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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“Why do they have to”adjust” Temps? To fit the hypothesis,not the truth?….”
I believe this adjustment serves a legitimate purpose. Many weather stations have been overrun by urbanization over the decades. This tends to skew their readings as urban temperatures are generally warmer than the previous rural temperatures. But you can see that in general the trend would then be that adjustments would generally go down not up. This, as you say, looks more like fitting the hypnosis than the truth but even more than you might suspect.
Incidentally, tried to communicate on NZ Prime Minister John Key’s Facebook page that NZ ETS is based on Climategate fraud and that NIWA is implicated – got censored out twice – can’t think why.
Like medieval theology, the answer in climate warming is known. Reality is just an obstacle to getting to the right answer.
I do worry about the future of science – a far more fragile enterprise than most people suppose.
See
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/scientsts-arent-science-and-science-isnt-a-method/
It seems to me that these people (Climate Scientists?) are doing there best to answer a completely different question that has intrigued me for a while…..
How high can you pile BS before it falls over and buries you?
This could make an interesting study, without needing to massage any data.
It would be beyond naive to think that this is confined to the UK or even merely to a handful of players. Look to the much touted consensus worldwide and you will find the culprits. It’s may be a good day for the world but it is a black day for science.
This’s scary info, if such kind of miscalculation prevails then we are most like to encounter so many challenges on our Environment, we need to wake up fast with the latest technologies so that we become Y2K compliant.
While you are waiting for these stories to break in the MSM, go get yourself some free carbon offsets:
http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com
You will be glad you did.
Now that we see some raw data, its becoming clearer that man-made global warming is confined to the man-made spike in the pro-AWG people’s graphs.
Thank you, commentors. I have been more impressed by the substantive quality of these comments than by any I’ve ever seen on any other website on any subject. If there’s a moderator screening them: good work!
A little footnote or two to this post:
WAG (18:28:10) Said;
“This is exactly why climate scientists shouldn’t be forced to make their data public – because lay people don’t understand the reasons for adjusting data and deliberately misinterpret it. “Adjusting” data is not the same as “faking” it.
1) I’m getting really sick of this elitist habit of referring to ‘lay people who don’t understand science’. A good scientist must be able to explain things so that a lay person can understand – obfuscation and explanations from top down belittle not those who need explanations but those who are unable to give them.
2) One can adjust data in scientific papers, provided one shows what and of what kind the adjustments are, and why one is making them.
Hiding these adjustments, keeping shtum about them is not science.
‘To make it look pretty’ is not a scientific argument either.
I think this is the time for a flood of FOI requests in EU, US, NZ, Australia,…….They may be too skittish now to refuse
I’m betting that the motive for the “adjustments” is almost certainly political. A New Zealander commenting on a post of mine (link below) complained that NZ minister of climate change Nick Smith is “hell bent” on rushing through a climate bill through the legislature. No doubt he looked to the climate bureaucrats at NIWA to give him useful numbers.
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/the-scientist-as-political-guardian/
To get a Ph.D in climatology, you should be required to have a Post-Graduate degree in Statistics with possibly a double major in Logic and reasoning.
I think these guys are putting their trust in the idea that will all the compute power available to them that the number crunchers will be able to discern the trends. What they don’t realise, it seems, is that the computer does not check the trends for reasonableness and suggest alternative hypotheses, or highlight where a supposed relationship does not actually exist. (Like the graph on joannenova.com.au that correlates global warming with US postal rates).
Once the data has been crunched it has to be processed by an objective and rational mind with the capacity to consider a range of possibilities. It just not seem to have happened.
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crosspatch (23:30:58) :
I don’t agree with the call for “jail” or trials of any sort for what I believe to be because it is the fault of the entire community that this sham has been allowed to continue. Why has the scientific community not demanded to see these results? I mean the ENTIRE scientific community.
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Let’s not forget the journal’s role in all this. They are analogous to the ratings agencies that gave sub-prime loan derivatives a high rating. The journal’s didn’t require the researchers to give them all raw data and code. How can we bring pressure to bear on them?? Cancel subscriptions?
Anthony, if you follow the first link there is an update to this story. The NIWA has responded and the text can be found there.
I still haven’t heard or read a valid explanation of why this bandwagon is so powerful. I don’t buy the “politicians want power”, or “they’re all stupid”, or “they want to tax us” meme. It’s similar to the European Super-State concept. It must go through, regardless of whether or not it’s rejected by the people in referendums, as it has been countless times (they vote “the wrong way”, just keep voting until they vote the right way!). Why?
Is there’s a compelling argument in favour that nobody is telling me about?
[snip]
Interesting new relevant comments about the NIWA press release above, see
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/niwas-explanation-raises-major-new-questions.html
I agree that some offset has to be applied when stations moved, in order to obtain maximum (and accurate enough) information from a network that is not stable, but I am not sure that the offsets were reasonably justified in all cases.
Can’t they just measure the right offset by putting a station to each old place again?
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Robinson (08:35:59) :
I don’t buy the “politicians want power
******************
Are you serious about this??
1. The politicians DO want power.
2. The scientists want money.
So the scientists are giving the politicians the data they want. They are hoping that by helping politicians, their funding will be guaranteed. This might not work out for them even if the politicians get the power (including our money) they seek.
Some scientists also have environmental goals they want to see achieved that have nothing to do with CO2. CO2 is just a vehicle for this subset of scientists.
Barry Foster (01:26:49) :
This NZ guy…
http://hot-topic.co.nz/
…who usually has a lot to say, is keeping strangely quiet on this one!
He’s commented now: NZ sceptics lie about temp records, try to smear top scientist – pro-NIWA and anti “The cranks in the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition”.
The reader comments tend to the same view, except for one by Richard
Treadgold from the Coalition.
For a map of added/deleted/edited land sites, see Fig #1 in
hadcrut3_gmr+defra_report200503.pdf in the data folder.
Sucks to find out one lives in an area that has been edited (data cleansed).
From http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/niwas-explanation-raises-major-new-questions.html?cid=6a00d8341c51bc53ef012875dfcab6970c#comment-6a00d8341c51bc53ef012875dfcab6970c
He’s referring to the graph provided be NIWA showing (unadjusted?) data from the three Wellington locations:
Although the Kelburn-Airport offset looks valid to me and the combined Kelburn/Airport curve goes up 0.6 degrees.
Here is a photo of the Stevenson Screen at Kelburn.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/22051607
At 125 metres(and that is indeed its altitude from GE) It is at the highest point for a considerable distance. The ground slopes down from it in all directions so it is much less subject to frost(and indeed all night radiative cooling) than the Thorndon site which is on flat land and near a hillside which will have cool air draining down at night. Welling ton does have a few calm days each year. Maybe 20.
One other point, the Wellington warming seems to have occurred between 1930 and 1960. Both the Thorndorn and Airport curves start and end at the same temperature.