We have posted reasonably often upon the NZ historical temperature data series. For overseas readers, New Zealand has a climatic government agency ("NIWA") which has published a temperature record for New Zealand stretching over one hundred years, ostensibly based upon actual temperature readings at certain temperature stations. The official NIWA temperature record showed a warming trend during the twentieth century of 0.9 degrees Celsius. This hard data was used to "prove" the global warming narrative and justify New Zealand establishing a cap and trade tax system upon all economic activity in New Zealand.
Now, NIWA has withdrawn this data series. It has done so only because a heretical group of climate scientists asked NIWA to produce not only the raw data, but also all the fudges and adjustments made to the data, together with justifications. (This in the trade is known as hindcasting. To produce a hindcast one goes back through the actual historical temperature records and adjusts the raw data, to, well, make it look more like you want it to look.) NIWA refused to produce the data, the fudges, or the rationales. You can read the backstory here and here. The heretical group, known as the Climate Science Coalition, unhelpfully took NIWA to court seeking a judicial order to force them to fess up and put all the linen, dirty or not, on the table.
NIWA eventually responded to the forthcoming court case by withdrawing the official temperature series and dumping it down the longest long-drop they could find. They have now produced a new "semi-official" temperature data series. This data series has gone back to the actual, original temperature data recorded through the century, essentially sans adjustments, fiddles, and hindcasts. A spokesman for the Climate Science Coalition heretics has said in response to NIWA's new temperature series:
Mr Treadgold said the people of New Zealand, for the first time, now have an official (although provisional) temperature record of the last 100 years. It is provisional because NIWA still has two steps to take to complete the project: it is working on calculations of the confidence intervals, or margins of error, which will be published later; and,it is yet to publish its methodology, which is to be independently peer-reviewed for a scientific journal.What has changed? Well, pretty much all of the hindcasting contortions of one Dr Jim Salinger have disappeared down the gurgler. Salinger no longer works for NIWA. Once its chief climate scientist (and NZ's leading authority on global warming) Salinger was fired for apparently unrelated matters. For some time, NIWA stood by Salinger's data manipulations once he had gone, but under scrutiny and needing to put all the dirty linen out on the table, it has done the expedient thing--simply dumped the old Salinger hindcast, and produced one without the deft and gentle caresses of Salinger upon the data. We note, however, that Salinger was used as a consultant on this new series. One presumes that Dr Jim has found "peer review" a bit more demanding than he wished. His "new" series discredits his old one. (Salinger, we note in passing, was trained at CRU, the now notorious UK institute which was at the centre of Climategate and has been exposed for, you guessed it, systemic data manipulation to support the public narrative of global warming. In other words they too hindcasted to support a political narrative.)
Coalition scientists look forward to examining this new series closely over the coming months to determine its accuracy. The two steps outstanding from NIWA will be of great benefit in this regard. Mr Treadgold said: “It’s reassuring to know that, for the first time ever, NIWA understands their own graph. This must be a tremendous relief for NIWA staff and management. It is certainly a relief for the NZ public.
Almost all of the 34 adjustments made by Dr Jim Salinger to the 7SS have been abandoned, along with his version of the comparative station methodology. NIWA is clearly not prepared to defend the adjustments exposed in "Are we feeling warmer yet?" But it took a court case to force them into a corner.Secondly, and very uncomfortable presumably to NIWA, the new series shows that no warming has taken place in the New Zealand temperature record since 1960. Again, this, from the heretics' press release:
NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960. Almost all the warming took place from 1940-60, when the IPCC says that the effect of CO2 concentrations was trivial. Indeed, global temperatures were falling during that period.We suspect that this is why Salinger and NIWA had been busy in hindcasting. The raw temperature record showed a 0.9 degree increase over one hundred years. But not in a manner that supported the global warming narrative. That required cooler temperatures in the first half of the century, and warming in the second half--what with all that CO2 spewing out into the atmosphere. So Salinger and his colleagues artfully manipulated the actual data to hindcast that this was so. Then they could use the "evidence" to support the narrative of global warming.
Thirdly, NIWA still has some work to do before this new data-narrative can be accepted as scientifically robust. It has yet to calculate the margins of error for the series. Moreover, it has yet to publish its methodology, which will then be peer reviewed by an appropriate scientific journal. We expect that, since the temperature data stations are so few and their records so patchy, the margins of error will be considerable. (We suspect they may be well outside the 0.9 degree of warming shown in the new, revised data series). Secondly, the peer review will tell us very little, because of the paucity of data.
But, for the moment anyway, simply making things up to support a public narrative, then using a hindcast to "prove" the narrative appears, to have been ditched. Morals of the story? Moral Number One: never trust a scientist with fame and fortune in his eyes. Moral Number Two: never trust a government scientist. The temptation to serve obsequiously one's government masters is likely always too strong.
Now, for those interested in the data, here are some graphs:
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| Actual temperature data shows no warming for the last fifty years. |
Now, here are the same weather stations, showing what happens when the hindcasting fix has been put in. (Note that in all cases, the hindcasting has lowered the older actual temperature readings to "show" a recent warming trend. The blue represents the actual temperature record; the red the adjusted hindcast "fix".)
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| Wellington |
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| Christchurch |
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| Hokitika |
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| Auckland |
H/T: No Minister
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