Fraud On A Grand Scale

Why Haven't We Thought About This Before?

We confess that we are getting sick and tired of the incompetence and deception of the New Zealand government.  Under Jacinda Ardern it has devolved into a bloated Santa Claus.  The reason for existence, it would seem, is to throw money taken from citizens via the taxation regime at Maori and any other madcap scheme d'jour.

The latest nonsense is the pledge of $100 million for capital development projects amongst northern Maori tribes.  The Mouth of Government--presently one Shane Jones--has sarcastically dismissed the failure of banks to provide investment funds to enable Maori to begin to exploit the natural resources of their land.

The banks, to be fair, have always had a problem when it comes to lending to Maori tribes for the development of tribal assets.  Many myopically prejudiced folk would argue that this is a case of institutional racism.  But the banks have a fundamental obstacle when it comes to whether they should lend to tribal entities.  There are no assets able to be put up by Maori tribes as collateral for loans.  Sure there are tons of tribal assets.  But no one entity owns them.  Because ownership is tribal there is no soul to damn and no butt to kick if things turn to custard.

Society's Christian Hangovers

What's Wrong With Cheating?

An interesting article has appeared in the NZ Herald.  If Alice were here, she might call it "curiouser and curiouser".  The essence of the matter is as follows:

More than $2.1 million will be forfeited to the police following a long-running legal battle with an alleged cheating service for university assignments.  In the first case of its kind, a settlement judgment released to the Herald this afternoon comes five years after the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the police first started an investigation into Assignment4U. 

No charges were ever laid, but the police took a civil case under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act, which has a lower evidential threshold of on the balance of probabilities.  The police case was Steven Li and Fan Yang, linked to companies running   Assignment4U, were providing "cheating services" for students to fraudulently submit purchased assignments as their own work.  [NZ Herald]

We are not sure of the ethnicity of the people involved in the systemic cheating enterprise, but their names suggest a Chinese origin.  We have seen cases over the years where students from various countries, but mainly Asian, have engaged in corrupt practices in an attempt to get passing grades in university or college.  Put more directly, they cheated.  Now an enterprising "firm" has made substantial profits from turning the latent demand into a business. 

A question of great moment is begged.

The Kim Jong-Un Porky Award Goes To . . .

Phil Twyford, NZ Minister of Housing

If Twyford Can't Phil us in on KiwiBuy/Build, Who Can?

Duncan Garner
Stuff

Seriously, what has Labour and its MPs been doing these last nine years? Eating their lunch?  We'd been led to believe its flagship Kiwibuild idea was this amazing, smart and innovative housing policy.  We'd been told it was an answer to the housing crisis for those who couldn't get into their first home.

I was thinking wow, our best architects and planners had come up with something very new and impressive and all on a large scale. I was thinking, think big, but 2018 style. And I assumed KiwiBuild meant just that;  as Housing Minister Phil Twyford said, 100,000 homes would be built.

Now we learn, um no, that's not the case. It's Kiwibuy, that house, your house, any house will do.

Labour has simply thrown its arms up in the air and put up a classified advertisement the size of a house that calls for all houses to be bought and sold as Kiwibuild dwellings. Labour wants the biggest shortcut to success possible.  It wants to buy current homes under construction or off the plans and call them Kiwibuild's own. It's a total hoax.

Makebelieve

Propaganda and Lies

What does it portray when a scientific establishment is caught out telling lies?  Ah, we hear you say.  Is it a government scientific establishment?  Sadly, yes.  Then, it's not unexpected.  Governments always have an agenda, or something to be reified.  These social goals or objectives have to be baptized by "science", since for many science is worshipped as the arbiter of truth. 

"Global warming" is a propaganda scam.  So pathetic is the evidential case for it that the pollies and Commentariat have had to change the looming apocalypse from "global warming" to "climate change".  Since the climate is always changing, every day the advocates could point to "evidence".  Then, when no-one is paying close attention, in their narratives "climate change" suddenly switches back to "global warming".   Thus we have a situation where Global Warming is aka Climate Change.  Yet Climate Change is very different from Global Warming, in the same way that "weather" is different from "rain".   Which term is used by the climatistas at any particular time depends upon the particular propaganda point to be made.  If the evidence points against the warming of the earth, the narrative morphs into the general threat of Climate Change.  When the evidence points in a different direction, suddenly the threat switches back again to the far more specific, Global Warming".

We have reached down to the bottom of the sewer, however, when government scientific establishments are caught out making up data in order to "prove" Global Warming.  Unfortunately, this has been going on for decades now.  But the "scientists" are still hard at work making up data.

Here is yet another expose:

NOAA Caught Adjusting Big Freeze out of Existence
James Delingpole
Breitbart

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating  ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data.  This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees.  Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. – an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

Homewood first smelt a rat when he examined the New York data sets.  He was particularly puzzled at NOAA’s treatment of the especially cold winter that ravaged New York in 2013/14, which he describes here:

The cold weather really began on Jan 2nd, when an Arctic front descended across much of the country, and extended well into March.  The NWS wrote at the end of the winter:

The winter of 2013-14 finished as one of the coldest winters in recent memory for New York State.  Snowfall across Western and North Central New York was above normal for many areas, and in some locations well above normal. This winter comes on the heels of two previous mild winters, making the cold and snow this winter feel that much harsher.

Temperatures this winter finished below normal every month, and the January through March timeframe finished at least 4 degrees below normal for the two primary climate stations of Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester)…..  Relentless cold continued through the month of January across the region.

On average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F.  Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.

So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.  Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.

Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenised and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data.  And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the US is any better?

So why, he wondered, did NOAA have this marked down as only the 30th coldest winter (since 1895) on its New York State charts, with a mean temperature of 16.9F?  Homewood compared the local records for January 1943 and January 2014 – months which, according to NOAA’s charts, had very similar average temperatures.

What he found was that NOAA’s charts were deeply inaccurate. The 2014 local temperatures had been adjusted upwards by NOAA and the 1943 local temperatures downwards.

He concludes:

On average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F.

Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.

Now, Homewood has given the same treatment to the most recent Big Freeze – the winter of 2017/2018.

Yet again, he has found that NOAA’s arbitrary adjustments tell a lie. They claim that January 2018 was warmer in the New York region than January 1943, when the raw data from local stations tells us this just isn’t true.

He concludes:

So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.

Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.  

Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenised and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data.  And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the US is any better?

Well indeed. The key point here is that while NOAA frequently makes these adjustments to the raw data, it has never offered a convincing explanation as to why they are necessary. Nor yet, how exactly their adjusted data provides a more accurate version of the truth than the original data.

One excuse NOAA’s apologists make is that weather stations are subject to changing environmental conditions. For example, when the station sited at Syracuse in 1929 was located at what was originally just a sparse aerodrome. Since then, however, as Homewood notes, it has grown into a large international airport with two runways servicing two million passengers a year. Its weather station readings therefore will certainly have been corrupted by the Urban Heat Island effect: that is, its temperature readings will have been artificially elevated by the warmth from the surrounding development and aircraft engines.

So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that to compensate for this NOAA would adjust the recent temperatures downwards. Instead, for no obvious reasons, it has adjusted them upwards.  This is a scandal. NOAA’s climate gatekeepers are political activists not honest scientists and the U.S. taxpayer has no business funding their propaganda.

Drain the swamp!

Climate Change Update, Part IV

‘Nearly All’ Recent Global Warming Is Fabricated

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

[This represents the fourth article in a series exposing the fraudulent re-stating of data in the vain attempt to "prove" global warming and climate change.  This represents the biggest fraud we have seen in our lifetimes.  JT]

Much of recent global warming has been fabricated by climate scientists to make it look more frightening, a study by statisticians has found.

The peer-reviewed study by two scientists and a veteran statistician looked at the global average temperature datasets (GAST) which are used by climate alarmists to argue that recent years have been “the hottest evah” and that the warming of the last 120 years has been dramatic and unprecedented.

What they found is that these readings are “totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”  That is, the adjusted data used by alarmist organizations like NASA, NOAA, and the UK Met Office differs so markedly from the original raw data that it cannot be trusted.

This chart gives you a good idea of the direction of the adjustments.

Climate Change Update, Part I

Time to Invest in Freezing Weather Clothing Companies?

We are going to run a couple of updates on the climate change/global warming scam.  The first comes from the US, but focuses upon the authorities in Australia making up temperature data.



This is not isolated.  We will shortly republish and refer to some research completed in the US which demonstrates convincingly that a substantial conspiracy has been underway to "modify" actual temperature data so as to "prove" rising temperatures.  Government institutions are complicit.

When Scepticism is Healthy

Fraud, Corruption and Business Interests

Adam Smith, the Scottish "free-trader" was deeply sceptical about the ethics of capitalists, or businessmen, or merchants.  Not that Smith fell into the ideological trap into which Marx and Engels and subsequent Marxist ideologues fell headlong.  With herd instinct, the Marxists trumpeted the moral purity of the proletariat, the working class, while they excoriated the capitalist class.  This euphoria over the moral purity of the proletariat lasted until Marxists assumed control of the regime. Then, overnight, the prols became cannon fodder, subject to oppression and torture.

Smith was more influenced by his Christian heritage.  He believed in the ubiquity of sin, greed, and selfishness, throughout all mankind, not just the capitalist or merchant classes.  His "solution" to the greed, which led to lying, deceit, manipulation, and extortion amongst businessmen and people of property, was to recognize that the free market--the free exchange of goods and services--was a wonderful discipline upon capitalists.  The reality is that capitalists hate competition for themselves, but wish it to be the grand reality for everyone else.  Smith said that if you left capitalists alone in a room for twenty minutes they would have come up with all sorts of schemes to reduce competition, control supply, and jack up prices.  In other words, they would quickly come up with schemes to defraud.  If the free market were to work properly, Smith knew that fraud in all its forms must be policed and punished.

His advice was never to trust a man of property further than you could throw him.  Self regulation of capitalist groups would always be a joke.

Fetid Corruption in the Swamp

Draining the Great Grimpen Mire


Scandal Gives Perfect Pretext To Drain The Climate Swamp

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

So NOAA deliberately fiddled the climate data to hide the “pause” in global warming in time for the UN’s COP21 Paris talks.  Really, this whistleblowing revelation couldn’t have come at a better time for Donald Trump.

In the field of energy and climate, President Trump has said that there is a massive swamp that needs draining.  But his efforts are being resisted at every turn by all those lying scientists, bent politicians, rent-seeking businessmen, and Soros-funded activist groups who  insist: “What swamp? What crocodiles? What leeches? Nothing to see here!”

What the whistleblowing NOAA insider John Bates has just done is prove beyond reasonable doubt what some of us have long claimed: that from NASA GISS and NOAA across the pond to the UEA and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, the world’s leading temperature data sets have been hijacked by climate activists and abused to advance a political agenda.

Here at Breitbart we smelt a rat from the moment NOAA released its dodgy, “Pause-busting” study two years ago.

Willingly Duped

Jesus’s Wife Claims Revealed as ‘Whopping Fraud’

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart News

The Harvard Professor who confidently proclaimed to the world she possessed evidence that suggested Jesus may have had a wife has now been outed as a second-rate academic who allowed herself to be duped by a con man.

Dr. Karen L. King, professor at Harvard Divinity School, earned her 15 minutes of fame by staking her reputation as a historian of early Christianity on the authenticity of an ancient papyrus stating: “Jesus said to them, My wife… she is able to be my disciple.”

At a splashy roll-out a stone’s throw from the Vatican in 2012, King presented a paper to more than 300 scholars from 27 countries, where she announced the discovery of an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus refers to his “wife,” whom King said is probably Mary Magdalene.  “All of the evidence points to it being ancient,” King later said. “As historians, the question then becomes, what does it mean?”

The Painful Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate

Oh Dear

We have often been reminded of the preacher, whose sermon notes were found by the church cleaner.  Scribbled in the margin was this reminder, "Point is weak; shout loudly".  Those who know their case is unable to succeed without "shouting loudly" not only betray the impotence of their arguments, but demonstrate for all to see that, unable to persuade, they must resort to bludgeoning opponents into submission.  

And so it is that yet another academic arises to trumpet global warming most loudly.  Not only does he shout.  He calls for his opponents to be convicted as criminals.  The fact that this particular academic is no scientist, but a sociologist, make the matter even more risible.  His actions trumpet the weakness of his arguments.

For those who reject global warming (which our sociologist refers to as "climate change", that wonderfully vague term that has been used to cover over the weakness of the warmist case) the arrival of threats and intimidation is a clear milestone of how far the argument has swung in favour of anti-warmists.  Scepticism is growing more popular, it would seem.

But one thing you will not find.  You will not find global warming sceptics calling for their opponents to be indicted as criminals.  Why?  Because they believe far more deeply in the epistemology we call the scientific method, than many warmists.  The warmist folk have been more moved by the cause and the implicit cloak of self-righteousness it bestows on its embarrassing advocates, than upon research, experimentation, and debate.

Here is our would-be oppressor:

Climate Change Deniers Are an Evil Dastardly Lot

Big Oil Conspiracy


Breitbart London
James Delingpole

Rajendra Pachauri, the disgraced former head of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), has produced an ingenious defence against the sexual harassment charges he is now facing in an Indian court.

It turns out that, no he didn’t pester, bombard with emails, and grope the attractive female employee at his TERI climate research institute.  Rather, the whole thing is the result of an evil conspiracy by climate change sceptics and right-wing think tanks, funded by Big Oil. Apparently they hacked into all his computer accounts and, without his knowledge, sent a series of flirtatious emails and love poems to his unnamed accuser.
>
Pachauri was given generous space to make these extravagant claims by John Vidal, one of the numerous environment editors who works at the Guardian – in this case its Sunday edition the Observer – and who for years has uncritically championed the world-saving, Nobel-prize-winning work down by the IPCC.

He says: “I have repeatedly received death threats anonymously over the years. In recent months I have received these threats over the telephone from numbers that were valid when East Germany was a nation. I am not sure how these people have numbers pertaining to that defunct international code.” He says he suspects strongly, but cannot prove, that there has been a coordinated attempt to destroy him professionally and personally and that money may also be involved. Ever since he was elected to lead the IPCC in 2002, he says the IPCC has been vilified by climate sceptics and rightwing free-market thinktanks, often known to have been funded by powerful fossil-fuel interests.

Letter From the UK (About Evolutionst Fraud in Germany)

History of Modern Man Unravels

German scholar is exposed as fraud

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.  This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.  Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

Credibility in Tatters

Lies, Damned Lies, and Scientists

We are told that all educated and rational people respect science and scientific disciplines.  The respect is to high that we have even erected an idol, called Scientism, which propounds that only matter exists, so that the study of matter is our sole prophet.  But now science lies discredited.  This particular idol  "lies broke in the Temple of Ba'al".

Public science, official science, state-propagated science has had its credibility riven to shreds.  Who would want now to be a scientist?  It has become a thoroughly discredited profession.  James Delingpole explains how this has come to pass.

Charlatans and Snake-oilers

A Dishonest Man, But Useful Idiot

Karl Marx had a theory that capital exploits workers. His theory was derived from the ramblings of the idealist or rationalistic philosopher, Hegel.  That particular luminary propounded the idea that history moved forward by a mechanism of a "dialectic" (love those big technical terms).  A concept or idea (a thesis) would be opposed by its opposite (an anti-thesis), resulting in conflict and struggle, leading to a temporary resolution (the synthesis), whereupon the whole process started over again.  The synthesis became the new thesis, which would be confronted by its antithesis, and so forth. 

Karl Marx studied in the German universities and became enamoured with Hegel.  He sought to apply Hegel's dialectic to the economic history of mankind.  Actually, he cherry picked a whole cluster of economic facts, figures and data, made up heaps more, then fitted them into Hegel's rationalistic scheme.  In short, Karl Marx was a fraud.

Draining the Swamp

Fraud, Corruption, and Conspiracies

It is an old adage that when one is uncovering and exposing a rort one needs to follow the money.  Where is the payoff going?  Who is benefiting?  In New Zealand we have had an example recently where traditional opponents conspired together to cream off some money from the tax payers to feather their own nests. 

The cause d'jour was workplace health and safety.  The conspirators were traditional opponents--the Council of Trade Unions ("CTU") and Business NZ.  Together they persuaded the government owned Accident Compensation Corporation to pay out $20m over ten years to the respective organisations/pressure groups to "train" employees in health and safety practices.  This from the NZ Herald:

Modern Secular Capitalism

A Diet of Darwinian Dogs

All human actions are grounded in ethics, one way or the other.  There is no such thing as an amoral act or deed.  Christianity declares to the world the doctrine of the ubiquity of ethics.  This is a message that does not sit well with Unbelief.  Ever since the Fall men have been trying to wriggle out of being pinned to the wall and having to account by spiting out all the butt ends of their days and ways. 

One stratagem has been to claim vast realms of amorality where ethics and morality are deemed not to apply. But the Word of God is unequivocal: all things lie bare and exposed before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to deal (Hebrews 4:13).  What is done in the darkness will be proclaimed in the light.  Unbelief recoils at these truths.  It would assert that there are enormous swathes of human action which are so unimportant that they are sub-ethical.  It would claim, on  the other hand, that some things are so vast and big that "ordinary" ethics do not apply.  And when it comes to oneself, Unbelief asserts a host of mitigating circumstances and rationalisations to explain away any wrong doing, whilst deflecting blame on to others, or to circumstances. 

The dismal science of macro-economics is one example of a "big area" deemed too important to be subject to ethics.

Essential Scepticism

Fools Gold

Our father used to tell us that a fool and his money are soon parted.  Every scam that hits the gullible is an old one.  It has been used countless times before.  Everyone who gets caught is either wilfully ignorant or they stupidly believe that this time it will be different. 

Back in the eighties we had in New Zealand a grand scheme of central government's confabulation.  It was decided that economic nirvana would descend upon New Zealand if agricultural production picked up.  It was decided by the wise that what was needed was more bush covered hills being converted into farmland, and we needed more types of cropping and animal husbandry--such as goats and alpacas.  To encourage people to undertake these inevitably risky ventures, the government promised subsidies, cheap credit, minimum prices for agricultural products, tax write-offs and a host of other government supports. 

A speculative agricultural gold rush commenced that rivalled the Kalgoorlie and Otago rushes, mutatis mutandis.  Enterprising individuals began farming government subsidies and hand outs, not agricultural goods.

Arriving Penniless, Departing Millionaires

 The Real American Dream

The final decades of the Roman Republic were marked by fraud, graft, and simony on a grand scale.  Sarah Palin, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal describes the United States in terms eerily alike.  If this remains uncleansed, it does not bode well for that country. 


While many may deride and despise Sarah Palin, on this matter she is dead right.

Hard Data Every Time, Part I

Just the Facts, Ma'am.

One of the most egregious aspects of Global Warming alarmism is that its "science" is built upon computer models, based upon conjectures, conjured up by projecting centuries into the future.  As with all models, garbage in, garbage out.  But worse, the models rely upon core assumptions about how the global climate and atmospheric systems work.

But since the models produce "hard" numbers, they immediately gain credibility amongst the credulous.  "On average, global temperatures will rise 3.659023 percent in the next one hundred years."  Who can doubt when such precision is displayed.

James Renwick was Speaking the Truth

It's Far Worse Than the Pollyannas Will Admit

When a storm broke around the blogosphere over the NZ temperature record being "massaged" by government climate scientists, the official climate science spokesman, Dr James Renwick protested that all the adjustments to NZ's temperature record were done following well-established, best-practice international procedures. We now know that he was speaking the truth. This revelation deserves official recognition: from now on international best-practice adjustments of raw temperature data will be designated as the Renwick Coefficient.

It has been revealed that this "international best-practice" has been employed building not just the CRU global temperature database in the UK, but also the two leading global temperature data bases in the US: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Before we dive down into some of the details, let us consider the odd fact that both NOAA and GISS have recently announced that 2009 was one of the warmest ever year on record, yet there was an odd discrepancy in play. GISS claimed 2009 was the second warmest year on record; NOAA reckoned it was the fifth warmest year on record. (We also note in passing that both NOAA and GISS temperature data is derived from land based temperature stations, whereas satellite temperature data shows 2009 as the 15th coldest in 31 years.)

Why the discrepancy between the two databases, and why the very divergent result from satellite data? Something clearly is not right.

It turns out that the discrepancy between NOAA and GISS is easily explainable. Both have applied the Renwick Co-efficient to the raw data; both have adjusted more recent temperature data upwards; both have guessed and interpolated the data; consequently both databases show different results. When scientists start massaging raw data, guess what? The data itself becomes guesswork and mere opinion and probably prejudiced opinion, at that. (Now, we are not objecting to scientists guessing when data has gaps, or is unavailable. What we strenuously object to is that the fact of guesswork is not disclosed. Every temperature pronouncement from GISS and NOAA should, by law, be required to disclose that the pronouncement is made on the basis of adjusted or interpolated data, not on the basis of actual temperature measurements.)

A recent article in American Thinker details how painstaking research upon the methodologies and employed guesswork of these two "institutions of science" shows that the Renwick Coefficient is alive and well.

Here is a summary what the forensic investigation of NOAA and GISS is tossing up. Firstly, NOAA:

1. Cherry Picking of Global Temperature Sites. There are 6,000 thermometers scattered over over the globe. NOAA has reduced the dataset to only 1,500. That represents a 75% reduction in the sampling population. And, as the article points out, all recent temperature records are derived from this significantly reduced dataset.

Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts.

2. Clear Selection Bias in Favour of Warmer Stations.

It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).

For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers.

The Renwick Coefficient at work.

3. Earlier Temperature Stats Include the Colder Records. In the NOAA database, earlier temperatures include the colder (higher) temperature station data; the later, more recent temperature data do not. Voila. A warming trend immediately emerges.

. . . baseline [older] temperatures to which current readings are compared were a true averaging of both warmer and cooler locations. And comparing these historic true averages to contemporary false averages – which have had the lower end of their numbers intentionally stripped out – will always yield a warming trend, even when temperatures have actually dropped.

This is as unscrupulous and perverse as someone who claimed to show a warming temperature trend over seven days by recording the temperature in the household freezer for five days, then in a hot bath for the following two days. Amazing and hard to believe it might be--but that is precisely what NOAA has done. This is the Renwick Coefficient at work.

So much for NOAA. Now, a quick look at GISS and the magical tricks it performs upon the raw data. Remember that the global data set has now been reduced to 1500 temperature stations. But, in an effort to give the appearance of a true global temperature data set, GISS divides the entire surface of the globe up into an 8,000 box grid. Now, there are only 1,500 current readings that survive in the database: how do you get them to fit into 8,000 boxes? Well, you make one temperature reading cover an awful lot of territory, that's how--a 1,200 kilometer radius to be exact.

4. (Warmer) Temperature Stations are Used as Proxies for Colder Areas. Consider the following example with respect to Hawaii.

It seems that all of the Aloha State’s surviving stations reside in major airports. Nonetheless, this unrepresentative hot data is what’s used to “infill” the surrounding “empty” Grid Boxes up to 1200 km out to sea. So in effect, you have “jet airport tarmacs ‘standing in’ for temperature over water 1200 km closer to the North Pole.”

Maybe this is an isolated problem. Not at all. Consider Bolivia, a mountainous country--therefore cooler. But how does GISS record Bolivia's temperatures these days? By using proxy stations which just happen to be located in the Amazon jungle or at a beach in Peru 1,200km away. The actual Bolivian temperature data was excluded from the database from 1990 onwards (it was included before that time). This is the Renwick Coefficient at work. Upshot: the data appear to show that Bolivia is getting warmer--but it is pure chicanery and lies.

Those responsible for this fraud need to be exposed, named, and shamed.

On another related front, Climate Audit has now exposed the extraordinary lengths to which the charlatans at GISS will go to to cover over errors and mistakes. In around August 2007, the guys at Climate Audit noticed a mistake in GISS data in the January 2000 data series. They kindly pointed it out to the good, honest folk at NASA (which runs GISS). Rather than correcting the problem by removing the error from their post-2000 data, they decided to go back and adjust all their pre-2000 data, in effect blowing a smokescreen over their mistake. This literally meant adjusting (changing) millions of historical records in their database.

The Renwick Coefficient at work again.