Category: Climate science

CRU emails show fraud? Yeah, right.

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Want to know just how much you have to read into the stolen CRU emails to uncover fraud? This excellent Youtube video explains the background to two of the more widely quoted passages — and in passing presents a few of the absurd accusations from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck in the USA. For members of the reality-based community, those sections may be painful. The whole thing’s well worth a watch — if only for the most creative use of the phrase “febrile nitwits” I’ve come across this year. Presenter “potholer54” has a Youtube channel devoted to climate and science issues, which is also well worth exploring.

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.

Continue reading “NZ temps: more stations, no adjustments, still warming”

Antarctic science review: greening and melting

The first comprehensive scientific review of our understanding of Antarctic climate and the way that it’s changing was published in the UK earlier this week [ScienceDaily]. The Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment report (a free download), prepared by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), points to ten key findings [PDF]:

  • For the last 30 years, the ozone hole has shielded the bulk of the Antarctic from the effects of “global warming”
  • The Southern Ocean is warming – the ecosystem will change
  • There has been a rapid expansion of plant communities across the Antarctic Peninsula
  • Parts of the Antarctic are losing ice at a rapid rate
  • Sea ice has increased in extent over the last 30 years as a result of the ozone hole
  • Paleoclimate studies in Antarctica show that the current shock to global climate is unusual
  • Marine ecosystem components, such as krill and penguins, linked to the sea ice show a clear response to climate change
  • Assuming a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations over the next century, Antarctica is expected to warm by around 3ºC
  • West Antarctica could make a major contribution to sea level rise over the next century
  • Improved representation of polar processes is needed in models to produce better predictions

The full report weighs in at 526 pages [20MB PDF] and is a superb overview of the state of our knowledge. It’s not an easy read, but in the manner of the IPCC reports is comprehensive and carefully referenced, with lots of illustrations of what’s going on. Recommended. The BBC has good coverage of the sea level implications, Stuff picks up on the “greening” aspect, and the Guardian notes that warming will accelerate as the ozone hole heals.

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.

Shock revelation: top NZ climate scientist admits global conspiracy to warm planet

WORLD EXCLUSIVE!: Hot Topic can reveal that the days of the great climate science conspiracy are finally over. In an unprecedented display of public candour Dr Jim Salinger, New Zealand’s leading climate scientist, admitted in a letter to the NZ Herald this week that he’s been part of a conspiracy to mislead the public about global warming. Responding to a perceptive column by investigative reporter Jim Hopkins, he wrote (and this is the unedited version which names names — I had to hack into his email system to get it):

I was very upset to see that the doyen of climate science investigators, Jim Hopkins, has finally got to the truth of NZ’s con of the century. Yes – he has uncovered it – the Great Aotearoa Climate Conspiracy (GACC) of the 20th century! My fellow schemers over the years include E Kidson, Ben Garnier, Blair Fitzharris, Trevor Chinn, Kevin Trenberth, John Kidson, James Renwick, Brett Mullan, and Rob Muldoon. GACC operatives have secreted heaters and concentrated sunlight on the permanent snow and ice that once clothed Aotearoa. The Mackenzie hydro scheme generates power for the heaters under Mt Cook. We have been so successful that the ice volume has dripped from 100 cubic kilometres in the 1900s to 45 cubic kilometres by 2008. Thus we have convinced the good peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand that the climate is indeed warming.

And indeed, to demonstrate that we have been in control, we were planning to turn the Land of the Long White Cloud into a lot of hot air. But we have been exposed by the mighty pen of Hopkins! Wait until The Guardian’s George Monbiot learns of this. I will have to consider a career change – perhaps to becoming a columnist so that I can write whatever I want without worrying about the facts. Long live the truth!

It’s unclear how the GACC operation fits into the wider global conspiracy revealed in my earlier post about the hijacking of Monckton’s emails, but my research indicates that Salinger commands a senior position in the hierarchy: he has taken to signing his emails as “Climate operative 007″. Meanwhile, sources close to Lucy Lawless, who has been a close companion of Salinger in recent months, tell me she is now refusing to let him anywhere near her shower.

[Disclosure: the author is GACC operative 287(b): (b) denotes blogger. We all have badges to wear at meetings, there’s a secret handshake, and members of the NZ GACC are also obliged to wear smocks made from Emperor penguin hides. Details of the Aussie branch regalia are sketchy, but seem to involve doing strange things with Tasmanian marsupials.]

[Update: For an alternative view on the merits of Hopkins’ reporting, see this post at Editing the Herald.]