Climate Conversation Group

The surface of the Sun, which is hotter than you can imagine. It is hotter even than a sausage being fried to the edge of its existence in a hot frying pan, so it is very hot indeed. A picture of the sun’s surface is often used like this to illustrate a story involving heat, but when the amount of heat involved in the story is vastly different from the amount pictured, it’s a deceptive trick. This is a trick.

UPDATED and expanded on awakening Saturday morning — 13 Mar 2010, 10:45 am

John Key: you must bring NIWA to heel

The Waikato Times yesterday wrote:

Niwa principal climate scientist Dr Brett Mullan said Niwa “had the original data, knew the method of the calculations, and we have the answers”. There was “no scientific issue from our perspective”, and Dr Salinger’s work had stood the test of time.

So what are the adjustments

The NZ Climate Science Coalition began asking NIWA for the adjustments to the national temperature record in late November.

NIWA have told us where we could find the adjustments; we searched for them where they told us to search; the adjustments are not there.

NIWA have said: “We have the methodology, it’s in a student’s thesis [and other sources] from 1981, just read it.” The Coalition never asked for the methodology, we asked for the adjustments, but we looked anyway.

We found the sources contradictory and concluded that the methodology is too subjective to enable anyone to replicate Salinger’s adjustments because they would have to make exactly the same decisions, which is impossible.

Wratt et al. are spineless hypocrites

NIWA themselves proved it impossible when they recently “reconstructed” the adjustments for Hokitika but they did not use Salinger’s methods. Why didn’t they use the methods they told us to use? Why didn’t they make any adjustments for altitude changes, which they previously hectored us was essential?

Wratt and other senior scientists (Renwick?) openly mocked Rodney Hide in Nick Smith’s office last December, publicly laughing at him for allegedly not knowing that altitude adjustments are necessary when a station is moved. Now they themselves have not made those adjustments, even when the Hokitika stations changed altitude. Wratt and his mates at NIWA thus reveal themselves as spineless hypocrites.

Dr Mullen says NIWA “knew” the method of the calculations — what does that mean? He says NIWA “have” the answers — why does he say that without saying what the adjustments are? We’re asking for them. He says they have them. Tell us what they are. Why won’t he give them to us? Is he afraid, like Phil Jones at the CRU, that we’ll discover something wrong with them?

Salinger’s thesis unpublished, never cited even by him

NIWA have recently published the numerical adjustments, but still refuse to disclose why they made them, so still nobody can test them. They give reasons only for Hokitika.

Dr Mullen says Salinger’s work has “stood” the test of time. His thesis, though, was not peer reviewed, in fact, it was not even published. Salinger’s experimental methods, invented as a student, have never been verified by other scientists and have never been used in any other country. With this lack of recognition, you can’t call it accepted science.

Since nobody else has used his methods to adjust their country’s temperature readings, one wonders what the time test Mullen refers to consists of. I suspect it’s the same test that succeeds simply by measuring more than a couple of millimetres of undisturbed dust after the passage of three decades. In other words, when the thesis is proved to have been completely worthless. Salinger’s thesis is worth nothing, because it’s never been used or cited, even by Salinger himself.

Hessell’s work never discredited

NIWA ignores the fact that Jim Hessell, a highly experienced and older scientist, in a paper published in the NZ Journal of Science in 1980, just before Salinger published his thesis, inadvertently refuted the young Salinger’s conclusions by saying the New Zealand temperature records were too unreliable to deduce anything from them, much less a warming trend. The error margins he noted were greater than the claimed warming.

Hessell’s highly credible paper has not been challenged in thirty years except by Salinger himself, who scarcely counts in defence of his own thesis. It stands unmolested and therefore authoritative. It is infinitely more believable than the youthful Salinger’s PhD thesis (the work of a mere student).

So why does NIWA put Salinger’s unpublished work before that of the experienced scientist Hessell? Does Salinger’s express a philosophy that NIWA perhaps agrees with?

A philosophy, perhaps, that believes that humanity is warming the planet and therefore there must first be warming?

NIWA scientists discourteous

NIWA must provide a proper response to these factual challenges, or an inquiry must be held into their unacceptable obfuscation; it’s just a matter of time.

John Key: please pay attention. Your ETS is shaky enough, with the retreat of Australia, the US and the rest of the Copenhagen signatories to that non-accord; with the strong signals you’re getting from our manufacturers and exporters that we stand alone in the world in taxing our industry for their “harmful” emissions; and the rising tide of public opinion that man-made global warming is a mirage.

I point out to you that now even our national temperature record cannot be proven to support the science the ETS supposedly rests on. It has been exposed for the unscientific shambles that it is and the unruly scientists responsible for it don’t speak clearly and honestly about how they’ve done it.

Wratt, Salinger and now Mullen tell us repeatedly that they “have the adjustments”. But they still refuse to reveal those adjustments.

It is disgraceful.

The behaviour of NIWA scientists has been free of scientific courtesy. John Key, you must bring them to heel and require them to be open about their science and the public data. Nothing less is acceptable on this topic of great national importance.

Enough is enough.