New Zealand climate scientists embroil themselves in as much of a climate data fraud scandal as Climategate and with eerily similar methods and results.
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) in its article ‘NIWA Challenged to Show Why and How Temperature Records Were Adjusted’ (February 7, 2010) provides its readers with an insight into the climate scandal dubbed ‘Kiwigate.’
NIWA is New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and is accused of repeatedly frustrating NZCSC in its attempts to get government climatologists to explain how they managed to create a warming trend for their nation’s climate that is not borne out by the actual temperature record.
According to NZCSC, climate scientists cooked the books by using the same alleged ‘trick’ employed by British and American doomsaying scientists. This involves subtly imposing a warming bias during what is known as the ‘homogenisation’ process that occurs when climate data needs to be adjusted.
Homogenisation Explained
When such data adjustments (homogenisations) are made, scientists must keep their working calculations so that other scientists can test the reasonableness of those adjustments. According to an article in Mathematical Geosciences (April 2009) homogenisation of climate data needs to be done because “non-climatic factors make data unrepresentative of the actual climate variation.”
The article tells us that if the raw data is not homogenised (or, in this case, “fudged” according to sceptics) the “conclusions of climatic and hydrological studies are potentially biased.”
According to the independent inquiry into Climategate chaired by Lord Oxburgh, it was found that it was the homogenisation process itself that became flawed because climatologists were overly guided by “subjective” bias.
Andrew Bolt, writing for Australia’s Herald Sun (November 26, 2009) commented that the Kiwigate scandal was not so much about “hide the decline” but “ramp up the rise.”
Jim Salinger: Another ‘Phil Jones’?
Bolt goes on to report, “Those adjustments were made by New Zealand climate scientist Jim Salinger, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” Salinger was dismissed by NIWA this year for speaking without authorisation to the media.
Salinger once worked at Britain’s CRU, the institution at the centre of the Climategate scandal.
Salinger became part of the inner circle of climate scientists whose leaked emails precipitated the original climate controversy in November 2009. In an email (August 4, 2003) to fellow disgraced American climate professor, Michael Mann, Salinger stated he was “extremely concerned about academic standards” among climate sceptics.
Circling The Bandwagons?
NZCSC made a joint press release with the Climate Science Conversation Group (December 18, 2009) accusing NIWA of publishing, “misleading material.” The two organisations claim that NIWA had been “defensive and obstructive” in requests to see New Zealand climate scientists’ data.
NZCSC goes on to report, “The main objective of our temperature study was not to show that the raw data has been tampered with, even though that opinion was emphasised and cannot yet be excluded.”
On January 29, 2010, in what seemed like a reprise of the Phil Jones debacle at Britain’s Climate Research Unit, the Kiwi government finally owned up that “NIWA does not hold copies of the original worksheets.”
Kiwigate Mimics Climategate
Kiwigate appears to match Climategate in three essential characteristics. First, climate scientists declined to submit their data for independent analysis. Second, when backed into a corner the scientists claimed their adjustments had been ‘lost’. Third, the raw data itself proves no warming trend. Thus we may reasonably infer a ‘carbon copy’ of Climategate.
NZCSC explained their frustrations in trying to get to actual truth about what had happened with New Zealand’s climate history, “NIWA did everything they possibly could to help us, except hand over the adjustments. It has turned out that there was actually nothing more they could have done - because they never had the adjustments. None of the scientific papers that NIWA cited in their impressive-sounding press releases contained the actual adjustments.”
After a protracted delay NIWA was forced to admit it has no record of why and when any adjustments were made to the nation’s climate data. Independent auditors have shown that older data was fudged to make past temperature appear cooler, while modern data was inexplicably ramped up to portray a warming trend that is not backed up by the actual thermometer numbers.
Sceptics are asking how can it be that climate scientists in different countries at the opposite side of the world are facing extraordinarily similar data fraud allegations?
Unsatisfactory Outcome
The world is left with more questions than answers. Website,’Scoop’ echoed the sentiments of other climate sceptics by arguing that because New Zealand’s climate data adjustments cannot be verified (peer-reviewed) like CRU’s, then they are thus just as worthless.
With so many climatologists having ‘lost’ their calculations, no one can now replicate their methods and confidence in climate science has evaporated.
In addition, further scandalous revelations with Glaciergate and other ‘gates’ have mired the IPCC in an alleged international data fraud conspiracy that undermines the entire theory of man made climate change.
The knock-on effect worldwide is a fall away in voters’ concerns about ‘global warming’ issues so that international governments are losing their mandate for cap and trade taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
References:
Bolt, A. ‘Climategate: Making New Zealand warmer,’ Herald Sun (November 26, 2009), accessed online April 26, 2010.
Costa, A.C. and A. Soares, ‘Homogenization of Climate Data: Review and New Perspectives Using Geostatistics,’ Mathematical Geoscience, Volume 41, Number 3 / April, 2009.
New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, ‘NIWA Challenged to Show Why and How Temperature Records Were Adjusted’ (February 7, 2010), accessed online April 26, 2010.
NZCSC & Climate Science Conversation Group; Press Statement of December 18, 2009; accessed online ( April 26, 2010).
Salinger, J. Climategate email Filename: 1060002347.txt. (August 4, 2003).
As regular readers know, I have more photographs and charts of weather stations on my computer than I have pictures of my family. A sad commentary to be sure, but necessary for what I do here.
Steve Goddard points out this NASA GISS graph of the Annual Mean Temperature data at Godthab Nuuk Lufthavn (Nuuk Airport) in Greenland. It has an odd discontinuity:
The interesting thing about that end discontinuity is that is is an artifact of incomplete data. In the link to source data above, GISS provides the Annual Mean Temperature (metANN) in the data, before the year 2010 is even complete here.
Yet, GISS plots it here and displays it to the public anyway. You can’t plot an annual value before the year is finished. This is flat wrong.
But even more interesting is what you get when you plot and compare the GISS “raw” and “homogenized” data sets for Nuuk, my plot is below:
Looking at the data from 1900 to 2008, where there are no missing years of data, we see no trend whatsoever. When we plot the homogenized data, we see a positive artificial trend of 0.74C from 1900 to 2007, about 0.7C per century.
When you look at the GISS plotted map of trends with 250KM smoothing, using that homogenized data and GISS standard 1951-1980 baseline, you can see Nuuk is assigned an orange block of 0.5 to 1C trend.
So, it seems clear, that at least for Nuuk, Greenland, their GISS assigned temperature trend is artificial in the scheme of things. Given that Nuuk is at an airport, and that it has gone through steady growth, the adjustment applied by GISS is in my opinion, inverted.
The Wikipedia entry for Nuuk states:
With 15,469 inhabitants as of 2010, Nuuk is the fastest-growing town in Greenland, with migrants from the smaller towns and settlements reinforcing the trend. Together with Tasiilaq, it is the only town in the Sermersooq municipality exhibiting stable growth patterns over the last two decades. The population increased by over a quarter relative to the 1990 levels, and by nearly 16 percent relative to the 2000 levels.
Instead of adjusting the past downwards, as we see GISS do with this station, the population increase would suggest that if adjustments must be applied, they logically should cool the present. After all, with the addition of modern aviation and additional population, the expenditure of energy in the region and the changing of natural surface cover increases.
ASOS rounds temperatures UP resulting in a warm bias, how convenient By E.M. Smith
In this post here, I found a roughly 1 F high bias to the ASOS at San Jose, and that led to finding out that the ASOS system rounds UP to whole degrees C.
Given that ASOS are now used as the QA standard for the daily data in USHCN (and who knows where else...) and that ASOS are an increasing percentage of the data over time, this could be significant.
The methods used by ASOS and observers to measure maximum and minimum temperatures are somewhat similar. ASOS software uses an algorithm that samples the ambient air temperature nominally every 30 seconds and computes a one minute average based on this reading. It then averages five consecutive one minute values to compute a five minute ambient air temperature. This temperature is updated every minute. The highest and lowest five minute average temperatures of the day are stored as the maximum and the minimum temperatures, respectively. All values are rounded up (NOAA et al. 1992).
See much more on the E.M. Smith post on Chiefio here.
A Review of Energy and Climate Wars by Peter Glover and Michael J. Economides
The title of Peter Glover’s and Michael J. Economides’ Energy and Climate Wars: How Naïve Politicians, Green Ideologues, and Media Elites are Undermining the Truth About Energy an Climate fails to do the work justice. While the subtitle accurately reflects the book’s fast-paced, biting tone, underneath Energy and Climate Wars is a smart and philosophically principled exposition of the ideological origins of the allegedly scientific climate discussion, freshly identifying the fundamentally unfounded and utopian aspects of the left’s attempt to remake the world to their liking.
The book, intentionally or not, serves as a quick, 250-page, comprehensive guide to the current energy and climate debate, filling the first few chapters with many of the basic conservative talking points against renewable energy and so-called green jobs. The attacks, while well-defended, merely reinforce information that is well-chronicled and readily available from a myriad of other sources, including the arguments set forth by Economides’ co-editor of Energy Tribune, Robert Bryce, in his books Gusher of Lies and Power Hungry. One looking to disparage what the authors call the left’s “Wishful Thinking Syndrome” will find thorough refutation of wind power and of the failure of green jobs initiatives and other government subsidies of renewable energy projects in both the United States and Europe.
The authors also exhaustively explore the two dominant myths pervading the public’s thought and discourse on energy policy: global warming and peak oil, the latter referring to the notion that we have reached the peak of oil production and that we will potentially face severe shortages of the non-renewable resource in the future. The authors’ brash tone shines through clearly as they heatedly, and desperately, plead for intellectual honesty in the non-renewable debate. Nonetheless, they convincingly present the case that a peak of oil production is not in our indefinite future and that a peak in demand is more likely to arrive first as energy technology improves. Their case for peak oil and energy transition skepticism is similar to the clear-eyed approach offered by Vaclav Smil.
The true value in the book lies not with their analysis of energy and climate science, but with their examination of the political and ideological wars that lie at the root of the policy debate. It is here that they make their contribution certain to please the Burkean conservatives among their readers: radical environmentalism is not about objective review of science, but instead is a component of an ideologically motivated, fantastical attempt to remake the world into a global, centrally planned green community, one without the evil Big Oil. In this way, the book provides a very useful response to Eric Pooley’s popular 2010 work, The Climate War, which offered an unreflective exaltation of Al Gore, Fred Krupp, and the entire environmental movement while denigrating any climate skepticism as disingenuous scholarship motivated solely by fossil fuel dollars.
There is a religious character to this radical form of environmentalism, and it begins with the emerging guilt attributed to Western capitalism for polluting the planet. Despite objective facts to the contrary, the left has managed to establish carbon dioxide emissions as the “Great Satan,” as the authors term it, elevating its defeat to the highest of moral causes. One can see the attractiveness of this premise in the alternative narrative that forms in this religion: unregulated capitalism is the culprit and, more significantly, the solution is to defeat this culprit through centralization and cooperation. In this narrative, environmentalism is a class struggle between the enlightened and the polluting capitalists.
The authors extensively expose this nexus between central planning and environmentalism which leftists in both the European Union and the United States government are seizing upon as an opportunity to promote their economic and political agendas. Borrowing Thomas Sowell’s ideological classifications, it is then the unconstrained nature of this environmental religion that becomes its most easily identifiable flaw.
In what the authors term the “energy disconnect,” those who possess the enlightened knowledge of the need to remake our economy, and the limitless estimation of the capabilities of renewable energies, are consistently revealed to have ignored the reality of the environmental and political facts. Renewable energy cannot hold the key to solve whatever crisis may exist, and coerced cooperation at an international level—as the failure of Kyoto illustrates—is a pleasant-sounding yet fruitless endeavor. But in the left’s unconstrained vision for a greener world, such realities cease to matter; it is indeed a hallmark of leftist political culture that, as the authors write, these things “are simply a matter of political will.”
Drawing upon the skepticism of F.A. Hayek and Margaret Thatcher, the authors expose the folly of attempting such a grand scheme through political will while ignoring the basic essentials necessary to make it work. The legitimacy derived from national sovereignty, which the EU and trans-nationalism generally seek to destroy, is left out of the political calculation.
The authors present the essentials of this analysis in the chapter titled “Trans-Nationalism and the New World Order: a Warning,” the most uniquely valuable chapter of the book. The remainder focuses on the future of energy and climate struggles, revealing the implications of an unrealistic, utopian narrative dominating our thought: it distracts from the true problems that will arise in the world as viewed through the lens of our realistic constraints.
Our livelihood depends on energy, specifically the dense and efficiently harnessed energy found in non-renewable resources. With these resources available in abundance in areas of the world not yet fully tapped, such as Antarctica, this is unlikely to change in the indefinite future, and international political struggles could focus on competing national sovereignties laying claims to these resources.
The authors discuss the political conflicts already underway for these resources and make the compelling case that it is to our detriment to forge ahead with utopian international efforts to collectively wean ourselves off nonrenewable energy. For too many countries, the incentives point them in the opposite direction.
For those readers uneasy about such an ostensibly pessimistic worldview, the book’s conclusion helps to put these concerns to rest.
Upon the revelation that environmentalism and centralization are unnecessary obstacles both to economic development and to free-market improvements in clean energy technology, one is liberated from the burdensome alternative narrative written by the left. In the true narrative, the energy economy is not a class struggle between Big Oil and the enlightened; the nonrenewable sector is not anti-human, but rather a force for bringing millions out of poverty.
To speak again of moral causes, it then becomes an imperative that we rewrite the narrative in the public mind and dispense with the dangerous myths.
See post here.
Thank you 10:10. We could not have come up with better promotion to show how malignantly dangerous the totalitarian eco-fascist dark side of Greens is. Send copies of this to your friends. Send them to your enemies!
10:10 produced a star studded sicko fantasy of what their real Christmas gift wish is for the world. When you can’t convince people with reason, mark anyone who disagrees, blow up their children.
Their true nature is so on display...softly, softly, quietly under the guise of “nice”: trick them, decieve them, say “No Pressure”, and then be judge, jury and executioner in gratuitous orgasmic revenge: press a button and see exploding blood and guts splat on the wall.
The sore losers are soooooo frustrated.
Spot the difference with green terrorism and Islamic Extremists. At least the jihadi’s are not pretending to hide their greedy egotistical self-interest by pretending to “care” about the planet.
The entire green movement of the world needs to answer this. It doesn’t matter whether they made it or not. They can’t hide behind this as a joke. Would they let any vigilante out there produce a video of someone blowing up, say, boat people’s kids? Should such a sick “joke” as that be put online. Any true human-rights-respecting, tolerant, compassionate speaking person must denounce the 10:10 video in no uncertain terms.
They used former-stars people who used to have some social standing (what were they thinking?). Gillian Anderson (x-files), Peter Crouch (footballer), David Ginola (a French footballer), Richard Curtis (film maker, eg Love Actually, Notting Hill), and Radiohead.
My Challenge to Green groups: Call off your attack dogs.
For peace loving environmentalists, you may not have asked for this, but your true colors are being tested and the test comes from within. The challenge goes out to the Greens, Greenpeace, WWF, The Wilderness Society, CAN and the Sierra Club. Will you allow your sychophant totalitarian bullies to push these death-threats under the guise of joke, or will you stand up for human-rights, for peace, for non-violent answers - and denounce 10:10 and demand it’s immediate dissolution? Do environmentalists dream of violent deaths of the children of those who disagree? Unless you issue clear official statements that you are appalled by the 10:10 threats, that this kind of sicko-psycho intimidation is dangerous and uncivilized, then we mark you as tacitly approving. It only takes one written press release for your organisation to make its stance clear. What say ye?
Can the Greens control their own bullies, or do the bullies show us the real side of the green-meme: The tribe wanting global control, whatever it takes, no matter who stands in their way.
Please post this challenge on Green sites around the world. Lets see which groups have attack dogs, and which groups ARE attack dogs?
These bullies use the Greens, and the Greens use the bullies.
As I mentioned at the Pacrim Conference, as many as 1 in 30 people are estimated to be serial bullies. What do they do when they go home from work? They can Bully-for-the-Planet, where bullying is rewarded instead of shamed. It’s all the fun of noxious superiority, fully approved by the so-called “caring” compassionate enviro-movement. Got your Global Bullies Rewards Card? Ask Greenpeace, it’s coming.
The relationship suits both, the green-power-hungry dictators get a fan club of the nasties: the insecure, attention seeking, mindless zealots. And the bullies get an excuse to enjoy their base desire under the guise of being “caring”. What kind of caring blows away children?
This is not an apology:
Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis - writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others - agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.
As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.
We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.
At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.
Onwards and upwards,
Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team.
It’s not about peace, but about power.
This is tribal warfare.
Delingpole sums it up what a PR disaster this is for the greens:
Gillian Anderson, Peter Crouch [a tall footballer], Radiohead, David Ginola [a French footballer] and - above all - Richard Curtis, I salute you! You have just released a video which has entered history as the most emetic, ugly, counterproductive eco-propaganda movie ever made. Believe me this thing is going to go viral beyond your wildest dreams. But unfortunately that virus is ebola.
Richard North EU Referendum: They have show us their true face and it is the face of evil.
The enemy, in this Eco-jihad video, is revealing its true face. And above is that face - Richard Curtis producer of the film and director Dougal Wilson, with the 10:10 gang. The scene looks normal and the Greenshirts look human, but they are not. This is the face of evil. When do we see the yellow armbands and the gas chambers?
This is BIG, and it isn’t going away. Reputations are being trashed online as this rages through the cyber-world.
Where are the good greens??? Time to face your nemesis, and they call themselves “friends”. Read more here.
The UK’s leading scientific body has been forced to rewrite its guide on climate change and admit that it is not known how much warmer the Earth will become.
The Royal Society has updated its guide after 43 of its members complained that the previous version failed to take into account the opinion of climate change sceptics.
Now the new guide, called ‘Climate change: a summary of the science’, admits that there are some ‘uncertainties’ regarding the science behind climate change. And it says that it impossible to know for sure how the Earth’s climate will change in the future nor what the possible effects may be.
An iceberg breaks off from the shelf in Antarctica. The Royal Society has reissued its guidance on climate change
The 19-page guide says: ‘It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future, but careful estimates of potential changes and associated uncertainties have been made. Scientists continue to work to narrow these areas of uncertainty. Uncertainty can work both ways, since the changes and their impacts may be either smaller or larger than those projected.’
And it avoids making any predictions about the possible impacts of climate change and advises caution in making projections about rising sea levels.
It says: ‘There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century for a given temperature increase.’
‘Similarly, the possibility of large changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean cannot be assessed with confidence. The latter limits the ability to predict with confidence what changes in climate will occur in Western Europe.
The new guidance still makes it clear that human activity is one of the likely causes for climate change but now does so in a more considered way. It states: ‘There is very strong evidence to indicate that climate change has occurred on a wide range of different timescales from decades to many millions of years; human activity is a relatively recent addition to the list of potential causes of climate change.’
The working group behind the new book included two Royal Society fellows who were part of the 43-strong rebellion that had called for the original guide to be rewritten. Professor Anthony Kelly and Sir Alan Rudge are both members of an academic board that advises a climate change sceptic think-tank called the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Professor Kelly said: “It’s gone a long way to meeting our concerns.
‘The previous guidance was discouraging debate rather than encouraging it among knowledgeable people. The new guidance is clearer and a very much better document.’ And Benny Peiser, Director of The Global Warming Policy Foundation also welcomed the Royal Society’s decision to revise. He said: ‘The former publication gave the misleading impression that the ‘science is settled’ - the new guide accepts that important questions remain open and uncertainties unresolved.
‘The Royal Society now also agrees with the GWPF that the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years. ‘In their old guide, the Royal Society demanded that governments should take “urgent steps” to cut CO2 emissions “as much and as fast as possible.” This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.
‘If this voice of moderation had been the Royal Society’s position all along, its message to Government would have been more restrained and Britain’s unilateral climate policy would not be out of sync with the rest of the world.’
The new book is certainly very different in tone that the original and takes into account some of the problems that have arisen in climate change science over the past year. The new version sets out its objectives by saying: ‘In view of the ongoing public and political debates about climate change, the aim of this document is to summarise the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers. It lays out clearly where the science is well established, where there is wide consensus but continuing debate, and where there remains substantial uncertainty.’
The Royal Society’s decision comes in the wake of a scathing report into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which called for it to avoid politics and stick instead to predictions based on solid science. The review, which focused on the day-to-day running of the panel, rather than its science, was commissioned after the UN body was accused of making glaring mistakes.
These included the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish within 25 years - and that 55 per cent of the Netherlands was prone to flooding because it was below sea level. Earlier this year an email scandal involving experts at the University of East Anglia had already fuelled fears that global warming was being exaggerated.
Read the new climate change guide from the Royal Society here. See this post here.
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GWPF Welcomes Royal Society’s Toned Down Climate Stance The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 30 September 2010
LONDON, 30 September - The Global Warming Policy Foundation has welcomed the Royal Society’s decision to revise and tone down its position on climate change. Its new climate guide is an improvement on their more alarmist 2007 pamphlet which caused an internal rebellion by more than 40 fellows of the Society and triggered a review and subsequent revisions.
The former publication gave the misleading impression that the ‘science is settled’ - the new guide accepts that important questions remain open and uncertainties unresolved. “The Royal Society now also agrees with the GWPF that the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.
Dr David Whitehouse, the science editor of the GWPF said: “The biggest failing of the new guide is that it dismisses temperature data prior to 1850 as limited and leaves it at that. It would cast a whole new light on today’s warming if the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period were as warm as today, possiblity even warmer than today. A thorough discussion of the growing empirical evidence for the global existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its implications would have been a valuable addition to the new report.”
In their old guide, the Royal Society demanded that governments should take “urgent steps” to cut CO2 emissions “as much and as fast as possible.” This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.
“If this voice of moderation had been the Royal Society’s position all along, its message to Government would have been more restrained and Britain’s unilateral climate policy would not be out of sync with the rest of the world,” Dr Peiser said. Read more here.
