Climate Conversation Group

Every brain has two hemispheres, each involved with a different set of functions. The Earth has two Hemispheres, too, Northern and Southern, which also function differently.

Running this blog, people send me stuff.

My new friend Jim has sent me a wonderful graph that pits NASA against NIWA in a way most apposite for our stoush with them. Here’s the graph, showing basically that the Southern Hemisphere has warmed more slowly than the Northern Hemisphere:

A graph with surprising repercussions for New Zealand.

This must be compared with the official NZ graph from NIWA.

Official NIWA graph of the New Zealand temperature history. It reveals some remarkable dissimilarities to the NASA graph, above.

Jim said:

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies [GISS, a division of NASA] explains that the temperature increase in the Southern Hemisphere is less than the Northern due to it being mainly water and that water has a greater temperature inertia than land.

The NASA chart says that a 0.5°C increase has taken place in the Southern Hemisphere as a whole over the 20th century — well below the global average.

NIWA scientists, on the other hand, claim their data series is correct and that New Zealand is warming considerably faster than global averages. Why is a maritime country like New Zealand so anomalous to the rest of the Southern Hemisphere?

Which means that NIWA’s official national temperature series has some well-credentialled scientific opposition. Surely Wratt et al. will struggle to refute the well-muscled NASA without surrendering some humiliating ground.

Examine particularly the period around 1945–1955 on both graphs. Whereas NASA shows considerable cooling in the Northern Hemisphere (which Tamino tries to pin on humanity’s emissions of aerosols, and that’s a fascinating story by itself) they show a flat period in the Southern Hemisphere. This is astounding, because NIWA’s graph of New Zealand temperatures displays warming for Africa!

NIWA’s Believers

I mean immense, earth-shaking, heating — about 0.7°C in ten years, the equivalent of 7°C per century — far beyond anything ever recorded by NASA. They show late-century warming of a similar magnitude, but instead of zooming through it in just ten years, it takes a far more leisurely 30 years.

Let’s see how the believers in CAGW at NIWA (I like to call them NIWA’s Believers) handle this steaming hot potato! NASA’s surface-based temperature series is riddled with quality problems and attacked for “smearing” single weather station readings over many hundreds of kilometres, filling the Arctic and other remote areas with spurious warming, pushing up the global average. Slowly their deceptions are coming to light. Until now NIWA has supported them and their conclusion of strong future warming. I wonder how their relationship will develop now.

It’s just mind-bogglingly amazing that NIWA records New Zealand warming at twice the Southern Hemisphere amount reported by NASA. According to David Wratt, the temperature inertia of water should ensure that NZ heats up much more slowly than continents like Africa, South America or Australia (whatever the cause).

This graph from NASA, with all the flaws of land-based measures and all the warming manipulation for which Hansen is famous, actually understates the record, compared with NIWA. Which shows that NIWA could be engaged here in a super exaggeration.

Still, both of them contradict the satellite readings, which show no Southern Hemisphere warming since records began in 1979:

The past 30 years of satellite temperatures.

Unlike NASA, the 7SS shows the main 20th century warming occurred by 1960, and there has been virtually no warming since GHG concentrations took off. NIWA hasn’t offered any theory to explain its peculiar, outlier, maverick, inconsistent, curve shape — but it obviously isn’t AGW.

Great stories hinge on timing

Great stories sometimes hinge simply on wonderful timing rather than new information. For just where did this graph surface, just days before the deadline for NIWA’s response to our High Court claim? At none other than Tamino’s blog, Open Mind, in a post about (of all incredible topics!) Anthropogenic Global Cooling.

Amazing! Tamino, a famous adherent of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming), supporter of the IPCC, Hansen, Mann, Jones and the rest of the warmist believers, with an article claiming significant anthropogenic cooling, now pits the Goddard Institute of Space Studies against our National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in demonstrating warming.

Which places GISS firmly on our side in our criticism of NIWA. Who’d have thought it possible? Considering I was summarily banned by Tamino at my first visit, it’s nothing short of miraculous.

Tamino’s post is concerned with demonstrating atmospheric cooling induced by man-made aerosols and he presents the GISS graph to show the different century rates of warming of the northern and southern hemispheres.

In the process, he makes us a wonderful gift, of impeccable (warmist) provenance, to show NIWA that, one way or another, they’ve made a mistake.

Old, but attractive, map of the world. It gives a good view of the differing areas of water between the hemispheres. Click for a larger version.