NIWA prefers spin to straight answers
Richard Treadgold | August 6, 2010
A scandal is erupting over a PR firm – Network PR – employed by NIWA for months specifically to advise it on how to respond to “attacks” from the NZ Climate Science Coalition and blogs like this one.
Read the self-serving announcement from Network here. Network must have been bamboozled into ignoring the scientific questions, because if they heard how simple they are, they surely would have advised NIWA to just answer them.
NIWA’s difficulties spring directly from refusing to answer these questions. Why won’t they answer?
A pox on their reputations, nobody cares about them. Just talk to us about the science!
Blatant mis-use of taxpayer funds
I’ll make this message short and simple:
Dr Wratt:
- Stop wasting our tax money on PR consultants and answer the questions we’ve given you about the New Zealand temperature record.
Dr Mapp:
- Take proper control of our premier climate organisation before it (or its climate section) self-destructs.
- Instruct its managers to discuss its methods and the science with its interlocutors.
Dr Smith:
- It IS about the science. Nothing else matters.
Hear that:
NOTHING ELSE MATTERS
It’s incredible that NIWA spends taxpayers’ money to avoid answering taxpayers’ questions about public data gathered for the taxpayer. I’m flabbergasted.
If the “attacks” really are unjustified, and if they emanate from disreputable sources, why trouble yourself to mount a campaign against them?
What is NIWA afraid of?
In defending themselves, NIWA have left the substantive questions unanswered, and I must ask what they will do about that. Nobody, least of all the Coalition, cares about NIWA’s reputation, they just want faithful attention to science and reliable data. That will take care of reputations without any futher effort from third-party leeches like Network PR, sucking more of our hard-earned tax dollars out of the Treasury.
This could start to get interesting as the snout/trough interface gets fully exposed,
While ASB gave the fund a New Zealand name – the Global Sustainability Fund – we played up the association with Al Gore, to heighten its newsworthiness and communicate the sustainability theme.
http://www.networkpr.co.nz/case-studies/asb/
Do they have such little confidence in their science that they have to get a spin doctor to make sure they get their feeble stories across in the best light possible?
The fact is that they are in an indefensible position. The chart they put up showing past temperatures in New Zealand has been produced by Jim Salinger working on his own. Not long before, a respected and expert member of their staff said that the New Zealand temperature records were not good enough to establish whether New Zealand had been warming or cooling. Jim came up with the new chart showing significant warming but he and NIWA have been totally unable to provide any information on how he got from the original data showiing no warming to the “adjusted” data. This means they have no peer review, no quality control and no policy for archiving.
And now we are paying for them to employ spin doctors to make the best of the mess they are in!
The network PR page has been taken down it seems.
The Google cache version is here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PqXQm50_7hMJ:www.networkpr.co.nz/case-studies/niwa/+network+pr+niwa&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz
Thanks Andy. This news inspired my following post, Naïve fanfare silenced by foot-in-mouth NIWA.
Keep ‘em coming!
is currently in the process of preparing a long term communications strategy to rebuild the trust and confidence in NIWA’s science that has been partially eroded by this concerted attack on its credibility.
Eh?
The trust and confidence in NIWA’s science has been eroded by NIWA’s failure to welcome and answer scrutiny of its scientific data analysis methodology.
This means my taxpayer dollars are being spent on justifying what appears to be bogus science that supports flimsy legislation (ETS) that robs me of even more dollars via yet another tax!
I agree; it’s quite sickening. I notice, too, that it’s easy for outsiders to tell the story this way, but not for the insiders. At almost every step they have entirely different evaluations and characterisations of what is happening and why.
In the end, in a semi-democracy, the majority view will prevail. It’s hard to know exactly where that sits right now, but I think it’s closer than the warmists imagine.
So we keep on marching; we tell the story the way we see it and report the facts as we know them. We battle for the hearts and minds! (Just pretend it’s Afghanistan.)
At least we have semi-democracy.
Britain has “virtual democracy”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7932343/We-are-given-virtual-democracy-in-exchange-for-real-power.html
Arresting.
One of the most convincing descriptions of life includes the characterisation of what we like to call “waking” as a dream. But the blurring of reality and imagination that Christopher Booker so expertly paints for us goes beyond that into foolishness or perhaps insanity.
On the subject of “spin”, check out this gem
NOAA Makes it White Hot in Wisconsin – excerpt
“But our intrepid anonymous whistleblower wasn’t done yet. He pointed out that Egg Harbor, Wisconsin really got cooking this July 4th around 9:59AM, according to NOAA and Coast Watch. It was there, at the bottom left row of the temperature data points, that the records reveal on that day a phenomenally furnace-like 600 degrees Fahrenheit.”
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/21729.html
Looks like NIWA will have to up its game