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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Robert L (18:26:38) :
A bit off topic, but a question:
Since the ocean is a zillion times more massive than the atmosphere (sorry for the technical quantitative description) and the amount of dissolved CO2 in the ocean is likewise huge compared to the atmosphere.
Doesn’t it make more sense from a thermodynamic perspective to say that the ocean cools the atmosphere (evaporation), and the land warms it (conduction/convection).
I realize that this is a bit simplistic, but should we be measuring ocean temperature, or sub-surface ground temperature to really get the long term trends?
Yes and it is being done. This is also the reason why the Arctic melt was not really that big a deal because it is not the air temperature doing it so much as the warmer currents that did it.
Look take an ice cube out of your freezer and stick it in the refrigerator. It will melt but it will take a heck of a long time to do it. Now place a cup of water in the fridge over night and then place an ice cube after the water has chilled . It will melt at a much greater rate then the one that only had ‘air’ to heat it.
Water is an immense, huge, gigantic reservoir for heat. It is really the thing that drives our climate.
WAG (18:28:10) : “Adjusting” data is not the same as “faking” it.
…. but “faking” data is the same as “faking” it though, right ??
And Winston looked at the sheet handed him:
“Adjustments prior to 1972 shall be -0.2 degrees and after 1998 shall be +0.3 degrees.”
Winston wondered at the adjustment to the data. At this point, no one even knows if the data, prior to his adjustments, was raw data or already adjusted one or more times previously.
It didn’t matter. All Winston was sure of is that one of the lead climatologists needed more slope to match his computer model outputs. He punched out the new Fortran cards and then dropped the old cards into the Memory Hole where they were burned.
“There!” Winston exclaimed to himself. Now the temperature data record is correct again; all is double-plus good.
WAG (18:28:10) :
“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.
No statistical data is ever presented unadjusted. Political pollsters, for example, adjust their samples to match reality when they find they’ve undersampled various demographic groups. There’s nothing wrong with it, and anyone who says there is is being deliberately dishonest.”
Political pollsters are often quite wrong, but there’s a bit of a difference between playing with polls and playing with the welfare of the human race. Adjusting data can indeed be done for purposes of deception, and is not unheard of. And not all lay persons are unable to understand data adjustments, some are able to make informed decisions about whether data has been fudged or not, and make determinations of the intent. You do yourself and your cause no favor with the unsubstantive rhetoric you have been sharing here, I submit you drink your own koolaid somewhere else and not expect to hook anyone here with your accusation of “deliberate misinterpretation”.
WAG wrote:
“No statistical data is ever presented unadjusted. Political pollsters, for example, adjust their samples to match reality when they find they’ve undersampled various demographic groups. There’s nothing wrong with it, and anyone who says there is is being deliberately dishonest.”
I agree. It’s undisputed that there has been warming over the past 200-some years, since the LIA. (Natural proxies indicate this, such as (in the US) the northern and upward-altitude expansion of territories of many species, etc.) If the unadjusted chart fails to show such warming, some adjustment (e.g., for time-of-day measuring) is surely in order.
There is a great temptation to “let ’em have it,” but that opens us to a counter-punch. I’m sure most–let’s say 2/3–of the adjustment is justified, and that Salinger will be able to persuade his colleagues of that. Therefore we should focus not on the magnitude of the fiddling, but on its existence. We should say, “If these alarmists are willing to put their thumb on the scale here, who’s to say they haven’t done so wrt more important matters, like positive feedback from water vapor? There’s a need to reassess this whole matter by a less involved / committed group of scientists.”
Let’s not try to hit a home run. Swinging for the fences feels good, but will get us nowhere. Let’s just try to get on base, and let our main work be done by TIME. (As recommended by Kuznetsov in War and Peace.)
No statistical data is ever presented unadjusted.
Really? Do you reckon the LHC at CERN will only give “fixed” values to scientists? Or do you reckon they will trust them to make their own adjustments?
The NZ Statistics authorities certainly adjust demographic data. But they both publish the original material and list the published changes in excruciating detail.
Political pollsters, for example, adjust their samples to match reality when they find they’ve undersampled various demographic groups. There’s nothing wrong with it, and anyone who says there is is being deliberately dishonest.
Pollsters even out data to balance their chosen selection with reality. They take a great deal of care to do so properly. That is the exact opposite of cherry picking, which is what we are seeing with GW values. And I would not trust with my money a poll I had not eyeballed the original data from.
I find it amazing anyone would claim such crap. Stop and think about what you just wrote. Do you really, really believe that no-one other than a small cabal should be trusted with data of this importance?
Eric (19:20:36) :
The Hitler video is in exceedingly bad taste, and should be removed. It’s the second time I’ve seen it posted.
REPLY: agreed. done, – Anthony
If these shenangans are going on in every country, do you know how much man power it will take to investigate all those frauds? It could take the entire CIA, KGB, FBI, NSA, MI5, etc. Do You know how many jobs investigating this scam could create?
First CRU, now NIWA. It really does beg the question:
How many OTHER supposedly objective atmospheric science agencies in how many other countries did the lemming thing; and adopted similar ”extended data enhancement” methods (the most generous term I can think of to apply (preferred plain english translation: Cooked the books) ) ??
SIDEBAR in passing:
The continuing exponential rise of the Google ”climategate” hit counter is truly amazing:
From 38K total after the story broke last Friday night, to 3760K as of 19:40 hours US PST today. Up by TWO orders of magnitude.
By comparison:
Throw “anthropogenic global warming” at Google, and see only 740K hits.
hmmm…..:
Not saying the above proves anything, but it’s kind of interesting. . . .
AJ Strata has found files in the CRU data dump that, country-by-country, plot out the temperature going back many years. Lots of countries show no warming, some even a decline. His links to the files might be helpful to those interested in pursuing how the global temperature was computed by CRU. At first glance it looks a lot like Mannian mathematics where the hockey sticks are heavily overweighted, but that’s to be proved by analysis of the code and data.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11466
It is clear this “adjusting” has been going on for some time now.
Maybe some of the adjustments are justified, maybe they are not, maybe the coders who actually implement the adjustments have been erring on the high side every time a new adjustment algorithm is instituted.
The NCDC confirms that the US temperature trend hs been adjusted upward by abou 0.425C since 1920 (or more than the increase which is recorded in the adjusted numbers so no warming has occurred since 1920 in the raw numbers).
The questions are, how do we find out exactly how much fiddling has actualy been done and how do we fix it?
FOIs, yeah let’s continue trying this. Let’s find the raw data and put it up on the internet but it doesn’t mean much if Hadcrut, GISS and the NCDC keep putting out their adjusted charts.
We have to convince the community itself, to redo all the analysis and redo all the charts. I don’t think we are going to have much luck in that.
[It sounds like it is about time for Part II of the PaleoClimate series which shows that the CO2 sensitivity is only about 1.0C per doubling over the last 45 million years and about 1.5C per doubling over the last 570 million years.]
i see there is this update to the original story linked.
UPDATE 15:49 NZDT – NIWA’s news release in response to this story appears to have been delayed, and according to a radio news report a few minutes ago Rodney Hide, leader of the minority Act Party and a minister in the National Government, is now calling on his Cabinet colleague, Climate Change Minister Nick Smith, to “please explain” [normal transmission now resumes]
Robert Wood of Canada (19:07:10) :
Well, I am sure that data goes up onto the rack also, but what I was getting at is the fact that they are two completely different things, but it seems that GISS treats them like they can be added together and give us a meaningful number to use and I wonder what their justification for that is. They aren’t measuring the air temperature above the surface of the water, they are measuring the surface of the water. With land measurements, you are measuring the air temperature, and not the surface temperature. Why is that ok?
[snip]
Nothing new, but an interesting headline.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/27/the-global-cooling-cover-up/#comments
Just searched on New Zealand in the HadCRU emails, looks like 24 results.
I’m going in, cover me.
Apparently Phil Jones’ dog doesn’t range as far as New Zealand or it would have eaten that data as well.
What I find really amazing about the “offical” graph is even that does not support global warming. I mean, look at it .. the temp anomoly only rises 1.2 Celsius over 100+ years! When you compare that to the discredited hockey stick graphs and other temperature change claims, the amount listed is far less (and does not follow the claimed rapid increase shape) from many other “climitologists”. I guess they didn’t read the memos on the desired graph shape and forgot to properly “account” for needed changes to make it more “accurate”.
It’s easy to see what the warmist tactic is in reply to climategate.Point out that whatever is in those e-mails does not affect the bigger picture.Science is still saying sea level rise blah blah blah.The interviewer in that fox video posted here gave that warmist a platform to spout that the science is still certain on global warming,what he said will stay in the mind,because the interviewer didn’t cut him off,and didn’t ask what data the settled science is using,and has that data been corrupted?There is so much information out there,but it is spread all over the web.All I’m seeing is one scientist went too far,but he will be sacked or resign,then we can go back to all the other data that is showing global warming as a threat.It is why they are calling for Phil to resign.All the msm is doing is giving a platform to warmists to state the view that global warming is a threat under the guise of investigating climategate.
“Maybe some of the adjustments are justified, maybe they are not, ”
Of course there are reasons for adjustments but they generally go in the other direction where increasing urbanization has encroached on stations that were rural. Urbanization results in higher temperatures due to heat absorbed and re-radiated from pavements and buildings. So if you have a station that was rural, urbanization would result in higher temperatures even with a static “climate”. So you adjust temperatures down. Adjusting them up in recent years would act to amplify urban heat islands. But since NZ is South of the Equator, maybe things go in the opposite direction down there. /sarc
I would expect there to be little difference in the climate of NZ because it is (or they are) islands. The climate is influenced (and moderated) by the ocean. No matter from which direction the wind comes, it comes from the ocean, unlike winds in places like North America.
Michael R (16:53:36)
In case you’re not aware of it:
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/
John Daly died a few years ago, so if you want to contribute to this area you would do well to maintain updates here rather than start out on your own.
Matthew Weaver (19:01:33) :
Question–and pardon being a bit off-thread–but is there any US station-by-station weather data downloadable that is presumed unadjusted? That is, the real original data reports by hour, day or whatever? As I read each of these reports–and realize that I’m sitting here with more computer power at my desk than these so-called scientists did even just 10 years ago, I’d like to download the data and take a look first hand.
I believe so. You can try poking around here for example:
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/summary/Climsmwy.html
Pick a station and then pick under monthly temperature listings (avg, min, max) to get a table of data.
press release is now out:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise
Warming over New Zealand through the past century is unequivocal.
NIWA’s analysis of measured temperatures uses internationally accepted techniques, including making adjustments for changes such as movement of measurement sites. For example, in Wellington, early temperature measurements were made near sea level, 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.
Such site differences are significant and must be accounted for when analysing long-term changes in temperature. The Climate Science Coalition has not done this.
NIWA climate scientists have previously explained to members of the Coalition why such corrections must be made. NIWA’s Chief Climate Scientist, Dr David Wratt, says he’s very disappointed that the Coalition continue to ignore such advice and therefore to present misleading analyses.
NIWA scientists are committed to providing robust information to help all New Zealanders make good decisions.
—————–
I believe that ClimateAudit covered issues relating to these station moves previously.
The New Zealand news is all over Twitter.
http://search.twitter.com
NIWA
Observation is perhaps the best method for determining anything. Statistics come with too many caveats.
Observation is simple….. You find a Semi tropical planktonic Diatom in the sediment cores of the South western Baltic sea that no longer lives there today. The conclusion is simple… The Baltic sea must have been warmer in that area. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V4/N3/C2.php
They appear in the sediment cores up until the mid 1200AD then disappear from the sediment record…. They do not appear in the Baltic sea today as it is too cold for this Diatom.
Now what climate conditions would the world have had to have, in the year 1100AD, in order for the South Western Baltic sea to be several degrees warmer than it is today, so that this Diatom, Pseudosolenia calcar-avis, could survive there.
Interesting question… Probably a climate conducive to colonizing Greenland, Iceland and a Viking cultural heyday.