Climate Conversation Group

The official New Zealand temperature graph from NIWA. Their web site claims “a warming trend of 0.9°C over the past 100 years (1909 to 2008)”. But the period since about 1950 (highlighted) is virtually free of warming, verified by senior scientist Jim Salinger (ex-NIWA employee) as having a warming trend of 0.3°C. Click for larger version.

What’s going on?

NIWA goes to a lot of trouble to warn us about the coming “climate change” causing warming between 0.7°C and 5.1°C by 2090. But I can reveal evidence that our top climate scientists don’t believe this.

Should New Zealanders expect significant warming for the next 80 years? You might be surprised to learn — especially if you’re following the discussions here — that scientists with NIWA, whose job is to research the climate, tell us we already haven’t had any warming to speak of for about 60 years and we won’t get serious warming in the future.

Now that’s not the message we normally get from government scientists!

Dr Jim Salinger recently claimed it has warmed 1.1°C over the last 80-odd years, but just over three years ago he claimed only 0.3°C over the last 55 years (which means none at all, for practical purposes). Just to be different, the chief climate scientist, Dr David Wratt, claims 0.9°C over 100 years (well over the global rate) but — get this — promises lower future warming for us than the rest of the world!

Confused? So was I. Let’s go through it.

NIWA’s web site has for a long time carried the official line about the amount of warming in New Zealand during the 20th Century. At the moment it says:

The best-fit linear trend over the past 100 years (1909 to 2008) shows NZ’s average annual temperature has increased by 0.9°C.

David Wratt says this — at least, he is the Chief Scientist (Climate), so he probably takes responsibility for it.

But about three months ago, on December 3, 2009, Jim Salinger said in a joint analysis with James Renwick posted on NIWA’s web site that the increase from 1931 to 2008 (78 years) was 1.1°C.

They had a graph to prove it:

Salinger and Renwick’s graph of their 11-station time series. After removing Raoul and Campbell Islands for some reason, the trend for 9 stations over 78 years is 1.1°C.

Their claim of 1.1°C is in the ballpark of NIWA’s other claim of 0.9°C. But it’s rather important to note the period: it’s 22 years shorter! What does it mean? Both periods end at the same temperature in 2008. But over 100 years the temperature goes up 0.9°C while over the last 78 years it rises 1.1°C.

The temperature must have dropped between 1909 and 1931. Looking at NIWA’s graph at the top of this article, that’s just what happened. But that’s not important, I mention it just to explain it. The important thing is that they all use different numbers, which seems to indicate they don’t talk to each other much.

It’s looking like a proper schemozzle. Can’t they even get the temperature right?

Now, the next important part is that an email was sent to Dr Vincent Gray, a member of the Climate Science Coalition, by Jim Salinger in 2006 in which he says:

A linear trend fitted to the data over the period 1950 – 2005 is equivalent to an increase of 0.4°C over that period (or 0.3°C fitting a trend to the last 50 years, 1955 – 2005).

Now this gives us an even shorter period, admittedly ending three years earlier, but with a virtually non-existent trend. It’s only 0.06°C per decade, 0.6°C per century. It’s impossible to measure temperature that accurately so it’s meaningless.

NIWA: we’ve had no man-made warming

The rather startling implication is that all the warming that NIWA insists happened during the 20th Century — all that warming that’s so important in signalling future drastic “climate change”, all that warming that indicates the science of “climate change” is so firmly settled — most of it happened between 1931 and 1955!

That means it couldn’t have been caused by humanity’s carbon dioxide, because everybody agrees we only started emitting serious amounts of it in the 1950s.

Amazing.

If you think that Salinger’s 0.3°C is significant, then at least it means that the rate of warming decreased markedly over the last 50 years, when the warmists say it should have been accelerating.

Still amazing.

Shall we ask NIWA who’s using the right figures? Shall we ask them what figures they’re using this week? Shall we ask them what figures they want us to use?

If we ask them anything, shall we expect an answer?

NIWA: we’ll get no man-made warming

Finally, let us remember David Wratt’s firm, repeated prediction: warming over New Zealand during the next 80 years will be strongly moderated by the ocean, leading to significantly less warming than the global average.

He has said it before, in fact, Nick Smith, Minister Responsible for Climate Change Issues, quoted him in the Parliament, saying: “What Dr Wratt has consistently said is that, because New Zealand is surrounded by oceans, all the modelling indicates that the temperature impacts of climate change are most likely to be less for New Zealand than for other parts of the globe.”

So there’s nothing to worry about. You heard it here first.

In fact, considering that we’ve already experienced no “global warming” at all that can be reasonably attributed to mankind’s emissions of carbon dioxide, perhaps we ought to put in a request to the climate controllers for a bit more of this global warming than we’re entitled to, or we might miss out completely.

Or we could just strive to increase our emissions.