Climate Conversation Group

How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists

I’ve reposted Roy’s announcement because the book sounds stunning and because of the penetrating comments he makes, such as:

The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists. By Dr Roy Spencer, who’s been a tenacious sceptic of anthropogenic global warming for many years. Click for previews at Amazon.

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The Mobius strip, invented in 1865 by German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius. It has the unique and apparently inexplicable property of having just one side and one edge. This makes for longer-lasting conveyor belts and endless fun for mathematicians. It’s also a good metaphor for the struggle to know what REALLY happened with the history of NZ temperatures — have they gone up or down? It seems they’ve gone all around the houses and ended up just where they were 138 years ago. Who’d have thought?

Most people take for granted that New Zealand’s surface air temperatures (SAT) have gone up over the last century. But is that true?

NIWA’s official graph of the national temperatures is well known. You can get it from their web site. By the way, if you go there, let me know if you think they’ve recently stretched the image laterally; it is definitely wider than before — even the text is obviously stretched sideways. Could they be trying to make the vertical change less prominent and thus reduce the apparent slope of the trend line? What goes through their minds at NIWA? Anyway, as copied a few months ago, and so a little different, it looks like this:

NIWA’s official NZ temperature graph. The straight line is the linear trend over 100 years, showing we’ve warmed by about 1 degree Celsius between 1905 and 2005. Click for a larger version.

You should be aware that the Climate Conversation Group and the NZCSC have delivered a rip-snorting criticism of this graph, so we don’t agree with it even for a moment. Now I will raise further objections to NIWA’s graph because it contains features inconsistent even with NIWA’s own conclusions. Read more… »