NIWA issued a response statement regarding the charges leveled by The NZ Climate Science Coalition here:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise
They say:
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.
I’m not too impressed, especially when you see where the weather station for National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) is, right on the rooftop next to the air conditioners:
Here is the station survey: NIWA_station_survey (PDF) and the Google Earth KML file
Thanks to: Dieuwe de Boer who did a good portion of station surveys in New Zealand last year.
The NZ Climate Science Coalition responds:
NIWA’s explanation raises major new questions
The NIWA climate controversy took a new twist tonight with the release of new data from the government run climate agency.
Reeling from claims that it has massaged data to show a 150 year warming trend where there isn’t one, NIWA’s chief climate scientist David Wratt, an IPCC vice-chair on the 2007 AR4 report, issued a news release stating adjustments had been made to compensate for changes in sensor locations over the years.
While such an adjustment is valid, it needs to be fully explained so other scientists can test the reasonableness of the adjustment.
Wratt is refusing to release data his organisation claims to have justifying adjustments on other weather stations, meaning the science cannot be reviewed. However, he has released information relating to Wellington temperature readings, and they make for interesting reading.
Here’s the rub. Up until 1927, temperatures for Wellington had been taken at Thorndon, only 3 m above sea level and an inner-city suburb. That station closed and, as I suspected in my earlier post, there is no overlap data allowing a comparison between Thorndon and Kelburn, where the gauge moved, at an altitude of 135 metres.
With no overlap of continuous temperature readings from both sites, there is no way to truly know how temperatures should be properly adjusted to compensate for the location shift.
Wratt told Investigate earlier there was international agreement on how to make temperature adjustments, and in the news release tonight he elaborates on that:
“Thus, if one measurement station is closed (or data missing for a period), it is acceptable to replace it with another nearby site provided an adjustment is made to the average temperature difference between the sites.”
Except, except, it all hinges on the quality of the reasoning that goes into making that adjustment. If it were me, I would have slung up a temperature station in the disused location again and worked out over a year the average offset between Thorndon and Kelburn. It’s not perfect, after all we are talking about a switch in 1928, but it would be something. But NIWA didn’t do that.
Instead, as their news release records, they simply guessed that the readings taken at Wellington Airport would be similar to Thorndon, simply because both sites are only a few metres above sea level.
Airport records temps about 0.79C above Kelburn on average, so NIWA simply said to themselves, “that’ll do” and made the Airport/Kelburn offset the official offset for Thorndon/Kelburn as well, even though no comparison study of the latter scenario has ever been done.
Here’s the raw data, from NIWA tonight, illustrating temp readings at their three Wellington locations since 1900:
What’s interesting is that if you leave Kelburn out of the equation, Thorndon in 1910 is not far below Airport 2010. Perhaps that gave NIWA some confidence that the two locations were equivalent, but I’m betting Thorndon a hundred years ago was very different from an international airport now.
Nonetheless, NIWA took its one-size-fits all “adjustment and altered Thordon and the Airport to match Kelburn for the sake of the data on their website and for official climate purposes.
In their own words, NIWA describe their logic thus.
- Where there is an overlap in time between two records (such as Wellington Airport and Kelburn), it is a simple matter to calculate the average offset and adjust one site relative to the other.
- Wellington Airport is +0.79°C warmer than Kelburn, which matches well with measurements in many parts of the world for how rapidly temperature decreases with altitude.
- Thorndon (closed 31 Dec 1927) has no overlap with Kelburn (opened 1 Jan 1928). For the purpose of illustration, we have applied the same offset to Thorndon as was calculated for the Airport.
- The final “adjusted” temperature curve is used to draw inferences about Wellington temperature change over the 20th century. The records must be adjusted for the change to a different Wellington location
Now, it may be that there was a good and obvious reason to adjust Wellington temps. My question remains, however: is applying a temperature example from 15km away in a different climate zone a valid way of rearranging historical data?
And my other question to David Wratt also remains: we’d all like to see the metholdology and reasoning behind adjustments on all the other sites as well.
Yes those “accepted techniques” require that data from heat islands like airports be read as Official.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_07impartialitybbc.pdf
In this pdf document,on page 40,you can see the view that the BBC gives about ‘climate change’ and their decision not to give equal airtime to sceptics.Interestingly:
Roger Mosey, Director of Sport, said that in his former job as head of TV News, he had been lobbied by scientists ‘about what they thought was a disproportionate number of people denying climate change getting on our airwaves and being part of a balanced discussion – because they believe, absolutely sincerely, that climate change is now scientific fact.
It would also be interesting to discover which ‘scientists’ they consulted to come to their decision (I bet I can guess a few!). Unfortunately, on page 27 it mentions that their 1996 charter requires them to be impartial in regards to ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ subjects.So I think they have a get out clause against prosecution? I’m still sure that this hoax,once fully brought into the public domain will deal a hammer-blow from which this Leftist organisation will never recover.Better late than never!
http://www.newsnow.co.uk – this is a nice little news aggregator in which to type ‘climategate’ when you feel the need.
..”NIWA’s chief climate scientist David Wratt, an IPCC vice-chair on the 2007 AR4 report, issued a news release stating adjustments had been made to compensate for changes in sensor ..”
So the organsation that is responsible for the the basic data is also the one taking a leading position at the IPCC where the deductions to be made from that data are being made..and these morons expect us to believe that it is all truthful and above board.
Pull the other one
brnn8r asks:
Absolutely! The more the requests the better. You are likely to overload them and might get the data, or other interesting scandals might be revealed, like deletion of emails or data or evidence.
From the point of view of testing the hypothesis that NZ is warmer now than 150 years ago, the siting of stations is an uncontrollable factor – the stations were never set up to show this hypothesis because they long predate it. However, the data could still be useful to test the hypothesis.
If the change in an uncontrollable factor (station siting) biases against the hypothesis (warming), then the scientists just have to live with that rather than adjusting data in the direction of their hypothesis. Were they claiming a cooling, some adjustment might be acceptable, but in any other scientific disipline it is not generally considered good, rigorous science to correct for an uncontrollable factor when the correction is made in the same direction as the effect you are claiming.
I would have more confidence in wetting my finger in my mouth and then putting it out in the air to check the temperature then from those people.
Can anyone confirm that the NIWA weather station is actually the one pictured on the roof? I guess I wouldn’t really be shocked, but good grief…
This Just In! [Mark Steyn]
On this Thanksgiving Day, let us give thanks that the two greatest all-purpose pretexts for government regulation of every single aspect of your life – “health care” and “the environment” – have now converged. Forget the global warming, global cooling, all the phoney-baloney tree-ring stuff – who can keep track of all that “settled science”? And fortunately we no longer need it, because we have a new rationale for the massive multitrillion-dollar Copenhagen shakendownen. Drumroll, please!
But slashing carbon dioxide emissions also could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet.
Government regulation of health care justifies government regulation of the environment: Ingenious!
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmZmYzcwYzUwZDhiYjFjZjllZTg1NzQ1YTZkMjI1MmY=
Fixed that for you (and I guess I’ll learn whether or not HTML embedding is allowed in comments here).
“NIWA’s chief climate scientist David Wratt, an IPCC vice-chair on the 2007 AR4 report”
Would that be David P Wratt?
C’mon! You’re kidding me!
There adjustment can be tested simply and fairly quickly, by comparing measurements simultaneously at each site. Was that ever done? Or was the change in elevation just assumed to require an adjustment?
Ron (12:12:12) :
There is in fact a perfectly standard way to handle this problem. Use a third station which overlaps both the old and new stations, and adjust the old so it has the same difference from the third station as the new.
Doing it in this order may not at first seem logical but it avoids having to continuously adjust the new station.
Given that long-term relative temperatures do not vary much over distances of 10s, or even 100 of kms, this method is perfectly sound.
But that isn’t true. Many stations only 10miles apart and same elevation have different long term average temperatures which exceed a degree.
“I have always maintained that the real danger from the Alarmist crowd is that because of their wolf-crying over ‘global warming,’ no one will listen when (and if) the world is ever faced with a REAL man-made environmental disaster.”
Absolutely! I have already read one article beginning with the sentence, “I’ll never believe anything atmospheric science has to stay again…” Never mind that meteorologists, in general, have been the leading skeptics — we’ll be the ones to take the hit in credibility from all this.
Global Frauding [Mark Steyn]
The CRU scandal has already ensnared Britain’s leading climate “scientist” Phil Jones (whom one principled leftie says has only “a few days left in which to make an honourable exit”) and his American counterpart Michael Mann (as in “Mann-made global warming”).
Given that these two men and their respective institutions are the leading warm-mongers on the planet, and the guys who dominate the IPCC, Copenhagen et al, it would be most unlikely if the widespread data-raping were confined only to the United Kingdom and the United States. Here’s an interesting snippet from my colleagues at Investigate magazine in New Zealand re their National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research:
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.
At least they only “altered” the data, unlike the CRU, which managed to lose it.
Upon examination of said “raw data”, it seems that the country’s temperature increased 0.06° over a century – ie, nada. But by the time Dr James Salinger (a big cheese at NIWA, the CRU and the IPCC), had “adjusted” the data New Zealand was showing an increase of 0.92° – ie, some 15 times greater than the raw data showed. Why?
It might be that “climate change” is an organized criminal conspiracy to defraud the entire developed world. Or there might be a “good explanation”. I’d be interested to hear it. Fortunately for NIWA et al, among the massed ranks of “environmental correspondents”, plus ça climate change, plus c’est la même chose.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2MyNGI4NjU1NGY1OGM2YTYyZmRiOWQ2ZTMwNDkxNDc=
In light of what we’ve learned from the emails about the inner workings of these nests of gov’t scientists. I think it’s reasonable to think that there is nothing sinister going on here. They honestly attempted to make adjustments, they tasked it out to someone in the Institute who did do it, but that person no longer works there and never documented a rationale for the adjustment. It makes what they have hollow so of course they want people take what they have at face value.
Anthony – the Khyber Pass station is a good example of a non-compliant climate station. Was a survey done at Kelburn that could be used to evaluate whether we might be looking at similar UHI / microsite effects?
Kelburn station seems to be in a park setting, but with buildings and parking lots. It’s got a webcam installed (http://www.metservice.com/public/localWeather/wellington.html) that’s dark right now but might give some idea as to the local setting.
[Ray (12:06:44) :
Oh! I though that the Internationally accepted technique to adjust temperatures was to use tree rings and readjust the temperature of real thermometers. So, what they really should have done is cut a tree at Kelburn and another at Thorndon and do the Mann trick… Et Voila!]
Ow man, i was just spraying coffee after this remark 🙂
“Our Berlin Wall Moment?”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018056/climategate-this-is-our-berlin-wall-moment/
Perhaps this is one of those questions that will seem obvious to some, but with all the problems with temperature datasets, is there any push (especially by the skeptic camp) to come up with proper datasets that are both open to the public and well documented? Would this not be a project both camps could agree on?
here’s NASA GISS temp for Auckland Airport.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=507931190002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
no warming there.
and wellington
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501947230000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
I seem to remember that the Stevension screen used to stand in a garden beside the Wellington Met Office… This would be in the 1960/70s
Oops “Stevenson” screen. It may have been moved more times than we’ve been told.
The exact location of the Wellington airport weather station could be interesting. A look at Google Earth will show that the airport, while close into town, actually sticks out into the sea at both ends. You wouldn’t want to overshoot, especially on the north end because the runway finishes in a fifty-odd foot high ramp. A bit like a giant tank trap.
Wellington isn’t called ‘windy Wellington’ for nothing and the airport is very exposed to the southerly in particular. Landing there is one of NZ’s major adventure tourism attractions, especially in a small plane in a Nor’wester. So location and airflow mean that any UHI effect could be pretty sporadic. Also, although Wellington calls itself an International Airport (lots of NZ airports like to do that – it makes them feel good) almost all flights are local and rarely does anything bigger than a 737 land or take off.
That having been said, I’m really looking forward to the rest of the excuses for the rest of the stations, and if Rodney (Dancing With The Stars) Hide is on the case, then look out NIWA!
Arnold (12:44:39) :
[Ray (12:06:44) :
Oh! I though that the Internationally accepted technique to adjust temperatures was to use tree rings and readjust the temperature of real thermometers. So, what they really should have done is cut a tree at Kelburn and another at Thorndon and do the Mann trick… Et Voila!]
Ow man, i was just spraying coffee after this remark 🙂
——
Good! Evaporative cooling!!! Very good against global warming!