Book me a front-row seat! [update 5]

Crikey, this is going to be fun to watch.

Court challenge to Niwa climate records – STUFF
    Climate change sceptics are taking the country's state-owned weather research body to the High Court over claims that its records are inaccurate.
    The government’ National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is being challenged about the data it uses to calculate climate change. The court action is being funded by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition … [who are] asking the court to order that records are invalid that show a 1 degree Celsius warming trend in nationwide temperatures during the past century, and wants NIWA to be ordered to produce another "accurate" record.
    It has also asked the court to order Niwa to stop using its current records to advise any government authority or the public.

The challenge is a simple one. As reported here several times before, the raw temperature records from New Zealand recording stations over the  last century shows no to only very slight warming. But, in a process begun by disgraced climatologist Jim Salinger, those raw figures have been adjusted upwards, well upwards, and the records justifying those specific adjustments are “no longer available.”

This is bad science, used to back up the most serious political attack on NZ industry since the war. Basically, the dog has eaten NIWA’s homework, and the best they can now do is point to general reasons for their dramatic upward adjustments, with no specific record available, they say, to justifying their fiddling of each figure.

And when that fiddling has been done by Jim Salinger, a certified climate alarmist who NIWA themselves described as “a stranger to truth,”  there’s good grounds to hope this bad science is as discredited by this case as it deserves to be.

It’s not even good enough for government work.

RELATED POSTS:

• CLIMATEGATE: Have New Zealand warmists cooked their books ...
• Soapbox Salinger sacked
• Warmist-in-chief Salinger a 'stranger to truth'
• NIWA should be shut down – Auer
• Cooking the decline?

UPDATE 1: Why is this important?

• Because NIWA are the source of the advice given to NZ governments on which they based their carbon taxes and emissions tax scam.  If that well is poisoned, their advice is moot.
• Because NIWA are the source of the advice relied upon by councils around the country that severely restricts (against right) what people may do on their own coastal property. If their advice is wrong, councils’ cases fall apart.
• Because the likes of the anti-development Environmental Defence Society (EDS) understand this perfectly, which is why they’re joining the action with NIWA. Without NIWA’s discredited advice, one less reason exists for the EDS to claim control of your land.
• Because the raw temperature records from the Met Service show no significant warming. Yet adjustments have been made by NIWA downwards pre-war and upwards post-war (the reverse of what you would expect as an adjustment for the Urban Heat Island effect). Talk about cooking the books! And the records for those adjustments"? They’ve been lost, says NIWA. This is either incompetence or dishonesty--and it’s certainly bad science—so in either case their advice to anybody should be ignored, and as the late Augie Auer maintained , they should be shut down. Because they’re not scientists, they’re shills.

UPDATE 2: Climate Science Coalition rep Barry Brill discusses the claim with Leighton Smith on air. Listen to the audio here. [Brill appears about 10:35am]

UPDATE 3: Apparently Radio NZ is finding it hard to find anyone to support NIWA on air, so this morning they went with truffle farmer Gareth Renowden, who does his best to fudge the story.  Listen to how carefully he dances around the disappearance of the log of adjustments, and the specific reasons for each.

UPDATE 4: Rational Capitalist has some links on the wider arguments:

Here is a Forbes article titled, The Death of Global Warming, and here is a great synopsis of the science by Dr. Roy Spencer titled, My Global Warming Skepticism, for Dummies. And, in case you are keeping track, here is some skepticism on the recent "independent review" of the Climategate controversy conducted by approximately the same people who were accused of the cover-up.

That should help give this all some context—and help you understand why warmists are getting so desperate.

UPDATE 5: I linked it indirectly, but it would be better if I liked directly to the Climate Science Coalition’s own release on this, which includes a backgrounder, a summary of the Statement of Claim, and a graph showing the effect of NIWA’s changes.  In fact, I’ll post that last one right here:

Don’t you think if you were a scientist who’d made that sort of huge and politically convenient adjustment—an adjustment made against the direction of adjustments for the  Urban Heat Island effect, a change that you would except to see—that you would want to explain step-by-step how you did it?  If you have nothing to hide, then why hide it?