I haven't tried the scientists' new tool to work out whether my house is going to be under water sooner than I think.

I am still a little surprised, though, that we seem to be making an awful lot of the fact that two well-known bits of data have never been joined together before to allegedly give us this startlingly new look at our lives and future.

The land, in bits of the country, moves. And where it moves down, and in some areas, we are talking about four millimetres a year, this makes a real difference, if you are looking to calculate when the tide is in to your lounge and you are moving out.

What we must point out, and the scientists never like to hear, is that the model around sea level isn't new. It’s the same old model they have used for years, so its accuracy is in some doubt.

So, by the time you take the doubt, the fact we've been worried about these things seemingly forever, and this new addition of land movement, the question is, has a lot changed? They say, yes of course. Instead of your town being underwater in 60 years it might be 20 years. Then again, it might not.

What we do know is the media is always up for a good old scare story, hence, they continue to give precedence to the alarmism. But in the alarmism is part of the problem, how many times can they scream disaster before it wears off? It's already started to wear off and has been doing so for years.

I note with irony on some of this modelling Auckland's Britomart transport facility would be swamped. That's odd because Britomart is new. Why would they build new stuff at the cost of hundreds of millions only to see it swamped?

The other part of it is size. We can't handle a lot in this country.

We can't build roads well, we can't keep people here, we don’t pay particularly well, our productivity is famously bad, Covid has been a dreadful muddle of angst, anger and poor delivery, and our education system is shocking, in parts.

So, the idea of being able to organise ourselves in a way that deals to something as large and overpowering as climate and where we live, I think is a bridge too far.

In other words, it's like the pandemic itself. People like Bill Gates warned of pandemics, we didn’t listen. People like the W.H.O warned of the rich countries robbing the poor of access to vaccines, we haven't listened.

Any number of climate conferences chocked to the gunnels with alarmism have been held, have promises made, and still, we are getting next to nowhere.

So the reality check is this, look up your area in this sparkling new tool, find out just when it is you need a snorkel, and then get back to life.

Because history shows way more accurately than any ocean rise model, we ain't changing anything.