Chris deFrietas sends word of a new paper, that drops the trend of the New Zealand temperature record (NZTR) to 0.28C per century, down from ~0.9C per century.
This past week, a paper on the NZTR was accepted by the journal Environmental Modeling & Assessment. It was originally submitted in 2013!
This demonstrates some of the colossal peer-review hurdles that had to be overcome by climate skeptics in getting a paper published that refutes the national temperature record produced by “official” government source National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) as seen in the graph above and sourced here.
As Bishop Hill notes:
The mere fact of acceptance attests to a fundamental shift in scientific attitudes to climate change, but expect strident opposition to this paper.
The authors present first a concise observational history of the NZTR, remarking that the established national record was a product of early methodology, then reconstruct an homogenised dataset using the peer-reviewed adjustment standards of Rhoades & Salinger, 1993 (RS93).
The paper:
A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand
C.R. de Freitas with M.O. Dedekind and B.E. Brill.
Abstract
Detecting trends in climate is important in assessments of global change based on regional long-term data. Equally important is the reliability of the results that are widely used as a major input for a large number of societal design and planning purposes. New Zealand provides a rare long temperature time series in the Southern Hemisphere, and it is one of the longest continuous climate series available in the Southern Hemisphere Pacific. It is therefore important that this temperature dataset meets the highest quality control standards. New Zealand’s national record for the period 1909 to 2009 is analysed and the data homogenized. Current New Zealand century-long climatology based on 1981 methods produces a trend of 0.91 °C per century. Our analysis, which uses updated measurement techniques and corrects for shelter-contaminated data, produces a trend of 0.28 °C per century.
![Rutherglen[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/rutherglen1.png?quality=75)
I wonder how former New Zealand climate scientist at NIWA, Jim Salinger, is feeling about this paper? For those who know what I am talking about (Kiwigate), read between the lines!
The Heartland Institute is so scary. They have so much money. Some years it’s almost 5 MILLION dollars. Oooooh! And the evil Koch brothers gave 25 THOUSAND dollars to them a few years ago. First time they had given money to them in ten years. I can see why that is such a problem. 25K for research on health care has such a huge impact in funding climate skepticism. Meanwhile Greenpeace and the WWF together have over 1 BILLION dollars (annually I believe, or is it in endowments?). (That’s 1,000 Million, in case you don’t know).
@pg Tips
“In any case it can’t be appealed as the plaintiff still has an unpaid costs order against it of $89,000.”
But I thought all of us sceptics had access to billions of dollars of Big Oil cash?
“the RS93 method resulted in equal numbers of increases and decreases.”
Finally some one doing it correctly. if you check the NOAA data you will find that this was the case for prior to 1960, after 1960 all corrections were made in one direction,up= data fudging.
One of these days we will have our own version of Leif who will find troubling weighting, smearing, and back-filling to the extent that the actual trend is substantially different from these overworked data sets. That highly respected and unbiased person will lead a multi-expert group that will fight, argue, compromise and remeasure raw data, one station at a time.
To be sure, many groups working on solar data have their own favorite versions and have published them in refereed journals prior to Leif spear heading the current drive to correct the over-compromised data and get these groups to set aside their pet versions. These factions had to set all that territorial-ness aside (and boy did some grumble loudly about that).
In climate science, we are not at that stage yet. We have different groups saying different things and still not substantially talking to each other. It will take a while, just like it did with solar data, decades perhaps, or longer, before we will see such an August panel tackle such a job, a job that must be carried out in each country with such climate data. Panels filled with climatologists, meteorologists, statisticians, and computer code specialists, to uncover ways in which that data was massaged out of recognition when compared to what raw data, truly raw data, still exists, and can be pried out of the cold hands of raw data keepers.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
Sir Walter Scott,
The Warmists are superb Spiders of Deception.
Interestingly climate “scientists” have said that the MWP was “regional” because the southern hemisphere didn’t see the same warming as the northern hemisphere. We know that antarctic ice is increasing and the southern hemisphere has heated less. I was told that was a characteristic of the MWP not GHG warming which would show consistent heating over the globe.
If the temperature is not affecting north and south similarly then it is a disproof of GHG warming as being the cause. So, either NZ is indicative of what real temperatures are doing or it is indicative of the fact that we are not getting CO2 warming. In either case “climate scientists” lose.
There is another way to cross check the temperature data. New Zealand is two relatively small islands surrounded by ocean. The minimum weather station temperatures should follow the local ocean surface temperature trends. Any bias can be used to test for local urban heat island effects. The Max-Min delta temperatures should indicate the local solar heating/near surface convection.
California follows the PDO and UK/W. Europe follows the AMO.
References
Clark, R. Energy and Environment 24(3, 4) 319-340 (2013) ‘A dynamic coupled thermal reservoir approach to atmospheric energy transfer Part I: Concepts’
Clark, R. Energy and Environment 24(3, 4) 341-359 (2013) ‘A dynamic coupled thermal reservoir approach to atmospheric energy transfer Part II: Applications’
Clark, R., ‘CA Climate Change is Caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Not by Carbon Dioxide’, SPPI Sept 16 th 2010, http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/pacific_decadal.html
Actually it is two relatively large islands, plus many smaller including Stewart Island.
Bigger than Oregon, and not as big as California.
And no, it is not visible from the Sydney Opera House, nor the Sydney Harbor Bridge. It’s 1400 miles across one of the roughest seas on earth.
I am a lab worker, the first thing that strikes me is”How accurate are these thermometers” Another way to look at this is that the temp is increasing 0.028C per century. How is the accuracy of this thermometer determined. I have seen lab grade thermometer off by up top 2 degrees. If the same thermometer used 100 years ago is used again, then authentication of its accuracy should be questioned again as well as the accuracy 100 years ago. 100 year old documents attesting to its accuracy will suffice.
A trend line rate is not an absolute measurement of temperature.
Peter, anyone who has taken on the new-world-order climate synod is a friend of Heartland. Even you noted that the machinations of NIWA was the subject of action in the NZ High Court. You are well aware that courts in lefty countries like NZ and Oz and essentially US recently packed Supreme Court would only hear such a case if it can’t be decently ignored.
“A long way from perfect but way closer than most. It will attain perfection when Richie McCaw retires” says Grace.
Aaah, a Richie McCaw reference. And there’s another myth promulgated by the media and battened on to by the political class — that every New Zealander is engrossed in the fortunes of the All Blacks; that the nation goes into mourning when they lose.
Balls . . . and that’s not a reference to what they play with.
Huge swathes of the population — myself included — couldn’t give a monkey’s if they win or lose; couldn’t care less if the game died altogether.
If the chattering classes can keep that rugby-engrossed myth alive, then something that combines environmental guilt with a dose of pseudo-science would be a breeze . . . which it is.
Although, happily, just as rugby is a dying sport in this country, belief in AGW is also on a steady decline.
I purchased and read this paper before commenting. Despite derogatory remarks by others elsewhere, it seems a very well done, thoughful and credible analysis. My congratulations to the authors for a real contribution
. And it harmonizes with much other data. Plus minus revisions are balanced, unlike (for example) GHCN. See the 2012 EGU paper cited in new book essay When data isn’t. Homogenized result accords with a long running, relatively unpreturbed by UHI station (as Paul Homewood points out), and more or less with regional SST. And so on.
One suggestion for the NZ authors. Compare your results rigorously to BEST for the same seven stations. I took a quick look. Seemed like different methods (but also explicity laid out) produce similar conclusions about regional trends. That shows again that NIWA has got it wrong despite the court ruling. For the new ebook, I did a number of other comparisons (Rekyavik, De Bilt, Sulina, Darwin… To GHCN) and reached similar conclusions to those just spot checked for NZ. BEST versus NIWA versus the new paper. BEST better than GISS or GHCN (or NIWA) homogenized, although hardly perfect.
Thanks Rud, valuable comments. We could look at BEST in the future, but first I may have a closer look at GHCN.
Superb work by an honest scientist
“Graphite, it’s more that the rest of the world goes into euphoria when they lose.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wrong. Apart from a tiny, statistically insignificant percentage, the rest of the world doesn’t care. There’s euphoria. No anything. F’rinstance, they played the US national team in Chicago yesterday and made such an impression on the city that a headline writer for the Chicago Sun Times labelled them an “Aussie” team.
Two points here. First, if they were as famous as they’re made out to be, that mistake would never happen. Second, the New Zealand Herald thought the cock-up so egregious that they featured it on the front page of their on-line edition.
It’s a media beat-up.
Just as the AGW nonsense is. If the media and the politicians stayed out of the Global Warming contretemps, the scientists would sort it out amongst themselves. With no government handouts skewing the findings and no media on the sidelines crying “doom, disaster, despair, armageddon . . . read about it here”, the debate would be conducted on entirely scientific lines.
And you don’t need a PhD in weatherology to know what the outcome would be.
Correction: “There’s euphoria” should be “There’s no euphoria.”
A resource that hasn’t been exploited to my knowledge is a fairly large number of thermometers from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries kept in museums in Europe, N. America, Australia, etc. Many of these were used on expeditions (the HMS Challenger, the HMS Beagle, etc. etc.). Early surveys done in Australia included multiple temperature measurements using two instruments now preserved in the British Museum (I believe). It would be a worthwhile project to undertake measurements of the accuracy of these instruments from 150 years ago to provide us with an idea of how trustworthy they were. There is a collection at MIT
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2003/thermometer-0924
and they mention that the thermometers used in research were sent periodically to the National Bureau of Standards to validate their accuracy. There is no reason to think that these instruments were particularly inferior to those manufactured more recently. They were checked for freezing point of water, boiling point, human body temperature, etc. to ensure they were within the required accuracy for their use. One highly accurate thermometer from that period was (IIRC) 3 feet long and spanned ony 5 degrees, so I guess someone was measuring 100ths of a degree in those days.
As an engineer, I’m surprised that such a survey hasn’t been done. We may find that the accuracy of the thermometers are routinely within 0.2C or better – essentially the accuracy of the observers estimation between graduations. At least if we are jiggering the temperatures of the past for any reason other than station moves or time of observation, we should at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge of how accurate they were first. Why we would think that 200 years ago or so, we were so crude in instrument design as to discount the usefulness of the measurements is beyond me. The Danish astronomer, Roemer (1644–1710), using a telescope and a clock, noted that the apparent eclipsing times of Jupiter’s moon Io (going behind Jupiter) differed in time when viewed at Jupiter’s closest pass to earth and when it was almost around other side of the sun. He realized that the time difference had to be due to the time light must take to cross the added distance of the diameter of the earth’s orbit and he calculated the speed of light at 131,000mi/s, a fair bit lower than the actual 186,000mi/s. The earth’s orbit diameter was not perfectly known. Nevertheless, light was thought to be of infinite speed in those days so this was remarkable discovery in 1676, not so long after Galileo discovered there were even moons of Jupiter. I have no trouble believing that the thermometers used 100-200 years ago were pretty reliable.
Heck of a good idea, Gary!!!
This past week, a paper on the NZTR was accepted by the journal Environmental Modeling & Assessment. It was originally submitted in 2013!
Which is not an unusually long time to publication. It took less than a year, which is fairly quick for that journal judging by the most recent volume.
In the NZ paper it yields a lower T increase. In Oz it yields a higher T (graphs at end of article).
Assuming both use the same adjustment standards of Rhoades & Salinger, 1993 (RS93)., we win one and lose the other. NZ is a lot smaller than Oz.
Unfortunately, the contents of this paper have been roundly debunked not only in the High Court of New Zealand, but also here: http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-cranks-finally-publish-an-nz-temperature-series-but-their-papers-stuffed-with-errors/.
from Colin S
Content of paper debunked?? I couldn’t see anything here but long foam-speckled tirades about the authors.
And the it was torn to tiny shreds here: http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2014/11/analysis-of-renowdens-analysis-of-our-reanalysis/
The issues with the historic data is symptomatic of how the global warming scare has evolved. Start with the answer and then make the theories and the data upon which those theories are based reach that answer. It’s an conformational bias. The hockey stick was basically drawn before the data was assessed. Didn’t fit a hockey stick? Let’s add some different data that will. Why not just make it up. Globes not warming .? It’s becoming to hard to manipulate global warming history lets call it climate change. No one really remembers what the weather was like 50 years ago before CO 2 reeked havoc on this world. Let’s just rewrite history and keep this climate junket going.
“It’s an conformational bias. ” … It’s a confirmational bias. Conformation is to do with physique.
“It’s becoming to hard to manipulate” … too hard
“before CO 2 reeked havoc on this world” … wreaked havoc. CO2 doesn’t reek – it is odourless.
🙂
This thread seems to have drifted away from the NZ7 data. I have downloaded the Excel file of the NZ7 data – a 17 column and 111 (effective) row data set? I recommend that you do too. It is enlightening. I’ll not discuss the minutiae of how the data have been gathered, adjusted, modified etc, which seems to exercise many people, but merely the content of the (final?) file. To be very brief, the final temperature data column, labeled “Composite” represents the seven locations fairly well. The data have a very clear and highly significant slope (warming, from whatever cause). But such naive fitting of a least squares line misses the most interesting and perhaps important message that lies slightly hidden in the numbers.
This is that after a period of effectively constant temperatures in 1954 there was a sudden increase in temperature, which occurs in all the individual site data columns. There’s no need to bother with “anomalies”, just look at the temperature data. The step change was about 0.4 deg C, and occurred immediately after the 1953 data. Before 1954 the data are effectively constant. It’s easy to compute the slopes of the lines and their standard errors and thus the confidence intervals before and after the proposed step. Do this and you will find that statistically the existence of significant slopes in these data subsets is very doubtful. Now repeat this exercise for the 1954 onward data. Again the slopes have low probability levels – the data are effectively constant. But the level of the line is about 0.4 C higher for the post 1954 data.
This step change is most readily found by forming the cumulative sums of the time series. The results are striking. All the locations exhibit the same cusum pattern, with an obvious break point at 1954. This cannot be chance. It is a fundamental property of the scientific observations, and it should be actively considered and contemplated by the professionals who pronounce on the interpretation of the data. If they ignore this very obvious finding they are not doing a proper job! My general take on climate data is that for much of the time climates tend to be stable, but are prone to sudden disturbance, for reasons that remain mysterious to me.
I could set out the numerical analyses, but it would be a very long post. I can demonstrate all this in graphics, but do not know how to post them here. Help, please!