UPDATE: see the end of the article for a response.
Reposted from TBR.cc Investigate magazine’s breaking news forum:
New Zealand’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking
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:
The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:
From NIWA’s web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).
But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:
Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.
The revelations are published today in a news alert from The Climate Science Coalition of NZ:
Straight away you can see there’s no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.
Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?
Why does NIWA’s graph show strong warming, but graphing their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!
Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?
It is relatively easy to find out. 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.
Proof of man-made warming
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.
UPDATE: see this new post More on the NIWA New Zealand data adjustment story
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You can check long-term records in NZ on NASA GISS website:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=507937800000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=507936150000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=507939870000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=534949960000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501949950001&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=532915920000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
All Australian stations are available from NASA GISS here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
Here are some examples:
Tenterfield
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501945560000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Melbourne
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501948680000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Bathurst
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501947300000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Alice springs
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Roma
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501945150010&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Broken Hill
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501946890000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Adelaide Airport
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501946720004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Broome Airport
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501942030004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Darwin Airport
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501941200004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Charleville
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501945100004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Parks
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501947170000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Dubbo
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501947190000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Tamworth
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501957620000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
A NZ$130,000 p/a pay rise for the NIWA big wig….
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-news/news/2997956/Niwa-chief-pockets-130-000-pay-rise
I usually go to stuff.co.nz for NZ news, this story about false data doesn’t show at all.
If you have corrupted increments, eliminate them. And declare your action openly. NIWA shows their bias and chasing of a preferred end result by the deliberate manipulation of an increment result to provide a manipulated historical increment. And hiding their manipulation. And attacking anyone who deigns to question them. Disgraceful. This would get you fired if you worked for SGS and you “massaged” an increment because you were not suitably positioned to record a crucial increment.
This NZ guy…
http://hot-topic.co.nz/
…who usually has a lot to say, is keeping strangely quiet on this one!
HideTheDecline (23:06:04) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk
That should carry a warning – you now owe me a new keyboard.
NIWA has issued a response ( http://tinyurl.com/yj2luns ).
The thing I find most striking about the report is that NIWA uses data from seven weather stations to make its official graph. And the adjustments to six of those seven weather station records have an upward slope, together forming the warming trend shown on NIWA’s official graph.
“….consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.”
Variants on this meaningless statement appear so often it’s ridiculous. Warming does not cause itself. Spouting tautologies does not make you look clever.
In an ideal world, this standard of “adjusted” science would be used in the medical professions, in pharmaceutical developments, in the design of aircraft, nuclear reactors etc etc.
We are indeed fortunate that the scientists from the global warming sector cannot cross-contaminate these sectors, unless there are a few smarties who realise they can make a fortune by following the ‘adjustment’ methodology.
Image if your life depended on it.
As indicated earlier, humans are only marginally responsible for global warming. The hotter sun is undeniable, and it is the main reason for global warming.
http://flyingbuffaloes7.net/keluar6.html
The per-station adjustments in the PDF are stunning. especially as Urban Heat Island effect would go the other way.
Surely now every single such paper in the body of “settled science” should be reviewed again – in the open, with raw data added as an extra series in all trend graphs. Where raw data is “lost or destroyed” the paper should be officially discredited. We need a per-paper and per-claim list with each either validated or discredited.
Gads, are there *any* long-running unadjusted station data that show an AGW upswing at a greater slope after the 1940 upswing in CO2 than before it? The stations that have run from the 1700s or 1800s are mostly all in Europe…about as close to the arctic as you can get without having to live in igloos. New stations then get added further and further towards the equator. Thus you could indeed have an alarming “global average” chart despite the fact that few if any individual stations in fact show an authentic “AGW” signal. Even century long cooling might be obscured this way. Before this scandal I might have chuckled at the idea that the answer might involved such incompetence but now I understand that it may have been willful or at least hopeful incompetence and needs to be checked out.
This has in fact been analyzed, come to think of it, but the guy involved doesn’t tend to graph his results so his blog is full of page after page of numbers so it didn’t make a huge impression on me when I ran into it several weeks ago:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/thermometer-years-by-latitude-warm-globe/
His theory is that despite adjustments for location that the adjustments simply become “swamped” by the “March of the Thermometers”.
Here he suggests that New Zealand is very important since its readings influence what scientists think the entire Pacific Ocean is doing since there are huge areas of ocean that lack thermometer stations:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/new-zealand-polynesian-polarphobia/
RW (01:54:15) :
“….consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.”
———-
:”Variants on this meaningless statement appear so often it’s ridiculous. Warming does not cause itself. Spouting tautologies does not make you look clever.”
========
As has been extensively discussed in various threads here in the past, there need be no “forcing” to cause warming (or cooling) to occur. Unforced warming is inherent in a chaotic system that is constantly chasing an ever-elusive equilibrium point–one that its chase itself disturbs.
As an example, the century-length upward and downward temperature surges of the past few thousand years occurred without any outside intervention. There is no reason to think that the upward surge of the past 150+ years, which is so far smaller than the MWP & the Roman Optimum, is unlike those prior unforced warmings.
It never entered the IPCC’s head that the climate might be a chaotic system whose zigzags were (mostly) internally generated. Its naivete disqualifies it from the get-go.
Steve Jones : Thankyou for those links to the Australian BOM’s temperature data for Cape Otway and Wilsons Prom. Very interesting indeed.
I’m sure they’ll find someway to blame global warming for their lies (the devil made me do it). I’m sure this same anti-mind/man crap is at work in all other countries that have public-scientists (those with their lips on the public teat). I’m sure they’ll all re-double their efforts for an urgent push to action to further chock off energy and [modern] life.
May I be the first to say…
[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75
George E. Smith (21:42:41) :
press release is now out:
“…in 1928 the measurement site was moved from Thorndon (3 metres above sea level) to Kelburn (125 m above sea level). The Kelburn site is on average 0.8°C cooler than Thorndon, because of the extra height above sea level.”
Sorry press release; but no cigar for you; you’ll have to smoke a dock weed instead. The movement of a site such as from Thorndon to Kelburn, is tantamount to ceasing the sampling at Thorndon, and commencing sampling at Kelburn.
Based on the standard adiabatic lapse rate of a 2°C decrease in temperature for every 1,000-foot increase in altitude, Kelburn’s temperature should be .78°C cooler than Thorndon’s. If they’ve been adjusting the temperature based on an 8°C difference, they’ll consistently show a small, but measurable, warming.
%$#@ur momisugly! Twitchy “Submit Comment” thumb.
That last sentence should have included the caveat “…even when *no* actual warming is occurring.”
“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.”
This warmed the cockles of me heart its priceless?
“Dave (01:51:21) : NIWA has issued a response ( http://tinyurl.com/yj2luns ).”
” but in 1928 the measurement site was moved from Thorndon (3 metres above sea level) to Kelburn (125 m above sea level). The Kelburn site is on average 0.8°C cooler than Thorndon, because of the extra height above sea level.” Hmmmmm…
Kelburn: Approximate population for 7 km radius from this point: 56857[probally a lot less in 1928]
http://www.fallingrain.com/world/NZ/0/Kelburn.html
Tourist town… Cablecar museum gets over 600,00 vistor per year
Victoria University of Wellington is there…
Urban Heat Island???? big changes from 1928 to today!!!!!
At the risk of editorialising… may I clarify the significance of this topic as it relates to the exposed UEA emails/programming files and the “correction” of the surface temperature record generally. The weather station record acts as the “master” series for much of the literature in climate science.
These weather instrument measurement series are used to “calibrate” and “correct” the complex predictive computer models upon which so much hangs, paleoclimate proxies which set the context for modern climate trends, and even satellite data.
The problem with the instrument record is that it is a) incomplete, b) prone to micro-environmental distortion (due to moves, “heat island effect” from urbanisation, etc), c) instrument changes, d) human error, and e) the recent selective drop-off of station points from the record. These are “corrected for” in the published definitive series, but that these corrections are controversial — not least because the correctors are unwilling or unable to tell us comprehensively how and why they did this.
The resultant data are used as the basis for much of the literature on AGW.
I’ll accept NIWA’s +0.79°C Kelburn-Airport offset for the periods between 1928 and 1970, but as the Wellington graph from the Climate Science Coalition paper shows, other offsets are applied before 1928. After 1970, the offset appears to vary wildly.
Just reviewed wisdom up-thread excluding my own awkward rambling and reconnected a few loose neurons that were previously assigned to my understanding of thermodynamics.
Conclusion:
The NIWA statement: “Warming over New Zealand through the past century is unequivocal” should read: “Air warming over selected New Zealand ambient air temperature measuring stations subject to Urban Heat Island Effect through the past century is unequivocal” to be correct. So those stations should be discarded and only one or two remote stations well away from urban influence be selected for NZ consideration in the global context (i.e. give UHI the flick).
The problem:air heats and cools rapidly as heat transfers through the medium (conductor) from hot sources to cold spots so temperatures swing wildly night and day, urban/rural gradient etc. generating massive data overload. Obviously air is a very poor choice of medium for long-term study of “Warming vs Cooling”. (the physics could be better but its late and too hard).
The solution: it’s the heat content of ocean and land mass that matters, both of which have thermal inertia far greater than air plus there is only one significant temperature cycle per year. (be careful not to poke the probe too far into the ground because Al said it’s millions and millions of degrees down there)
Having solved that I now find the Idealogues have shifted the goalposts from Anthropogenic Global Warming to Anthropogenic Climate Change. Notice how the focus of study is shifted from the solution: heat content of ocean and land mass (Globe) back to the problem: ambient air temperature (Climate). The Idealogue camp within Climatology (and Environmentalism) want the battle fought in the Climate arena. That way they only have to push the man-made aspect and can avoid any Warming vs Cooling debate and instead just point to Change either way.
Meamwhile, sharp minds are diverted from the big picture to haggle over NIWA temperature data-sets instead of just highlighting the irregularities and then getting straight back to addressing the notion that (developed country) man is the significant driver of Climate Change and should be penalized for it as part of a global wealth redistribution regime. And to put that in perspective, a Telegraph UK article shows how only 16 supertankers emit the same pollution as all the worlds car fleet. One of the many absurities of national Emissions Trading Schemes is that the worlds 100,000 strong shipping fleet is excluded. The other elephant in the room being the now industrialized China – the biggest polluter of all.
I’m worried about all the graphs on here. None of them really shows raw data.
The raw data will be a huge series of daily Tmin and Tmaz readings for individual stations – unless they have some new style thermometer that reads off annual average temp directly.
I posted the CRU data for comparison as well – none of them match.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11542
AJStrata