NIWA's Great Shrug

It's Gone Missing--Again.

Our official public tax payer funded climate research institute, NIWA has had to acknowledge under a Freedom of Information request that its adjusted historical temperature data series for New Zealand is a hopeless, unreconstructable, unrecoverable mess.

On February 1, 2010 the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) put out a press release in which it reported that NIWA has admitted that it not longer has data or records which would document and justify its adjustments to raw data. Our readers will recall that NIWA, along with its confabulators at NASA and the CRU, had admitted applying what is now known as the Renwick Coefficient to the raw long term temperature data in New Zealand. (The Renwick Coefficient is named after its public defender, Dr James Renwick, NIWA's spokesman for climate change. The Renwick Coefficient is highly technical, but in laymen's terms it is a mysterious multiplying factor which effectively lowers older temperature readings and adjusts more recent data upwards.) The application of the Renwick Coefficient to the raw data "proved" that over the past one hundred years, average temperatures in New Zealand had risen.

The NZCSC made a formal request under the Official Information Act for

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.

NZCSC offered the following commentary on this eloquent "scientific" shrug.

NIWA’s website carries the raw data collected from representative temperature stations, which disclose no measurable change in average temperature over a period of 150 years. But elsewhere on the same website, NIWA displays a graph of the same 150-year period showing a sharp warming trend. The difference between these two official records is a series of undisclosed NIWA-created ‘adjustments’.
“Late last year our coalition published a paper entitled ‘Are We Feeling Warmer Yet?’ and asked NIWA to disclose the schedule detailing the dates and reasons for the adjustments. The expressed purpose of NZCSC was to replicate the calculations, in the best traditions of peer-reviewed science.

When NIWA did not respond, Hon Rodney Hide asked Oral and Written Questions in Parliament, and attended a meeting with NIWA scientists. All to no avail, and the schedule of adjustments remained a secret. We now know why NIWA was being so evasive - the requested schedule did not exist.

So, now we know that the "official" temperature record for New Zealand is unreliable and cannot be used in any scientific analysis. This is because the conditions under which it has been produced are not repeatable. As even junior scientists know, repeatability is a core sine qua non for scientific research and analysis.

Where to from here? The NZCSC makes the following recommendation:

The only inference that can be drawn from this is that NIWA has casually altered its temperature series from time to time, without ever taking the trouble to maintain a continuous record. The result is that the official temperature record has been adjusted on unknown dates for unknown reasons, so that its probative value is little above that of guesswork. In such a case, the only appropriate action would be reversion to the raw data record, perhaps accompanied by a statement of any known issues,” said Terry Dunleavy, secretary of NZCSC.

We hope that Rodney Hide will continue to ask questions in the House seeking to get to the bottom of how such careless procedures and sloppy record keeping could have become insinuated into the procedures of an official science institute.

We also believe that the time has come when every pronouncement by any scientist or commentator on long term temperature trends and data in New Zealand must no longer be taken at face value. Each pronouncement needs to be challenged with the simple question, How do you know? The key thing is whether the protagonist's data set is raw or adjusted. If the latter, it must be discounted and discredited as being merely speculative guesswork, being based upon unaudited, unchecked, unverifiable manufactured data.