Tag: NZ C"S"C

When asses go to law

In a bizarre twist to the tale of New Zealand’s climate sceptics and their strange obsession with the minutiae of the history of temperature measurement in New Zealand, it now emerges that they have lodged papers with the High Court [Stuff & NZ Herald, via NZPA], seeking to have the court rule that the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) should:

  • set aside NIWA’s decisions to rely upon its Seven Station Series (7SS) and Eleven Station Series (11SS), and to find the current NZTR [NZ temperature record] to be invalid
  • to prevent NIWA from using the current NZTR (or information originally derived from it) for the purpose of advice to any governmental authority or to the public
  • to require NIWA to produce a full and accurate NZTR [text from their press release]

The mind boggles. Just what is an “invalid temperature record”, and how on earth is a judge expected to rule on that? Given that NIWA has received funding to do a thorough re-working of the long-term temperature history of NZ, mainly as a result of the earlier kerfuffle, why are the cranks so keen to go to court now? Science is not done in law courts. Then there are questions to be asked about the organisation and funding of this legal effort, as well as questions about possible abuse of process and waste of taxpayer funds…

 

The genesis of this story goes back to November last year, when Richard Treadgold and the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition trumpeted the release of a “study” that showed (in Treadgold’s words):

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.

It was a shonky study, as I showed conclusively at the time, in what has proved to be the most widely-read Hot Topic post to date. NIWA’s response was to develop a new temperature series, using data from places where adjustments had either never been required or were very minor, and it demonstrated that warming was unequivocal — if anything slightly greater than in the original “seven station” series. Since then, Treadgold and the C”S”C have — with their friends in the far-right ACT Party — tried to turn the affair into a scandal, with no success. This latest legal ploy is a transparent attempt to get some more mileage out of what should, by all sensible measures, be the deadest of dead horses.

The case is being brought not by the NZ Climate Science Coalition or Climate Conversation Group, but by a newly-incorporated charitable trust, the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust. The trustees are NZ CSC stalwarts Terry Dunleavy and Bryan Leyland, together with relative newcomer Doug Edmeades. An application for charitable status was made at the end of July and it was granted on August 10th. The Deed of Trust can be read at the Ministry of Economic Development’s Societies and Trusts Online site: search for “2539286 – NEW ZEALAND CLIMATE SCIENCE EDUCATION TRUST”. The stated aims of the trust (section four of the trust deed) look innocuous enough, but include a standard “do what you like” clause: 4.2.8: Such other activities and enterprises to further the charitable purposes of the Trust as the Trustees may decide. The documents sent to the press over the weekend can be read, in lightly edited form, at Treadgold’s blog.

It’s clear that Dunleavy, Leyland and Edmeades have some questions to answer. Their “charitable trust” was registered on August 10th, and within days they had lodged their legal action with the court. Was the trust formed specifically to bring the action? I understand that using a trust to bring a legal action provides some protection for the litigants if they lose their case and find costs awarded against them. But if that is the real reason for the trust’s existence, then surely it cannot be regarded as a charitable trust? Whatever the law may say — and I am sure that Dunleavy and co will have had legal advice (C”S”C chairman Barry Brill is a retired lawyer) — it cannot be morally or ethically acceptable for them to hide behind or misuse a charitable trust in this way. It also demonstrates rather nicely that they have no confidence that their case will succeed…

There are also questions to be asked about the funding of this legal effort to discredit NIWA and its scientists. Legal advice isn’t cheap, especially when seeking to bring a case before the High Court. The NZ C”S”C has always been rather coy about its funding, maintaining that it’s just a group of interested individuals who volunteer their efforts. Nevertheless, it has strong links with the US think tanks organising and funding campaigns against action to reduce carbon emissions, and has developed close ties with the Rodney Hide’s ACT Party — one of whose most generous supporters is climate sceptic and multi-millionaire Alan Gibbs. Of course, the NZ C”S”C might just have had a sausage sizzle outside a North Shore New World, and a bit of a whip round their membership, but on Radio NZ National’s Morning Report this morning [at 8:13am] Bryan Leyland admitted that Gibbs was “one of our friends”.

The question of funding is particularly important, because any reasonably objective assessment of their statement of claim shows it to be highly unlikely to succeed. The summary attached to the NZ C”S”C press release is pretty tedious, but it’s worth taking a look at the second paragraph:

The official NZ Temperature Record (NZTR) […] the historical base for most Government policy and judicial decisions relating to climate change, wholly relies upon a “Seven-station series” (7SS), adopted in 1999.

You don’t to need to read any further, to be honest, because this is sufficient to establish the statement of claim as nonsense. As I’ve said before, the NZ temperature record is interesting, fascinating even for those of a meteorological or climatological bent, but there is no such thing as an “official” temperature record that has formed any sort of “historical base for most government policy and judicial decisions relating to climate change”. No NZ government of any flavour has ever relied on NIWA’s temperature series for anything much, certainly not used it as the basis for any policy. NZ government policy in this area depends far more on the international scientific and diplomatic context than it does on the temperature in Hokitika in 1890.

So if the case is pretty much certain to fail, why go to the expense of bringing it in the first place? It’s a waste of good money, surely? Dunleavy et al, and their mysterious backers, clearly disagree — and the reason’s obvious. This is not about science, or improving the NZ temperature record, it’s about attention seeking. Having failed to get the government to delay the introduction of the ETS at the beginning of July, the C”S”C and its “friends” are getting desperate. Like spoilt children, they’re pouting and screaming and throwing toys out of the pram.

The results of this hissy fit are predictable. My guess is that the court will refuse to consider the case — which will give the CSC another excuse for a loud public whinge. Questions in Parliament by Hide and Boscawen? A racing certainty, I reckon. But much judicial time and public money will have been wasted in the process, and the NZ temperature record will continue to show what it always has and always will do — significant warming over the last 100 years. Meanwhile the world will continue to warm…

Terry keeps his clips on

As predicted, New Zealand’s tame band of climate cranks have waxed all pompous and upset about Sir Peter Gluckman’s perceptive comments on climate change denial. But I was wrong about one thing. Instead of Barry Brill stepping up to the plate, it’s the grand dame of NZ denial, Terry Dunleavy, “honorary secretary and webmaster”and co-founder of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition who does the honours.

Terry’s piece is nothing new. Certainly nothing newsworthy. But I can’t resist quoting Richard Treadgold on the subject, because it made my day. Under the heading PM’s Chief Science Adviser must change — or go, Treadgold reproduces Dunleavy’s thoughts verbatim. But he can’t resist adding a final thought of his own:

I would suggest that our highly respected Sir Pete ought to acquaint himself with some real climate science if he wants to be taken seriously by the scientists in the NZCSC.

Gave me the best laugh of the day… “Sir Pete” is, I imagine, rather uninterested in what scientists of the calibre of — who, Vince Gray? — think of him. And the scientists in the C”S”C would do well to try to be taken seriously by — well, anyone, really…

[Former greatest living Englishman Viv Stanshall]

Bum notes from the Brill building (and a question for the minister)

The new chairman of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, Barry Brill OBE, is certainly not shy about parading his point of view to the world at large. Brill, a lawyer and former junior minister in the 1975-81 “Think Big” Muldoon government, has attempted to argue with John Key’s science advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, and last weekend followed in the oversize footsteps of Bob Carter by popping up at denier-friendly Aussie “journal of ideas” Quadrant Online with a lengthy rant on the “Crisis in New Zealand climatology”. Crisis? What crisis? It appears he means the ACT Party beat-up of the shonky analysis by Richard Treadgold and un-named “researchers” at the Climate “Science” Coalition. Brill seems blissfully unaware of the real controversy surrounding this affair, but his article — and its appearance at places such as Watts Up With That— gives me another chance to demonstrate that this whole affair is nothing more than a politically-inspired attempt to undermine action on climate change.

 

Underpinning this manufactured controversy is one big lie: that the New Zealand temperature record has been important in determining government policy on climate change, and has somehow been influential on a global scale. Here’s Brill:

For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS [NIWA’s “seven station series”] has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.

Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.

At the centre of advice to government? A foundation stone for the IPCC? Brill is channelling Treadgold, but doing us the favour of being explicit. He wants us to think that the NZ temperature record is really, really important. The bad news for Brill? It isn’t, and never has been. The New Zealand record is interesting, certainly, but has only ever been a tiny part of the global evidence that has persuaded governments around the world to enact policies designed to address climate change. The truth is that even if the NZ record showed cooling (which it doesn’t), the case for taking action wouldn’t change one iota. However, Brill wants us to believe that warming in New Zealand isn’t real:

First, we know what New Zealand’s average temperature was in 1867. The predecessor of the Royal Society of New Zealand (The New Zealand Institute) made a formal minute in 1868 of:

“Tables, which form the most reliable data for judging of the Climate of New Zealand, are extracted from the Reports of the Inspector of Meteorological Stations, for 1867”.

The mean annual temperature was 55.6F – the equivalent of 13.1C. Now consider this extract from NIWA’s “Climate Summary for 2005”: The national average temperature of 13.1°C made 2005 the fourth warmest year nationally since reliable records commenced in the 1860s.

No change whatever in 138 years! In fact, if 2005 was warmer than most 21st century years, New Zealand has obviously experienced some cooling during the past century or so.

Oh really? Brill is here lifting “work” from none other than Bryan Leyland, which I dealt with in this post in January last year. But for the purposes of further showing Brill to be wrong, take a look at the cover of this book:

Hasst.jpg

This is the cover of a 2005 book from Canterbury University Press. The top sketch was painted by Julius von Haast in 1864, and shows the Cameron Glacier in the Arrowsmith Range in Canterbury. The photograph underneath shows the same scene in 2004. The glacier has retreated more than two kilometres. A lot of ice has vanished. I wonder how that happened? Fairies, perhaps? Or oofle dust? Here’s a photograph of the Cameron taken a few months ago. Still retreating, it would seem. As Jim Salinger noted in his PhD thesis, when commenting on a paper by Jim Hessell which purported to show little warming in NZ since 1930:

However, almost universal occurrence and synchroneity of the warming at 66 out of 70 sites associated with years of profound glacial retreat cannot be explained simply by instrumental or observer error.

We can be confident that New Zealand has warmed not just because the temperature record shows that to be the case, but because the country has lost a huge amount of ice over the same period. The ice melt is confirmation that the process Jim followed when adjusting station records for moves and changes was yielding results that pointed in the right direction.

Brill moves on to thank his supporters:

Piecing together the provenance of the New Zealand historical temperature record has been no easy task. Much of the detail is set out in the Climate Conversation blog. It has involved a myriad of investigative methods but the most productive has been the placement of nearly 50 Parliamentary Questions for Written Answer, for which credit must go to John Boscawen MP. The New Zealand mainstream media, all highly partisan on climate change matters, have evinced little interest in the scandal to date.

Fifty questions to Parliament, about a shonky analysis being given a politically-inspired beat-up? That sounds like an outrageous waste of tax payer funds to me. I wonder which MP will have the nous to ask Wayne Mapp, the minister responsible for NIWA, how much time and money the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has had to expend on answering those 50 questions. Because that’s the legacy of Treadgold, Brill and the ineducable Boscawen — a spectacular waste of time and money.

There’s the real scandal. NIWA and its scientists have been subjected to baseless attacks and smears, and the organisation’s limited resources have been diverted to feed nothing more than the monstrous egos of New Zealand’s climate cranks, who are happily slinging mud as part of an extreme right wing political campaign to persuade the government to drop the ETS. Brill’s fact-challenged rant only demonstrates that he’s the latest in a long line of people prepared to spout nonsense in pursuit of inaction.

[The Animals, doing an appropriate Brill Building song (Mann/Weil)]

Doug digs denial

Waikato farmers who deny human-caused climate change will be cheered by the support lent by a real live scientist in an interview prominently reported in the latest issue of the Waikato Farmer, a monthly feature supplement of the Waikato Times.  Admittedly not a climate scientist – a soil scientist actually – but one who has done much reading on the subject, including Nigel Lawson’s A Cool Look At Global Warming.  Thus fortified he is able to substantiate the opinions of the 99 percent of the farmers consulting him who he says think global warming is a hoax and the Emissions Trading Scheme unnecessary.

Doug Edmeades is his name.  He’s not listed as a member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, but his “coming out” as a sceptic was posted on their website. To be fair, in his statement on his joining the ranks of the sceptics he acknowledges that he does not read the scientific literature on climate change and cannot be considered as an authority on the subject. Indeed he says he’s a layperson who must rely on the views of others who specialise. However those whose views he then goes on to cite don’t include any climate scientists. Willem de Lange and Bob Carter are the two scientists he mentions, and they are buttressed by Bjorn Lomborg, Ross McKitrick and, yes, Christopher Monckton who demonstrated there is no scientific consensus.

Back to the Waikato Farmer interview. It’s the usual farrago. Climategate was a scandal which confirmed most farmers’ suspicions that global warming is a politically driven theory. Phil Jones has admitted there was no global warming in the past 15 years, calling into question the reliability of climate models and temperature records. Water vapour is the biggest greenhouse gas; why aren’t we taxing it? Doubled carbon dioxide will increase food production by about 30 percent. Carbon dioxide doesn’t determine global temperatures.  Humans and the natural world are good at adapting to survive.  Even if the alarmists are right and the average temperature increases by 2-4 degrees the likelihood is that we could be better off. And so on.

Edmeades’ expressed views are mostly wrong or reckless or silly. There’s nothing in what he says to deserve time spent countering it here. But it’s depressing that views of this nature should be regarded as worth highlighting in a farming publication and are evidently nourishing the opinion of many farmers that global warming is a matter of no great moment or still under dispute.  The edition of the Waikato Farmer in which the interview appears is much concerned with the cost of the Emissions Trading Scheme to farmers.  One can understand that this should be a matter of concern and debate.  But to couple it with denial of the seriousness of climate change is a different matter.  One of the farmers reported didn’t go as far as that, but said, “The science is not robust enough. Some of the research has been a bit shaky.”  This is perception, not knowledge. It’s high time the NZ farming community discovered that the essentials of the science are established and did its thinking about the ETS or other mitigation schemes without dallying with the idea that perhaps there’s nothing in climate change to be worried about. Then people like Edmeades can be valued for their soil science and ignored for their rejection of climate science.

In the land of Gray (and pink)

homer.jpgI have been asleep at the wheel of the good ship Hot Topic, for it appears that I have missed the latest pearls of wisdom to emanate from that grand old man of New Zealand science, Vincent Gray. Vincent’s latest Envirotruth Newsletter (#244) has been a lead item at Climate Realists, and received headline treatment at Mark Morano’s Climate Depot. Michael Tobis even catches Morano describing Vincent as a “UN IPCC Scientist”, which is somewhat stretching the truth, given that his major input has been diligent proof-reading. So what is Vincent’s great revelation? That climate scientists think the earth’s flat.

He starts with a schematic of the earth’s energy budget, and notes:

The attached graph is in all of the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and it is fundamental to all their activities.

It assumes that the earth can be considered to be flat, that the sun shines all day and all night with equal intensity, and that the temperature of the earth’s surface is constant.

Then he inserts a later version of the diagram, commenting:

The earth is now thoroughly flattened, as if it had been run over by a cosmic steamroller. […] It ought to be obvious. The earth does actually rotate. The sun does not shine at night. The temperature is not constant. Every part of the earth has a different energy input from its output.

Unfortunately for Vincent, climate science has noticed that we’re standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, that’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned, a sun that is the source of all our power. And that’s reflected in the calculations. But let’s not let that little truth get in the way of a good story. Here’s Vincent’s coup de grace:

The currently promoted greenhouse theory is dead and its consequences have to be removed at once.

And of course that’s good enough for Climate “Realists” and Scaife-funded Morano. Where’s the peer review when you need it most? Deciding not to stand for the UK parliament, it seems. Dr Gray will be 89 next birthday.

[Big hat tip to Michael Tobis who did all the work, via Stoat]

[Caravan (takes me back, way, way back…)]