Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:27pm

Junk Science Part II

A follow up to my initial post here on what is becoming known as Climategate.  Now news comes from New Zealand about massaging of data by global warming proponents.

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.

We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.

NIWA’s David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.

“Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?”

“No, no,” replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science Coalition and accusing them of “misleading” people about the temperature adjustments.

Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were “destroyed” or “lost”, meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.

Go here to read the whole story.  Climategate is rapidly becoming a very big story indeed.

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Don the Kiwi
Don the Kiwi
Thursday, November 26, AD 2009 12:40pm

Jim Salinger was fired from NIWA earlier this year, but the reason never came out into the public domain. Now the reason is obvious.
The revised data seems to show similar data to the graphs I have seen on OISM.org , in refutation of the AGW scenario.
Locally, we have just had the coldest October since 1945. Winter last year was the coldest since 1973 – this winter just gone was colder – we had more snow on the Southern Alps than before – some say the most in living memory. The Cabbage trees are flowering about a month early – nature’s indication of a warm dry summer.
Is this a proof of AGW?
Nope – I recall in my lifetime this happening fairly regularly. I think this summer will be cooler than those in the 60’s when I was a callow youth – those lazy hazy days of summer were warmer then, and again warmer in the 90’s. Recent summers are cooler than previous.
Maybe our bro’s across the Tasman in Australia would disagree – they are heading for one of the worst bush fire seasons in quite some time; will be interesting to see what the AGW pundits make of it.

Don the Kiwi
Don the Kiwi
Thursday, November 26, AD 2009 8:27pm

Thanks Rick.

Actually we do get large iceburgs floating past the bottom of the South island fairly regularly, some come part way up the east coast of the South Island not far from Dunedin and Christchurch, and tourist operators offer helicopter flights to them – they land on those that are stable and flat enough.
But we’ve had a pretty wet winter as well as a cold one – so the Aussies should send out a ship and lassoe this ‘burg because they’ve has a fairly dry winter – they could do with the water.
Both the NZ and the Oz governments have been focussing on pushing through Emission Trading Schemes over the past few days, in time for the Copenhagen conference – just so they can wave and say “look at me, look at me” for doing something about CC. What I want to know is, all the extra taxes (carbon) that are going to be levied, where does the money go? Our ex PM, Helen Clark, who is now in charge of the UN Development Fund is going to give all our hard earned dollors to “third worls countries” like China and India – that’s where the money goes. Clark “bought” her job with the UN by donating millions to the UNDF while she was PM, thus giving her a shoe in for the job.
Its all part of a Marxist plot (Helen was a Labour -read marxist/left wing politicion, and radical feminist to boot) – wait and see. Don’t have time right now to expand – will later if I can.

MikeInOhio
MikeInOhio
Friday, November 27, AD 2009 11:04am

> he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.

In a reliable scientific study, such adjustments would be documented, explained, and justified as part of the methodology. It would be in the original publication.

To say ‘we have good reasons for this, which we did not disclose before, but don’t worry, we will come up with an explanation’ means one thing: they got caught.

Anthony
Anthony
Friday, November 27, AD 2009 7:54pm

Hopefully this will be one more step towards scuttling plans to hamper the private sector with ever-increasing regulation… could we see both cap-and-trade and ObamaCare die in the Senate?

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