Tag: NZ C"S"C

The annotated Rodney Hide: treating parliament with contempt

rodenymorph.gifHow far can a Minister of the Crown go in misrepresenting the facts of a matter before he is guilty of misleading the House? That’s not an easy question to answer, but any sensible reading of Rodney Hide’s speech in response to prime minister John Key’s statement to the House yesterday would suggest that if there’s a line to cross, Hide’s not just trodden on the chalk but taken a flying leap into touch.

Hide is certainly parliament’s highest-profile climate “skeptic” (his spelling), with a long track record of spouting the standard climate crank arguments, but yesterday Hide combined a complete misrepresentation of the so-called “climategate” affair with a scurrilous attack on the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, based entirely on the discredited smear campaign emanating from the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold’s “Climate Conversation Group”. Here’s the relevant section of Hide’s diatribe, annotated by me to show just how far from the truth he strayed…

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Treadgold and the NZ CSC: dogging a fled horse

The campaign by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold’s “Climate Conversation Group” to cast doubt on the NZ temperature record and to smear the scientists who have worked on it has stepped up a notch or two in recent days, following a response by NIWA to an Official Information Act request from NZ C”S”C secretary Terry Dunleavy. It seems Dunleavy and Treadgold didn’t like the answers they were given, because they immediately jumped on one small part of the response, and rushed out a press release throwing up their hands in in horror. Here’s Dunleavy:

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings. [my emphasis]

In December, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations”. On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.

“Merely” referred to the scientific literature? That’s where scientific knowledge is to be found, not in worksheets or computer records. Treadgold developed the theme at his blog, under the heading FARCE: NIWA don’t have the changes:

Heads must roll – Turning into farce

In an astounding admission of ineptitude, after their former arm-waving and expostulations of injustice, NIWA have finally confessed that they cannot provide the adjustments they made to the original temperature readings in the official NZ temperature record.

Luckily for us, Treadgold later posted pdf copies of NIWA’s response, as well as Dunleavy’s original request, and so we can see for ourselves what NIWA said. Funnily enough, things are not quite as Dunleavy and Treadgold would wish us to believe.

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NZ temps: more stations, no adjustments, still warming

NIWA has released details of a newly calculated long term temperature series for New Zealand, based on 11 stations that have had no major site moves or significant adjustments made to their raw data. Running from 1930 to present, the series shows that significant warming has taken place, confirming that the national temperature series recently attacked in a shonky analysis published by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Climate Conversation Group is not only pointing in the right direction, but actually warming a little more slowly than the new series.

Here’s a graph of the new compilation:

The stations used in the analysis are Raoul Island, Tauranga Airport, Ruakura (Hamilton), Gisborne Airport, Chateau Tongariro, Palmerston North DSIR/AgResearch, Westport Airport, Molesworth, Queenstown, Invercargill Airport and Campbell Island. All were identified by Jim Salinger as offering consistent long term records requiring little or no adjustment for site moves or other influences. Salinger’s calculations were confirmed separately by NIWA’s chief climate scientist Jim Renwick, and the results were identical. Over the period, warming of 1ºC is seen.

Bottom line? Unless there’s a significant “urban heat island” at places like Molesworth Station, warming over New Zealand and in the wider NZ region is undeniable.

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NZ temps: warming real, record robust, sceptics wrong

The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), accused last week of fiddling the long term New Zealand temperature record to create spurious warming, has released information showing that the attack mounted by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Climate Conversation Group has no merit.

The NIWA announcement shows that the warming trend in the long term record is also found when weather stations with long term records that require no corrections are used. From the release:

Dr Jim Salinger has identified from the NIWA climate archive a set of 11 stations with long records where there have been no significant site changes. When the annual temperatures from all of these sites are averaged to form a temperature series for New Zealand, the best-fit linear trend is a warming of 1°C from 1931 to 2008. We will be placing more information about this on the web later this week.

I’ll have more detail on that series when it’s made available. So the warming in the record is robust, found in sites all round New Zealand, and doesn’t depend on mysterious adjustments. But the Treadgold/CSC report also made claims about data being hidden:

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.

That’s an outright lie, as the NIWA release shows.

For more than two years, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition members have known of the need to adjust the “seven station” data. They have had access to:

  • the raw data
  • the adjusted data (anomalies)
  • information needed to identify the adjustments made by Dr Salinger
  • information needed to develop their own adjustments.

The NIWA release cites emails to CSC members Vincent Grey and Warwick Hughes in July 2006, which provided all the references required to calculate the necessary adjustments themselves. In particular, all the information about the station site changes has been publicly available since 1992 and details of the methodology since 1993!

So where does this leave Treadgold and the CSC? They have published a report, issued press releases and made blog posts that misrepresent the facts, and have shown themselves incapable of conducting good science. They have proven themselves morally and ethically bankrupt, and should — if they had any decency — withdraw and apologise. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Who writes Rodney’s rubbish?

rodenymorph.gifWho’s this supporting the NZ C”S”C’s idiotic attempt to cast doubt on the NZ temperature record? Why, it’s none other than Rodney Hide, leader of the ACT Party, and Minister of Local Government, Associate Minister of Commerce, Minister of Regulatory Reform and Parliamentary principal climate crank. Hide has written to climate change minister Nick Smith, demanding that the NIWA release the temperature data:

There is only one process that is appropriate for matters of science, and that is to release all data, together with a detailed account of what adjustments have been made, with an account of the reasons for doing so, and the computer codes that have been used to adjust and smooth the final published series, together with details of which measurements have been discarded. All the data and the relevant computer codes should be available for scientific scrutiny.

Free the NIWA code! What a rallying cry. It’s a pity that he thinks the likes of Treadgold constitute independent scientific scrutiny. Hide’s also been taking instructions on the CRU hack, and is seemingly happy to completely misrepresent what’s been going on. Apparently the emails:

…reveal a systematic attempt to manipulate the historical time series data, together with what appear to be arbitrary adjustments to the computer codes which produce the averaged and smoothed temperature data…

Er, no. That’s not true. The Herald does a far better job than the Minister of Local Government of covering the stolen emails and what they actually say. But perhaps Rodney gets his “facts” from somewhere else. So, in the spirit of his letter to Nick, here’s mine to Rodney.

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