Friday 27 November 2009

CLIMATEGATE: Have New Zealand warmists cooked their books as well? [update 4]

A few months back a reader here at NOT PC discovered you could now view NIWA’s raw temperature records online, and what he discovered when he did was that while NIWA was shouting about warming, the raw data said something totally different.  The raw data said there’d been no warming at all.
The NZ Climate Science Coalition saw the same thing, and their research showing what NIWA have done is now big news round the world this morning: the news that the supposedly neutral meteorological organisation has apparently been fudging its figures to say something the raw data doesn’t.
The work uncovering NIWA’s calumny was done by NZ”s Climate Science Coalition, and can be told in these two graphs. The first graph tells the story NIWA would like you to hear, a graph Jim Salinger started working on back when he was working at the now disgraced Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia showing a clear warming trend across the country:
aaaaa_thumb
This second graph however tells you the story told by the raw data, that is, no warming whatsoever:
new_zealand_thumb The reason for the difference?  NIWA “adjusted” the raw data because . . . well, for no very good reason at all, really.  Instead of adjusting for the Urban Heat Island effect, which should have seen modern temperatures adjusted downwards, virtually all the adjustments were made in the other direction, to manufacture a clear warming trend where there wasn’t any. See:
new_zeal_fix_thumb
These figures, the adjusted figures, have been used to manufacture a scare story now used to justify sending NZ taxpayers a $100 billion Emissions Trading bill. And the people who manufactured those figures?  They’re the ones who’ve been advising minister Nick Smith that his Emissions Trading Scam is necessary. Says the Climate Science Coalition:

_quote There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years. But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on?"  Researchers find records adjusted to represent 'warming' when raw data show temperatures have been stable.”
This sort of review of NIWA’s science is only possible now NIWA’s raw figures have been made available on the ‘net, since as the NZ Climate Science Coalition note in their summary of what they’ve uncovered, “Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered . . . ” You can only wonder why.
This is how climate science has been done here, folks – the science that’s being used to make us all poorer -- and while reviews of that science like this one are still themselves in their infancy, what’s already being uncovered in the CRU emails and data like this is not pretty.
This is undoubtedly the biggest story around this morning, and coming on the back of the hacked emails from that other organisation for which Jim Salinger used to work, it should call into question with every honest person the basis on which the warmist mantra has been intoned.
Read about the story here at Andrew Bolt’s who’s got a great summary too of subsequent developments in his updates:
Climategate: Making New Zealand warmer.
The Climate Science Coalition has an eight-page PDF summarising the scam:
Are we feeling warmer yet?.
It’s a story that’s gone around the world:
And from New Zealand, the mainstream media catches up by issuing the denial before the news itself: Climate scientists attack criticism.
And NIWA belatedly explain the arguments for their adjustments at one site, Kelburn, after repeated refusals by Salinger to either release the raw data for all of them or explain the reasons for all the one-way adjustments: Combining Temperature Data from Multiple Sites in Wellington.
I’d like to see that replied to today, and I’ll be checking back at the Climate Science Coalition site regularly to see if it has.
Oh, and by the way, since we’re “thinking local” here, satellite data for the Southern Hemisphere over the last thirty years shows "a warming trend" for the Southern Hemisphere during those last 30 years of 0.00 °C per decade.. . .
UPDATE: In the absence of a swift response from the Climate Science Coalition, Ian Wishart critically examines NIWA’s response re their adjustments to the Wellington data (that’s one station out of seven for which they’ve adjusted temperatures “to hide the decline,” presumably the easiest to explain, they think), pointing out quite correctly that all such adjustments “need to be fully explained so other scientists can test the reasonableness of the adjustment”; wondering if “applying a temperature example from 15km away in a different climate zone [is] a valid way of rearranging historical data”; and reminding NIWA that “we'd all like to see the methodology and reasoning behind adjustments on all the other sites as well.”
Pronto.
UPDATE 2: Zen Tiger hacks satirically into NIWA’s emails to discover the real reasons for their drastic upward adjustments of raw data: The NIWA Emails

UPDATE 3:  Interested readers might like to know that Steve McIntyre discovered serious problems with NIWA's manipulation of the Wellington temperaeture records back in 2007,including it's fiddling around with that of Kelburn.
It all began when NASA lost Wellington altogther, you see, and then discovered it once again . . .

UPDATE 4Anthony Watts takes NIWA to task for its response, and for the frankly hopeless state of some if its temperature collection stations [pdf]. He posts a picture of the Auckland station (incorrectly labelled Kelburn), from whence Auckland's official temperature record is kept - right on the NIWA rooftop in Khyber Pass (all that lovely warm concrete), right under the motorway (all those lovely cars) and right next to the air conditioners. So no problem at all with its accuracy then.

And Terry Hurlbut at The UK Examiner comments.

UPDATE 5: By the way, you can see pictures of all NIWA's surface stations caputured on film so far at Watts' Surface Stations Gallery.  Compare them with some of the other horror stations uncovered so far around the world, while remembering that it is from stations such as these combined with "adjustments" by the likes of David Wratt and Jim Salinger that "the" temperature record is made.

4 comments:

Falafulu Fisi said...

Despite Dr. Salinger's cooking the data, I was in contact with him via email about 3 years ago about the possibility of me developing black-box type models for them (ie, NIWA), because I knew that their modelers didn't (still don't) know much about these techniques. Sure, I have seen the black-box types models described on their site, which they use the non-advanced ones.

Before any warmist jumps in here to strangle me for making contact with warmist like Salinger, that first I was looking for some contract work, and second it would be hugely an advantage to them if the published models that I proposed to Salinger (yep I listed him some papers that were published in journals that he and NIWA modelers in general were/are unfamiliar with, such as those from IEEE, ACM, SIAM, etc...) that I could implement for them are state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy.

What I mean by this? It means that they're more accurate than the standard black-box ones they were/are currently using. It doesn't mean that these new black-box models are more accurate in pin-pointing the culprit for the warming (ie, us humans). No, they can't do that. They can analyse the data and present the result to the users and the users have to make inference. The user is free to infer any causes, be it human actions or solar cycles and one cannot rule it out that it is Santa Claus that causes all the warming.

Dr. Salinger replied that their modelers are already doing something like that, which I knew that it wasn't true. The list of models that I sent him were just being published back then, so they were quite new at the time, and it was impossible for modelers at NIWA to claim that they were already doing something similar (according to Salinger) when if fact they had not seen or read them yet. So exchanges didn't proceed any further and no contract work as a result.

For readers here who don't know me. I get my contract work via hustling. If I see that my skills are applicable in certain businesses (be it software , data analytic applications, etc,...), I just ring/email one of the top management and explain that I can help/implement method A, method B , etc,... for them, since those methods (I proposed) are not the domain knowledge of their inhouse gurus. When I am not concentrating/working on my own software projects, then I hustle just to get some earning and keep me going.

This means that I will do contract work with NIWA even I don't agree with their pro-warming stance. I suspect that their senior managements that are pro-warming and not those engineers who develop their computer models (the ones who really understand models).

LGM said...

NIWA cooked data? Surprise, surprise.

What a pack of ninnies. Sack 'em all then hang 'em up for a good old fashioned knouting.

LGM

Anonymous said...

Oh, piffle.

You start by saying they adjusted data for "no good reason at all".

By the time we hit update 4 you've got links to real reasons and you're then arguing that their reasoning isn't good enough - that the move from measurement in Thorden to Kelburn isn't necessarily a 0.78 degrees move as they expect. Not that you've any evidence that their estimates are wrong, or that the climate science coalition's are better.

But most of those adjustments (eg for the Thornden/Kelburn shift) are really old. That shift occurred in the 1930s and researchers have been using that adjustment for decades. So this can't be some recent NIWA conspiracy to support global warming theories. Instead, this is a story of how the Climate Science Coalition are attempting to rewrite the established view on how the data should be interpreted, based on their political view of what conclusion must be supported - no matter how much they must torture the evidence to achieve that conclusion.

LGM said...

Should knout this latest anonymous poster for trying to defend the indefensible.

LGM