Wildlife centre's climate change information panels labelled 'misleading'
An educational display about glaciers on the West Coast features outdated and misleading claims about climate change, glaciologists says. The West Coast Wildlife Centre in Franz Josef, which is a public/private partnership with the Department of Conservation (DOC), includes space where people can learn about glaciers. The interpretive panels do not address human-caused climate change and show outdated information that the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers are advancing. The glaciers stopped advancing in 2008. The Franz Josef Glacier retreated 1.4 kilometres and Fox Glacier retreated 0.9km in the 10 years to 2018. About the melting glaciers, the panels say: "We can't stop the chain of events. READ MORE: * New Zealand glaciers won't survive this century, scientists say * Glacier tourism is on thin ice * 'What a milestone': Rare rowi kiwi chick hatches - the 300th one to do so * The decline of glacier ice volumes in New Zealand * When the world's glaciers shrunk, New Zealand's grew bigger However, scientists say the rate of ice melt can be slowed if people reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Fox Glacier access road closed indefinitely last year and walking access was lost in 2014 because of hazards, washouts and retreating ice. Franz Josef Glacier lost walking access for the same reasons in 2012. Glaciologist Lauren Vargo, who works at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, said the panels were misleading. The Department of Conservation has really good information at its centre in Mt Cook with a bit more scientific information. Tourist attractions like this should be used as an opportunity to communicate with the public, she said. The panel says the Tasman glacier has remained unchanged in the last century. It has in fact retreated by 5.5km since the 1970s. DOC South Westland operations manager Wayne Costello said the departments involvement with the centre was for its kiwi hatchery programme only. Although nothing to do with DOC, the panels in question will have been accurate when they were done pre-2008, when this building was an indoor ice climbing centre, he said. The West Coast Wildlife Centre kept some of the interpretive material when it purchased the building in 2009. Centre director Richard Benton would not comment specifically on the information panels. We try to present information in the best possible way. If people would like us to improve we are more than happy to take suggestions, he said. Vargo said she would be happy to work with the centre to create new displays with updated science and information. She said the panels' claims that there was little data to tell us just what will happen was incorrect. It was also misleading to say the glaciers would melt or disappear until the next global cooling. We know that 90 per cent of New Zealands glaciers could be gone by 2100. We know the earth is warming faster than it ever has and the rate of warming is increased by greenhouse gases, which are emitted by humans, she said. Vargo published new research in August that found the melting of New Zealands glaciers in 2018 was at least 10 times more likely to have been caused by human-caused climate change than not. The study also found extreme melting of New Zealands glaciers in 2011 was six times more likely to have happened because of an accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mostly from burning fossil fuels. Glaciologist Andrew Mackintosh, head of Monash Universitys School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, has spent years studying New Zealand's glaciers. He said the wildlife centre's signs needed to be updated. There would be no next global cooling because of the effects of human-induced climate change, he said. If humans continued business as normal, 80 per cent of the ice in the Southern Alps would be lost. There was some truth to the claim we cant stop the chain of events but only in that glaciers could take decades to respond to climate change, so a certain amount of change was already locked in. The centre also houses the South Islands largest kiwi hatchery and six tuatara. It receives kiwi eggs from DOC and incubates them. Young birds are released onto a predator free island and later moved to wild Kiwi sanctuaries when they are large enough to fend off predators. More than 320 eggs from the world's rarest kiwi the rowi have hatched at the centre, helping bring the rowi back from the edge of extinction.