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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Time for trials on scale with the Nuremberg trials with appropriate punishments. These clowns have made a mockery of science and potentially have set back humanity by decades.
Relax, it’s just a news alert on a web site.
tokyoboy (16:25:06) :
“The situation is similar also in Japan.
…and says blithely that “the average temperature in Japan has risen by 1.1 degC over 100 years,” and “this graph has been prepared from the data of 17 stations which “keep long-time record” and “undergo small urbanization effects.””
It would be great if you could extract and post the station location information.
Here’s another thing that drives me nuts! Phil Jones says that UHI only contributes a small amount to the surface temp records (.05C, I think per century, but I stand to be corrected). Then why is it when I see the local weather forecast for a city of 150,000, that the city night temps are 3-5 degrees F lower that the outlying areas? Is it the negative sheep effect?
Sorry, I overstated the case a bit: based on the USHCN description of their graph they state “The cumulative effect of all adjustments is approximately a one-half degree Fahrenheit warming in the annual time series over a 50-year period from the 1940’s until the last decade of the century. “
Slightly off topic, but still relating to temperature, I am interested in plotting recorded temperature for Australia’s longest running (and apparently most complete) temperatures to see what trend it makes from the raw data, however I have been just using Excel to plot individual stations. What program would you recommend that I could use to add in each separate station onto the same graph to produce an “overall” look?
Bastages. I am REALLY getting angry now! I hate being lied to in order to separate me from my money.
The official Australian temperature record is also based on significant “adjustments’ of raw historical data.
The main adjustments were made by Torok and Nicholls in 1996 and then a few more adjustments were done by paul Della-Marta in 2000.
to my knowledge this process has never been properly audited, but from a few stations that I have checked I see that there is a similar lowering of temps in the early part of the records and a raising later on.
All the data can be found in this folder.
ftp://ftp2.bom.gov.au/anon/home/bmrc/perm/climate/temperature/annual/
Men Behaving Badly – 2.
Reminds me of blink comparators I’ve seen on WUWT previously showing GISS adjustments; how the early data is adjusted down while later years are adjusted up, resulting in an adjusted warming trend.
Now, I wonder why climate scientists have a credibility problem.
Originally, I was worried that this was the worst of the worst possible situations, i.e. first New Zealand’s NIWA for some reason adding in these correction factors and submitting adjusted numbers to CRU, second CRU adding an additional correction, and then last New Zealand’s NIWA publishing the doubly corrected annual graph.
I reviewed the file idl_cruts3_2005_vs_2008.pdf which was part of the CRU file dump. The CRU plots out the temp for 20th Century for all 4 seasons.
All 5 graphs (the 4 seasonal graphs in the CRU file dump and the one published by NIWA) appear (by eyeballing) to have a slope of 0.8 C/century.
It could be that NIWA submits the raw temp data to CRU, and then CRU tells NIWA how much they have warmed up?
While some adjustments of temperature records may be valid, for instance in calibrating resited weather stations, we must remain skeptical of their motivations. The question for me though is Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology engaging in temperature adjustments. I have been using their data and now feel somewhat uneasy.
Sounds like NZ needs a SurfaceStations like documentation of siting and data for each of the subject stations.
And why is it that ALL adjustments result in positive temp trends? McIntyre has run across this in the past. Excuse my ranting, I’m really pissed tonight.
“The wise men are put to shame,
They are dismayed and caught;
Behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD,
And what kind of wisdom do they have? Jeremiah 8:9
Any sensible believer would understand that fossil fuels were laid down to be used. Are they sometimes misused? Sure but remember that our banking and money model is based on government backed, systematic violation of “Thou shall not steal”. No wonder then that we have problems.
Hey Greenies,
Your real enemy is the banking and money creation model. Fix that and we can have sustainable prosperity.
This is exactly the sort of thing I posted on earlier today on the “codified” link – we might find the exact same thing with the CRU code- that most all the supposed warming isnt real at all but induced by the code.
I would again encourage anyone with the time & the skill to try figuring out how the code modified the data – image the impact if the CRU data looked like the unmodified NZ data after the “corrections” were removed. AGW as a problem would be dead. Full stop.
Also from David (16:30:57) link http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=762&filename=1167928837.txt
“Hubert’s chapter has lots of detail, many figures which have lines with the phrase ‘analyst’s opinion’ – one of his favourite terms for things he made up”.
Clearly there is a long tradition in climate science for “made up” stuff.
The GISS site shows the individual station data (all 6 of them that are still active) with the big high in the late 90’s and the drop off to now. The 90’s high was by no means the only one last century.
Publicize everywhere possible. It is imperative to keep the heat on, and not stop until the broader public reacts.
Its easy to figure out guys, whoever fudges the most, has the biggest crisis. They then get the biggest pot of “rich nations” money to combat global warming.
Yes, it is that simple.
Robinson (16:15:46) : “Don’t tell me, the statement will explain the necessary corrections for gridding, interpolation, calibration and research grant acceptance.”
Uh, and “homogenization,” and, uh, “teleconnection,” and “time of day fudge factors,” and a whole bunch of really scientific stuff you guys wouldn’t understand, like dendrophrenology.
This is again showing that the manipulation of climate science is worse than most skeptics imagined.
Adjusting is one thing.
But covertly adjusting in secret while perpetrating a false impression that you’re using the recorded temperatures is cold blooded fraud.
“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.”
Is it radical to now assume Jones et al wanted to avoid getting caught in an AdjustmentGate like what is happening now in NZ?
This isn’t science or politics.
It’s crime.
We have courts and prisons where this ALL needs to be heading.
… and the raws still include UHI effect…
As I asked in another thread…
What if it’s GHCN/GISS/CRUT3 that needs adjustment, and MXD that is correct?
What if they’re adjusting the wrong data series?
What if the actual temperature is 2.6C below where CRUT3 says it is?
Things that make you go “HMMMMmmmmm”
“Dr Jim Salinger (who no longer works for NIWA) started this graph in the 1980s when he was at CRU (Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK) and it has been updated with the most recent data.”
Well Damn! I was going to go to the tavern to add to my buzz but pass the POPCORN instead!!!!
This is the NIWA building. Surface station right where it should be….
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=41286
I think the saddest part of the recent outing of ‘adjusted figures’ debacle at CRU and now NIWA in ‘Godz own’ country is that science and scientists are coming under a cloud. Always thought to be impartial and trustworthy, some are being shown to be con men and charlatans with little or no scruples and this will inevitably rub of on all.
Whatever happened to the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin who strived for and stuck to the TRUTH no matter what the personal cost …surely they would be better making the result fit the facts rather than the other way round.
I know this is a very simplistic view but it is sad to see politics get in the way of science, a discipline I HAD a great deal of respect for…
I moved to N.Z. 17 years ago and havent noticed ANY warming … in fact this winter was very cold and helped the ski industry have one of there best years … even in Auckland the temps were a lot cooler than in the recent past…
One man who is on to it though is Leighton Smith talkback host … but… he is an Aussie…
http://www.leightonsmith.co.nz/