It will be awkward for BOM if the revisions to the NZ temp record are not those that the BOM uses for the Australian record. Which it would be unlikely, as new work and attitudes determine which options one takes, and there is always more than one option to take in “adjustments”. The Australian blog-auditors will, no doubt, devour the NZ results and then see what happens to the previous BOM data in a retrofit.

As you state, New Zealand is a small part of the global record, but as the correction process is interative and has progressed with time, going back to the beginning could have an unexpected, large impact. The land records are particularly important to Hansen’s historical view, although like ripples on a pond they lose impact as you move away. Still, with BOM involved, should first NZ and then Australia become involved, a disturbance in the force, so to speak, might require the Europeans to demand changes to their parts of the records being used by Hansen. To-date there have been a number of complaints by Russians and others of misleading use of their data, but not enough to touch NASA and its pronouncements. But if the NZ experience leads to others, NASA may be forced to at least say that they are reviewing the data. For something that is supposed to be “settled”, an admission that a second opinion may have merit could be a mortal wound (outside the Hansen-Gore egosphere, of course).

The fact that Salinger did not have anything to do with the BOM records is not germane. The records have been questioned legitimately and found to be wanting. ALL the data can be questioned, as none of it is used in its original state, but only after substantial adjustments have been made. The adjustments can be seen to have a warming bias through time, through population growth (UHIE), and through changes in rural/urban/geographic proportions. To have to publiclly reveal that an entire country’s temperature record has been seriously in error ON PURPOSE will create a great deal of discomfort for the CAGW crowd.

Tom Quirk is a principal of Quirk Partners. He has interests in venture capital, fund raising and investment management as well as business advisory work.
Tom holds an SMP degree from the Harvard Business School, Master of Science from the University of Melbourne and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He spent 15 years in the U.K. and USA as an experimental research physicist, a University Lecturer and Fellow of three Oxford Colleges. During this time he worked in the United States with colleagues at Harvard and Chicago and in Europe at Geneva and Hamburg.

Dr Quirk is one of the members of the scientific advisory panel to the ACSC