Today, we have a man who needs no introduction: Patrick ‘Paddy’ Gower. Paddy is an incredibly well-respected journalist in Aotearoa, known for tackling complex issues head-on. His latest documentary, On Ice, focuses on climate change and his journey to Antarctica.
More about Paddy Gower:
Find us online:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowthatswhaticallgreen/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/now-that-s-what-i-call-podcasts
Follow me on social media:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/briannemwest/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@briannemwest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briannemwest/
Wanna know more about Incrediballs?
www.incrediballs.com
https://www.instagram.com/incrediballsdrinks/
https://www.tiktok.com/@incrediballsdrinks
Transcript
Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with.
So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place. Today we have a man who needs no introduction. Patrick Gower, or of course as many of you know him, Paddy, is joining me today to talk about his new documentary On Ice, which is all about climate change and his travels to Antarctica. You may have watched some of his other documentaries like On Weed and On P, documenting the drugs crisis in Aotearoa. Paddy has never really shied away from tackling some pretty complex issues, and I've got to be honest, climate change is up there.
Welcome! Do you prefer to be called Patrick or Paddy?
Paddy: Paddy, Paddy please.
Okay, perfect. So I don't really think you need any intro, but congrats on the new role with Stuff. Very exciting.
Paddy: Thank you. Stuff, let's be honest, is the preeminent national news—sorry, NZ Herald.
As a non-reporter, I'm very excited about this. Thank you for joining me today, I'm really excited. I've watched your Antarctica documentary, both episodes, twice, and it's kind of—well, we'll get into it—it's a little bit depressing. But first, you've covered pretty heavy topics. You went from politics to drugs, and now you've decided you'll go to Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, and talk about climate change.
Why?
Paddy: Well, it is the biggest issue of our time. And as my career progressed—and you're right, you know, I've been doing this for 25 years now, rolling my way through the different issues—climate change had to come. And, you know, one thing that I'll be pretty honest about is I probably haven't been the best climate change reporter or even the best climate change person throughout that career.
It's taken me a long time to get to climate change. I've sort of covered every other kind of issue I could get to, and, you know, I'm pretty honest about the fact that it took me a long time to get there, despite its importance. A lot of the reason is, and it sort of fits with bigger themes to do with climate, I think, that I actually found climate change really complicated to report on. I couldn't understand how to communicate it.
And not only was it complicated, but a lot of the time it would fall on deaf ears with the audience. So I just sort of, rightly or wrongly, deliberately or not or whatever, avoided climate change through 25 years of journalism. I started out as a crime reporter and came right through to working in Parliament for 10 years, covering climate change policy while I was there, by the way. And then, of course, delving into all these big issues, and climate was just off to the background.
But you and I know, and really everybody knows—or most people know—that it is the biggest issue of our time facing humanity, depending on how you define things, but it's right up there.
And yeah, it took me 25 years. This is a long way of answering and apologizing, saying that it took 25 years to get there.
It's a very fraught topic. I mean, you bring it up on social media and you get everyone in the comments calling you all sorts of things. So I can understand why you avoid it, and it is complicated.
Paddy: I will come in there though. I've never avoided it because of the social media comments and the people who are against it. That is not—
You're braver than me.
Paddy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, no, no, no, I'm not braver. I'm just so used to them. I’ve been hassled by that certain sector of society for so long that I just really—everyone's saying, Oh my God, the comments on your Facebook and everything like that, and I'm just like, Brother, sister, I've been having those people comment on the stuff I've said about the vaccine, things, you know, all sorts of things.
So that's never been a reason for stopping me from doing it.
Yeah, and covering the vaccine would have been interesting.
Paddy: Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, I've had them with covering white supremacy as well, and Mark Twain, and 1080, and just all sorts of things. So I guess I was kind of ready for them to come.
The only thing is I manage all of my own social media. And I'm actually a technophobe. I'm amazed that we got this up.
Paddy: Well, we haven't finished yet.
I do all my social media off my phone. I don't do it on the laptop or anything like that. I'm doing all this posting, and of course, I don't always manage to turn off the comments on certain posts. Then I come back a day later and they've flooded the zone.
Or I try to moderate the comments myself, but I don't have time. There are really nice comments coming up, but then there are five negative ones to every positive one, and every now and then, I have to give up.
So yeah, anyway, we're spending a lot of time talking about these people when we don't need to.
And it's funny we devote so much time to them when they make up such a small—
Paddy: They're just small but loud.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paddy: So I'm sorry, that was my fault.
But you're here now, and that's the main thing. And I'm very excited about that.
So, just a practical question—what is being down there like? Because you were there for three weeks, right?
Paddy: Yeah, three weeks.
What was that like?
Paddy: You know, it was really odd and extreme. On one level, it's kind of everything you imagine. You just know that you're going to get absolutely blown away when you first step out of the plane and you see it, and I think you're ready for that.
Visually, I think I was kind of ready for it. Scientifically, I didn’t fully understand it, even though I’d been reading a lot of articles about mountain sea ice and that sort of thing. It didn’t really click until I was down there, spending all this time with top scientists, and it started to unlock. That took me to a new level as well.
But a couple of things—the cold. I was not ready for the cold. It was so cold when you’re outside. Just incredibly cold and unforgiving. You’d be outside doing some work and you’d just get too cold to work. That was something I didn’t really get used to.
And then the other aspect was the cramped conditions inside Scott Base. No privacy, living in a bunk room. I’m a really private kind of guy, and I’m sure a lot of people are.
Breakfast in particular—I hate having breakfast with people.
Yeah, I don’t want to talk.
Paddy: Yeah, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to see anyone. I just want to eat, have a cup of coffee, look at my phone, get the day started. But coming into a mess room full of highly energetic, motivated people who want to have a yarn—that was one of the hardest things for me.
The visual beauty, the 24-hour sunlight while we were there because it was the height of summer, was just blowing my mind away. But then there was this extreme cold, this massive thing going on scientifically and environmentally, and your brain starts unlocking it.
It was a lot.
Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.
Paddy: It was a lot.
Okay, cut to the chase. What did you learn? You looked pretty devastated in some of those conversations.
Paddy: I think the main thing I learned was, to sum it up, we have awoken this beast, this monster. We've stirred up Antarctica with our own actions, knowing what we have been doing—but we’ve actually awoken the beast.
And Antarctica has so much power and control over the rest of the world. That was something I didn’t really understand. I just thought there was a hunk of ice at the South Pole and a hunk of ice at the North Pole, and they did something—I didn’t really know what. I didn’t understand that Antarctica had this power and control over the world in terms of basically the temperature of the sea.
Antarctica freezes in its winter, and its ice gets bigger while it freezes. In the summer, that ice melts and gets smaller, then it freezes again. And all of the world's oceans—the major oceans—you know, I never knew this either until I was down there. I obviously did not look at a globe or anything when I was young. All of the world's major oceans—the Pacific, the Atlantic, all of them—are fed by Antarctica. It literally sends water around in a circle, and it diverts off and comes out into the rest of the world.
All of this was new to me. Learning that, I realized—here’s this thing (I call it a thing because it’s so hard to describe), this massive thing that has so much control over our temperature, our weather, our sea temperature—everything happening everywhere in the world. And we have gone in and—sorry to use bad language—we’ve gone in and fucked with it.
We’ve poked it and prodded it and jabbed it and just said, Wake up, wake up, wake up. Almost in an idiotic way, like, Let’s see what happens if this thing wakes up.
We've poked the bear.
Yeah, we’ve poked the bear. And we’ve done that, and now we face the consequences. Now it’s awake, and nobody knows how to get it back to sleep, or what’s going to happen, or what it’s going to do. That’s what I’ve learned. And it’s just kind of stupid to go and poke the bear like that. And yet, we do it all the time.
And the scientists I spoke to—I was down there talking to scientists 24 hours a day—these are people who have devoted their entire working lives to Antarctica and to climate science, building on knowledge after knowledge. They were so frustrated. They were just like, Well, we’ve been telling you this, Paddy. We’ve been telling people this. They were quite downbeat about it.
That was another realization for me as well. I was down there having a mini epiphany, really. I don’t want to throw the word epiphany around too lightly because it’s a big one, but definitely a mini one. And I got really worried for the world.
I mean, you actually specified—I think it was perhaps in the trailer—that you didn’t want this to be a big, depressing, alarmist documentary. But this is a big, depressing, alarmist topic. And one of the things you talked about was the four-metre sea level rise if the Western Ice Shelf melts.
And that is depressing.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, which they’re worried about melting, would mean four metres of sea level rise, according to the scientists. And there’s no sugarcoating that. That is what is going on there. There’s the Western Ice Sheet and the Eastern Ice Sheet. The Eastern Ice Sheet is even bigger—if that goes, we’re in serious trouble.
But the Western Ice Sheet—if you think about it, the scientists explain a lot about it, but there are two big sheets of ice under Antarctica, the west and the east. And then, around them are the shelves—big bits of ice that protect them. And then, around the shelves is the sea ice, which comes and goes with the seasons, and protects the shelves.
So it’s almost like we’re peeling back the layers. We’re peeling back the sea ice layer, which is weakening the shelves, which could weaken the sheets—which could stuff everybody.
Yeah. So, you know, there’s four metres of sea level rise potentially. And those forecasting models are based on our current levels of warming.
And when all of this starts to click together—because, believe you me, I did not understand this before I went down there—I can actually talk about it now. And I’m not giving myself big ups here, but I think I’m getting close to the level of communication where you really need to be to reach someone who doesn’t understand it. And it’s taken me a year to get to that.
That’s another big issue—how hard it is to communicate climate science. Some people just don’t want to talk about it. It’s incredibly complex. Either they know and they don’t want to hear it, or it’s just too complicated to communicate effectively.
But that’s part of this education of climate that I’ve had. I didn’t realize when we started making the documentary that there were people out there who had climate anxiety and didn’t want to watch these things.
I just kind of thought, Holy shit. Because I’m an old-school journalist from way back, a bit of a shit-kicker. I was just like, Oh Jesus, this bloody place is melting. It’s a horror story. Here we go. Headlines, headlines.
But the documentary team I work with—a company called Ruckus, run by Mitchell Hawkes and Owen O’Connor, and my friend Justin Hawkes, who’s Mitchell’s brother and the director—they are experts in science communication. They understand all this stuff, and they slowly filtered it down to old Paddy, you know?
And they were instantly onto this issue of climate anxiety. Because if you serve up a documentary full of horror stories, a whole lot of people aren’t going to tune in.
So that’s why we put some hope, some solutions, and different things throughout the documentary to help with that. Because we didn’t want to make a documentary of gloom and despair—some people just can’t take all of that.
And it doesn’t achieve anything anyway.
Yeah.
You have to give people something to aspire to, to hope for, to do. Otherwise, what’s the point?
But sadly, there is gloom and despair. That is part of this issue. There’s no getting around that. And we also need to move the conversation from mitigation—trying to stop it—to, Well, actually, it’s here, and now we need to talk about adaptation.
We need to be more realistic now about how we deal with this.
And that has a gloomy aspect as well, because it’s basically saying things have changed, and we need to change too. We need to adapt. Things have gotten so far that we need to start thinking about adapting.
Nobody really likes that storyline, but that’s where I’ve decided to go—because that’s the reality, as far as I see it.
We now need to start thinking about adapting, adaptation, adaption—whatever you want to call it. Changing. Climate change is coming. We can mitigate it, but we can’t stop it.
We can do bits, and our actions do matter, but ultimately, as a country, as a world, as human beings, as Paddy, we need to start thinking about adapting to it.
Because it is coming, and it is here, and it’s not going away.
And by adapting, I mean big things—like moving away from the sea, moving out of floodplains that are near the sea, not building any more stuff in those places.
These are massive questions.
That’s where I want to try and lead the conversation.
Yeah, well, no one wants to have these conversations. Governments just focus on re-election, so they’re not going to talk about moving, I don’t know, Auckland.
That’s right. That’s right.
I mean, how do we even bring that conversation up?
Yeah.
But you’re absolutely right. Climate change is here. It’s already happening.
You only need to look at the changing weather. It’s not just about sea level rise. It’s about changing weather, changing ocean currents. It’s bloody scary.
But you’re right—we do need to adapt to it. And we need to try and prevent further climate change and slow it down.
It’s interesting you say we can’t prevent it. Did the scientists talk much about preventing further change?
Paddy: Oh yeah. Everybody realizes that we can prevent further change and mitigate further change.
Right. So are we still talking about 1.5 degrees or 2?
We’re not really talking about 1.5 anymore, are we?
Paddy: Not really, no. I think 1.5 is sort of taken as locked in.
And the scientists are so incredibly adventurous to choose to do this work. They’re reliant on the weather being okay, they have to get down there, their equipment has to work, and there are only so many slots they can use the helicopter. Their research is so critical. I really ended up admiring them.
They have to complete years of study to get to the point they’re at. Then they have to wait for their chance to get to Antarctica. Then they have to secure funding to go back again. Then they have to get there and hope the weather is right so they can collect their data. And then they have to get their data back out again.
The scientists down there are incredibly resilient, and they’re finding out information for the sake of the world—which is what all scientists do—but there’s something very special about Antarctic scientists.
So, to get on the big drill—I forget how many meters we drilled down, but we drilled bloody deep into this frozen sea with this massive drill. Seriously, I’m used to just using a hand drill at home to put in an old screw in a kit set. Then next minute, we’ve got this gigantic drill going into the frozen ocean.
Into history.
Yeah. And it was just surreal to be there. You’re literally on the Ross Sea, which is completely frozen. You drive across it to where we were drilling this hole in these Hägglunds vehicles, which are like little tanks, and you just go right across—literally a couple of hours out to sea, essentially—across the frozen sea.
Then you’re sitting there, and in the background is an iceberg—the top of the iceberg—frozen into the frozen sea. That’s the backdrop. Then you get out this gigantic drill that you’ve never seen before and drill down, pulling up an ice core. And then you check out the algae—which I’ve always just seen around home and sprayed away. But here, it’s this precious thing to examine.
So, it was just awesome to be out there with these scientists, working in these conditions. And, you know, they’re so Kiwi and so practical, but they’re also doing this deep science.
And yes, it was awesome to be working with them.
But don’t be fooled by the documentary. It makes everything look short and fast, like it all happened really quickly. In reality, it would take days to set those things up.
I can imagine.
Yeah, we made it look far more... not boring, but far easier and more fun than it actually was.
Yeah, science looks great in movies like The Day After Tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were sort of taking that version of things, really cramming it in.
Yeah.
So, we probably created a lot of scientists thinking, I want to do that! And then they’ll all be like, I hate this.
I know. But 15 years ago, it set me on a path that...
Well, they can blame me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can.
You spent a bit of time with a couple of climate change deniers. Do you think they actually deny it, or do you think they just don’t want to contemplate it? I’ve always wondered that. I’ve never really met too many. I thought it was a really good conversation.
I didn’t know what their views on climate were. I take a really liberal approach to people’s views in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’ve learned over the years—you can’t look down on people just because they have a different view from you. I’ve done that myself, I’ve made that mistake, and I’ve tried to learn from it.
Everybody has their reasons for believing what they believe.
And I know some people will say, That’s a stupid thing to say, but in my experience, you have to respect people and where they come from.
Alan and Valerie, who you’re talking about, live near Thames, literally underneath a seawall that needs to be built a bit higher. I’m sure they’ve lived a fantastic life as New Zealanders and contributed to society and their family in all different ways.
Of course.
Yeah, quite the opposite. But they just really don’t think much of climate change. And you’ve got to sit there and go, Okay, and try to communicate with them respectfully.
You say, Well, that’s not what I’ve seen in Antarctica. That’s not what I’ve been told.
And then you realize—they’re elderly. They say they won’t be around for it.
It’s a tricky one. I think my job isn’t to be a persuader or anything like that. I’m a journalist. My job is to communicate.
That’s what you have to try to do with people like that. You can’t bang them over the head. You can’t just tell them they’re wrong. They’ve lived their whole lives, and they’re entitled to their views.
All you can do is try to communicate and present the information and keep going.
You’re absolutely right. If you go in and judge people, you’re never, ever going to persuade them. Even if that’s not your goal, you’re never going to get them to start listening to you. It can be frustrating, and I commend you for that very grown-up attitude. I try. I fail at times.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’ve learned it the hard way.
You know, I covered the vaccine. I was pro-vaccine during that time, and I just tried to block vaccine-hesitant people out. I didn’t think much of them.
And where did that really get me?
Where did that get us? Who knows?
So, as hard as it is, my philosophy is—you have to listen to people sometimes. Otherwise, you lose them forever. Or you lose the next person who comes along.
You just have to keep communicating in a positive manner. That’s how I approach climate change conversations.
Yeah, well, when you mock and belittle people, you just push them further into the arms of whatever extreme side they’re on.
Yeah, totally.
Speaking of what people think is extreme, but I don’t necessarily—I saw you spent some time with Extinction Rebellion.
Yeah. And I thought they were extreme beforehand.
Beforehand.
Yeah.
Beforehand?
Yeah. And it wasn’t actually Extinction Rebellion, but it was part of the same movement that blocked the motorway in Wellington a few times—the Passenger Rail movement.
And look, I’ll be honest. This fits into the conversation we’re having.
I was just like, Shivers.
I thought, This is not a way to communicate something to people. Just getting in the way, blocking them, hassling them. You’re bloody annoying. Get off the roads. Maybe you need a short, sharp shock in jail to teach you a lesson.
I was in that camp.
So yeah, meeting Extinction Rebellion was like meeting Alan and Valerie. Another learning experience for me.
Because they weren’t as bad as I thought they were.
Being in Antarctica, I can see why they feel the way they do.
And it’s kind of like Alan and Valerie’s climate skepticism—you have to open yourself up to why someone feels the need to glue themselves to a motorway, stop a fuel tanker, or chain themselves to a bridge in London.
They feel so frustrated and unheard that they don’t know what else to do.
And I really had to go, Well... I can see why they do it. I can now.
Yeah. I’ve always admired them because I would simply not have the balls to do that. I think they’re incredible people. But I’ve also wondered how successful those tactics really are. But they did say, right? One of the women told you—We tried everything else, and you didn’t listen, and this is all we have left. And to be fair, that’s how everything has been changed through protest.
Yeah. If you put it in that context—the Vietnam War, the Springbok Tour—there’s a reason protest exists.
And now we have this issue—the biggest issue facing the world.
We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of activism. We’re not going to see less of it.
And you can’t see things in isolation.
Who knows how big this will get? Who knows what kind of influence Extinction Rebellion and protest movements will have in 5, 10, 15 years?
Who knows where it’ll lead?
Hopefully, we won’t need them. Although, I’m not going to hold my breath.
And then there’s the fear factor—people have anxiety about climate change, and that turns them off from reading and learning more about it.
Perfect storm.
Yeah, I hate to use the word storm.
It’s quite appropriate, really.
Yeah, it is. And you’ve got this perfect storm of things going on. The media does have a responsibility to take on hard issues. That said, New Zealand media has some incredible climate specialists working on this.
When I first started in media, there was very little science coverage. Now, there’s been an exponential increase. It might not be as much as everyone wants, but compared to other areas where there are no specialists, climate coverage is actually doing better than most.
The media can always do more on climate change—it has to. Hopefully, what I’ve done is a small step toward righting my wrongs, and it’s been cool hearing from all the climate journalists whose work I respect, telling me, Good on you, man, for getting in there and giving it another nudge.
But yeah, there’s no way to sugarcoat it—the media can do more when it comes to climate. Simple. That’s the answer.
Yeah, it’s about figuring out how to do it in a way that actually moves the needle, though, isn’t it? I don’t envy you, and I don’t think there’s blame to be placed on you or other journalists, because you’re right—journalism and media in general are massively under attack at the moment. But it’s so difficult to cover climate in a way that actually drives change.
Yeah, it’s a tricky one. You want to talk to consumers, to everyday people, about what they can do—because that tends to push governments to act.
But I’ve always believed that if we really want to change the world, we need to change business.
Of course, the way to do that leads back to the consumer.
But then you talk to people, and they say, Well, it’s not my fault this is happening.
I know it’s not your fault specifically. But consumers are still the ones who can move everything else.
So it’s complicated—who do you talk to, what do you say, and how do you say it?
Yeah, I don’t envy you.
It’s not like there’s one truth when it comes to climate change. Obviously, there’s the scientific truth—it is happening—but for individuals, there are so many different perspectives on how fast we should act and how to fix things.
And we know that climate is politically divisive.
We’ve gone from a Labour-Greens government, which had one view, to a National-Act-New Zealand First government, whose approach is quite different.
So you’re already dealing with a divided audience.
Then you add in climate change complexity, climate change fatigue, and climate change fear—now you’ve got a very difficult challenge in terms of how you reach people and actually engage them.
For me, the bigger picture really comes down to leadership.
Who knows where it’s going to start or how it’s going to happen, but ultimately, leadership is what’s needed—whether it’s from individuals, from the top, or somewhere in between.
We are in a crisis.
What’s happening in Antarctica is a crisis for the world.
And we need leadership to get out of that crisis.
That’s what I said in the documentary.
Ernest Shackleton, the famous Antarctic explorer, was trying to reach the South Pole. He was a heroic and courageous leader in a crisis—able to make quick decisions and adapt.
And realistically, that’s what the world needs now.
We are in a crisis, and we need strong leadership to bring everything together and help us get out of it.
At some point, leadership will come—whether it’s from one person, multiple people, or something else—because it has to.
Humans do adapt.
We adapt all the time.
In Antarctica, I was adapting to a new world.
Even something as small as adapting to having to talk to someone over breakfast—I know it sounds funny, but it’s true.
The algae in the ocean—scientists have shown that it adapts to warmer sea temperatures. It changes to survive.
Humans can adapt, too.
So we are going to find a way out of this.
Who knows what it will be, or how, or who will lead it, or when, or why. But we will. Because that’s what humans do.
But yeah, it comes down to leadership—leadership in a crisis.
And that can be individual leadership.
I’m trying to show a little bit of that myself—not just in how I act, but by making this documentary, doing the mahi around it, having conversations like this, and using my platform.
I’m trying to do my tiny, tiny bit in this big world to show some leadership.
And that’s what we all need to do to get out of this.
Absolutely.
I wouldn’t underestimate your impact.
It’s interesting that you say leadership will come. Is that your way of saying that you don’t think we have it now? I don’t know if I should ask you that—it feels a bit mean to put a political reporter on the spot.
I don’t mean that in terms of who’s in power in New Zealand or other countries right now. I mean it in a broader sense—this issue is bigger than whoever happens to be in office at the moment.
But if we do look at politics, we’ve seen climate leadership emerge before.
Jacinda Ardern energized the climate movement. It can be done.
And even on the right, some parts of those parties have come a long way on climate.
Corporate New Zealand has moved forward, too.
There’s definitely potential for climate to become a major issue again—and for us to start moving in the right direction.
I know this sounds like a bit of a wishy-washy answer, but I don’t think it would take much for climate to fire up as a major movement again in New Zealand.
All the pieces are there. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when and how.
That’s actually a really uplifting answer. I like that.
Yeah. And when you look at it, you realize—a climate-based movement could be ignited quite easily.
That’s just me, as an observer of New Zealand and politics, saying that. But it’s something that could have genuine power in this country.
Agreed. So there you go—there’s your next project.
Yeah, I have thought about it.
People like you, and others who are different from the usual activists, might be where a real movement could come from. So yeah, I’m being quite serious.
Yeah, there are some really interesting people out there. Some really young people doing incredible work.
I feel so old when I say that.
Yeah. But they’re out there. And that’s hopeful.
Interesting to see what happens.
Now, I have two more questions for you. You mentioned before we started recording that with your new role at Stuff, you’re going to do some exciting work and move into the climate change conversation. What are you looking to do?
Well, I want to stay on this message around Antarctica. I want to focus a lot on Antarctica, to be honest—it’s not going anywhere. I’m connected to it now, and I want to continue communicating about what’s happening down there.
I want people to look back one day and say, Paddy got into climate change late—like he does with a lot of things—but when he got in, he gave it a bloody good shot. He communicated about Antarctica and got the message out.
I had a roommate down there in my bunk room, Professor Craig Cary—an amazing Antarctic scientist. He had been there 18 times, one of the mighty tōtara of Antarctica. He was a cool guy, working at the University of Waikato.
When I left Antarctica, he was the last person I hugged at Scott Base, the last person I saw. Sadly, as people will have seen in the documentary, which is dedicated to him, he passed away shortly after returning to New Zealand. He died of natural causes.
So, I want to honor his work—and the work of all the scientists down in Antarctica, the people keeping Scott Base running.
I want to make communicating about what’s happening down there one of my things. I don’t really know how else to explain it. I just want people to say, Well, he tried.
And that’s all you can do. You almost sound like you feel a little bit guilty that you joined this message late, but I really don’t think there’s anything to feel guilty about.
I don’t feel guilty—I feel like it was a missed opportunity.
I do feel a little bit guilty, but it’s also like, Oh well, I’m here now.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And that’s the main thing. You’re here now, and you’re going to have a massive impact because of who you are.
Yeah.
Well, my last question for you is my favorite one—I ask everyone the same thing, so brace yourself. If you were a supreme global overlord, what’s the one thing you would change immediately to make the world a better place?
This is a good question.
So, if I was supreme global overlord—like Prime Minister or President of the world?
Yeah.
So, what would I change?
I want to get this one right…
Yeah, what’s the one thing you’d change to make the world a better place? It could be something as simple as banning raisins, which I’d be totally on board with.
I would definitely ban raisins.
Oh, good.
Second.
You’ve got my vote.
Yeah. What would I ban? I’d want to have a real impact, wouldn’t I?
I wouldn’t ban arguing, though. We’d have a good world if nobody argued.
I’d try to ban arguing, but I feel like that would cause arguments.
Maybe you could ban arguments where people resort to ad hominem attacks—where instead of debating the point in a respectful way, they just attack each other.
Yeah. You know, I just look at the world, at Aotearoa New Zealand, and as I get older—I'm 47 now—I see us wasting time, worrying about things that don’t matter.
We argue about stuff that doesn’t matter and slow ourselves down by focusing on nonsense.
And I say this as someone who has done that in my own life.
I’ve had struggles—I’ve been an alcoholic, I’ve had things that have slowed me down, I’ve worried about things that I shouldn’t have been worrying about.
And I think Aotearoa, New Zealand, and the world—we have the same tendency.
It’s human nature.
We slow ourselves down by nitpicking and worrying about bullshit.
I’m not even going to name the things I have in mind because it’ll fire people up, but honestly?
I would ban people from worrying about things that don’t matter.
And that would just be the coolest world to live in.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
Actually cool.
Two degrees cooler.
I like it.
I always get a different answer to this question, and I love that.
Yeah. So, I think I’m banning arguing, worrying, and raisins.
I’m a fan.
Particularly of the last two—worrying and raisins. Worrying is just suffering twice, right?
I like it.
Amazing. Is there anything else you want to say?
Thank you.
I really appreciate you having me on. It’s been fascinating—and not as depressing as I expected, actually.
Yeah, I thought it would be. But I love that you have so much hope—it’s really, really nice.
Well, that was less depressing than I expected.
I’ve got to be honest—I didn’t want to watch the documentary.
I know enough about this stuff.
I speak to enough climate scientists to realize that there isn’t a lot of good news in the climate science world.
There are lots of good news stories outside of climate science.
But when you look at actual climate science—what’s happening, what we’re doing, and whether it’s moving the needle—it’s not a cheerful story.
I wasn’t excited about it.
However, it was actually a really good watch.
I really enjoyed it.
And he did balance it well.
There were great news stories and really interesting solutions discussed.
And I appreciate that he did it.
This is a hard topic for people to wrap their heads around.
It’s a hard topic to talk about.
I think—I don’t know if brave is the right word—but actually, no, brave is the word.
It’s hard to tackle this issue the right way.
And I’m delighted that Paddy is here now, helping us talk about climate change and getting this important message across.
I really appreciate that he joined me.
Thank you again, Paddy, for your time.
See you back next week with another This or That.
Till then, kia ora.
And there you go—I hope you learned something and realized that being green isn’t about having everything in your pantry match in those silly glass jars or living in a commune.
If that’s your jam—fabulous.
But sustainability, at its heart, is just using what you need.
If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t keep it to yourself—drop me a rating and hit subscribe.
Kia ora, and I’ll see you next week.
.png)
.png)
