sets three alarms in the morning, at 6:30, 6:35, and 6:40, to help her wake up and get to the bus on time. She tries to get seven or eight hours of sleep, but finds that even if she goes to bed early, she doesn’t feel sleepy until 11 or 12. “I tend to be more productive at night,” she says; she does her homework later in the evening, too. 

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Research backs up Nina’s experience. “Teenagers’ sleep rhythms are different,” says Edmonds; young people are naturally more alert at night and take longer to wake up in the morning, representing the human variety in chronotypes. (Incidentally, evolutionary biology argues that this is to make sure there’s always someone awake, keeping watch). Edmond cites research showing that teenagers don’t stop producing melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone, until 7am, while adults stop around 4am, meaning that, to a teenager, being woken at seven feels like being woken at four. 

In Aotearoa, at least 39% of adolescents report getting less sleep than is needed for their age, and 57% say their sleep is of poor quality. This inadequate sleep impacts ability to focus and retain information, impeding learning. 

A young teenager is sitting in her bed in the dark with only the light of her phone shining on her face.
Teenagers’ circadian rhythms make it harder to sleep at night. Electronic devices don’t help. (Photo: Paula Daniëlse/Getty)

Sleep is a fundamental right, and a lack of sleep impacts Māori, Pasifika and low-income teenagers in particular. “Māori and Pasifika teenagers need more opportunities to thrive,” Edmonds says. Financial pressures, like having to work in the evenings and environmental pressures, like sharing a room or living in noisier neighbourhoods, are some of the many complex and intersecting factors which mean these groups suffer most with the current regime of school times. But, Edmonds says, this means there are more opportunities to change things to help Māori students flourish. 

Better sleep can lead to better student attendance and retention and better learning, and research shows that all those factors have the biggest impact on adolescents who are more economically disadvantaged. “If you’re able to thrive at school, more doors are open to you,” says Edmonds. She’s passionate about these improvements being made for Māori and Pasifika teenagers. While sleep interacts with every part of life, meaning the full impact of later school times might not be immediately or directly measurable, the possibilities of better health and better focus alone are enough, Edmonds says. 

Edmonds and her co-authors argue that school start times are “malleable”. There’s no reason that schools should start at 9am or earlier, just because that’s currently the pattern around the country. Schools have the power to choose their own start times, meaning the policy wouldn’t necessarily require a law change. 

Most teenagers go to school, meaning that changing how school works can impact the majority of teenagers, who have less agency over their schedules than adults. “School is a large portion of your life, so it makes sense to alter that system if it’s not working,” Edmonds says. 

Implementing different school start times would require overcoming some logistical hurdles; several of these are identified in the paper, and the research team has a number of surveys that they’d love family members, young people, teachers and board of trustee members to answer to identify more of the pros and cons. Parents working nine-to-five hours might struggle to help their children get to school if it begins after they’re supposed to be at work; if the policy is only implemented for senior students and school hours are extended into the afternoon it may mean younger whānau members are alone while waiting for their siblings to get home. The timings of before and after school activities and work would have to change too. 

That said, school hours already don’t align with standard nine-to-five work; the school day ends earlier. Shifting school start times later could make it safer for young people to get to school without having to interact with morning traffic. “We really want to hear from communities about what’s important to them,” Edmonds says.

classroom empty with alarm clock floating and slightly odd eerie colours, it's desaturated
Lots of students rely on alarms to get to school on time (Getty Images / Bianca Cross)

“I’ve seen how much of an impact sleep has on my classmates,” says Ruby, a teenager from the Hutt Valley who finished high school in 2022. “Everyone was always tired, but there were no conversations about how to address this.” As a member of the student council, Ruby says there was some brainstorming about the school having later starts, rather than early finishes when there was space in the schedule, but they didn’t reach a conclusion. Instead, even though she usually got eight or nine hours of sleep a night, Ruby saw how much her classmates were “detrimentally affected” by sleep loss, which she connects to the broader youth mental health crisis. Teachers encouraged students to get to bed early, but “most students don’t want to hear a teacher rambling about sleep.” Ruby isn’t sure if later school start times are the best way to help pupils get more sleep, but she agrees that something needs to change.  

Changing school start times isn’t a completely new concept. In 2022, California implemented a law requiring schools to start no earlier than 8:30 am, half an hour later than the US average, to allow students to get more sleep. Wellington High School implemented a 9:45 or later start for its senior students in 2006, rearranging classes so the school day didn’t run later as a result. However, principal Dominic Killalea recently told the NZ Herald that the “experiment” was abandoned – the school didn’t notice changes in achievement, some students weren’t keen, and the policy interrupted other scheduling requirements. 

Beyond the issue of school start times is a larger one of living in a culture that often does not value sleep. Edmonds, who has three teenagers of her own, sees how their biological imperative to sleep gets labelled as lazy. “Teenagers need their sleep,” she says, but a focus on productivity, for young people and adults, can treat that need as a problem. The paper notes that Māori and Pacific ways of experiencing and talking about rest often aren’t valued. In response to this, “we need to reframe how we talk about and value sleep,” Edmonds says. 

While teachers, parents and other authority figures may appear to teens to value work over rest, that’s not the only pressure on them. Cultural products, like music and TV shows, glamourise being up all night. This makes going to bed early feel uncool, Ruby says. For many teenagers, the compulsion to stay up late is aided by electronic devices, and the relative freedom of the night: in the darkness, you can talk to friends and watch videos and have ideas about the world without supervision, classes or work to concentrate on. The only cost is lost sleep. “I hate using phones to explain the woes of the world,” Ruby says, “but if you have to get up early or work after school, pulling out your phone in bed can be a band-aid, then you get into rhythms of getting more and more tired.”

Edmonds hopes that school start times can change, and intends to keep working with other members of the School Start Time Study Advisory Group to research and advocate for this policy. In the meantime, though, she says that teachers, teenagers, and parents all have a role to play in talking to each other about the value of sleep. “I’d like us to see that good sleep is part of being well,” she says. 

Teenagers, too, are optimistic about the possibility of change. “It’s logical to have school at a time that is comfortable for teens,” says Nina. “I want to wake up later!”

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