Under the heading “Combining Temperature Data from Multiple Sites in Wellington”, NIWA described in some detail the process of adjusting temperature readings when the weather station has been moved. By way of example, they cited Wellington, where, they said, the Thorndon weather recording station was moved in 1928 to Kelburn.

The Kelburn site is colder because it is about 120m higher than the Thorndon site. The process of combining data from various Wellington sites is illustrated below.

The day before, David Wratt was quoted in another NIWA press release:

Such site differences are significant and must be accounted for when analysing long-term changes in temperature. The Climate Science Coalition has not done this.

NIWA climate scientists have previously explained to members of the Coalition why such corrections must be made. NIWA’s Chief Climate Scientist, Dr David Wratt, says he’s very disappointed that the Coalition continue to ignore such advice and therefore to present misleading analyses.

But now, in a dramatic turnaround, they confess, in a written answer to a Parliamentary question, that this “example” of adjustments for the reason of altitude change was fiction.

They have not changed any temperatures for that reason at any station in the national “seven-station” series.

They were lying to us. They openly mocked Rodney Hide for not knowing about that sort of thing and scolded the inquiring scientists at the NZ Climate Science Coalition and falsely incited their supporters, such as the rabid warmers at Hot Topic, into making vicious attacks on the credibility of the NZ CSC and the Climate Conversation Group.

That’s all I have time for, but here’s the official Parliamentary answer (my emphasis):

Station adjustments are not made on the basis of elevation differences, either for Wellington or for any of the other six locations. Adjustments are calculated from comparisons of different stations’ records, as described in the NIWA document Creating a Composite Temperature Record for Hokitika.

Wellington is a special case where two sites, Thorndon and Kelburn, are very close to one another horizontally but with a large (approximately 120m) altitude separation. This does not occur for any of the other six locations in the “seven-station” series.

Temperature differences between Wellington sites correlate well with measurements, in many parts of the world, of temperature decrease with altitude. This “lapse-rate” effect has been used to confirm that the adjustment between Thorndon and Kelburn, calculated by inter-station comparison, would be expected from the altitude difference between the sites.

The slippery scientists at NIWA now admit that they didn’t use the altitude “lapse rate” method to calculate adjustments. They say it only “confirmed” adjustments made by another method.

So why did they ridicule us?

If NIWA have any credibility left it would be surprising.

How will Gareth Renowden respond to this? Is he getting the picture yet?

More later.

Peeling the onion in the Parliament. Like the onion, everything associated with Parliament has layers. As we make our way through the Parliamentary questions we discover more and more.

We’re working through several answers from the Hon Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, concerning questions posed by ACT about the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

The last of the questions posed by John Boscawen on behalf of ACT on February 19 asked about the official graph of the seven-station temperature series which shows warming over New Zealand during the 20th Century.

The answer, on March 1, said the iconic graph was finally justified by work done over about six weeks, from mid-December to early February. I’m sorry, that’s wrong: the graph was not justified by this work; the graph remains unjustified except for the portion related to Hokitika — that’s right, yes, I’ve got it now.

The work NIWA did justified only the temperature history at Hokitika, although it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet by independent scientists, only by colleagues at NIWA, so there might still be errors in it.

You wouldn’t get away with it at high school

So the temperature graph made from seven weather stations, which NIWA has used for years to prove that the New Zealand climate has warmed, and thus we must take expensive action against global warming caused by humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide, has never had proper scientific standing.

They’ve been pulling the wool over our eyes.

This iconic graph, prepared at great cost by highly-qualified climate scientists using public data drawn from a publicly-maintained network of weather recording stations over many decades, has never been prepared to accepted scientific standards.

Why not? Why has it taken extraordinary efforts from scientists of the NZ Climate Science Coalition (CSC) to draw this amazing confession from their colleagues at NIWA?
Why has NIWA left it until now to do the little amount of work it needs to properly qualify and describe the national temperature record?

What have they been thinking?

It gets worse

When they were asked by the CSC, under the Official Information Act, to provide details of this graph and how it was derived, why did they provide nothing?

Why didn’t they hand over the material they describe (or their minister, Wayne Mapp, described) in the Parliamentary answer:

The source material comprised: a list of the more than 30 sites used to develop the “seven-station” series; raw unadjusted data for these individual sites from NIWA’s National Climate Database; the time series of adjusted monthly mean temperatures at the seven locations; and Appendix C from Dr Jim Salinger’s 1981 Ph.D. thesis. In addition paper records were consulted to clarify the early Hokitika record (1943-1945), and the early Nelson record (1907-1920).

They gave this answer on March 1; their lawyer had answered the OIA request from the CSC, offering nothing at all, saying, in effect, “there is no material”, on January 29; yet NIWA’s scientists were hard at work, using the material they have just described in the Parliament, from mid-December. This is unacceptable.

Why didn’t they hand it over in compliance with the law? Wayne Mapp, whose head will roll for this?

The Holy Bible, once widely considered the word of God. A new scripture has arisen in the name of “The Environment” claiming it has the right to avoid change. Though Nature has constantly changed the environment and always will, the new scripture hectors us to spend a lot of time and money to ensure that it doesn’t change. If a change is observed, the religion states that it’s a problem, it’s our fault and we must act in super-human ways to change it back again as soon as possible. Apparently it is our duty to do this because we are fundamentally wicked and selfish and we don’t deserve to be here on this nice planet.

From the Independent, written by Steve Connor, Science Editor, and echoed uncritically by the NZ Herald yesterday, comes an amazing story of faith. It must be faith because it cannot be science — there are too many opinions and the facts are wrong.

With the original Independent headline advertising the ignorance the story is steeped in (Humans must be to blame for climate change, say scientists) the articles of faith are reiterated for the global warming multitudes.

Harken ye unto them, that ye stray not from the green and carbon-free path of righteousness, I say unto thee, even your sons and your grandsons, keep to these my commandments, yea, even unto the hundredth year from this day, when, verily, these green prophecies shall surely come to pass, but, the Lord says, not before then.

But it’s a message with no punch

First we hear the strong conclusion we are to take from the story to come:

Climate scientists have delivered a powerful riposte to their sceptical critics with a study that strengthens the case for saying global warming is largely the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Hear how quickly, as you read that, the idea of a “powerful riposte” dissipates into thin air. So the study merely “strengthens the case” for saying global warming is “largely” the result of our emissions. Well, there’s nothing quite like confidence for persuading people, is there? But they’re not prepared to say this proves anything. This is a message with no punch.

A powerful riposte makes factual statements, like “every tonne of carbon dioxide you emit causes the temperature to rise by 5.8°C per week” or “every single SUV kills 18.5 pukeko per month” or “a house with no insulation creates the equivalent of 159 petrol tankers full of CO₂ per day” or “the extra carbon dioxide caused by commuting in your private car instead of using the bus increases the growth rate of 15 nearby kauri trees by 3 metres per year each”.

This is no riposte, it descends to mumbling something like “you ought to throttle back some of your polluting engines, old chap, since the biosphere really is proving remarkably difficult to cool.”

Admission of ignorance not knowledge

Is that the best they can come up with? It doesn’t match their bold headline at all, what a let-down! Let’s see if their arguments improve.

The researchers found that no other possible natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in the activity of the sun, could explain the significant warming of the planet over the past half century as recorded on every continent including Antarctica.

It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century.

That’s certainly confident, but anyone can see it’s an admission of ignorance, not knowledge.

The researchers have observed a mild global warming during the late 20th Century. When they say “since the middle” of the century, they don’t mention that from about 1950 to about 1975 the temperature trend line is flat. That means it didn’t rise. The rise occurred after 1975.

They call the warming “significant” without telling us its magnitude. But we know it was only about 0.1°C per decade, about 0.25°C from 1975 to 2000, and it’s actually gone down again since then. If the rise was maintained, it would amount to about 1.0°C over a century, the same as the last hundred years — perfectly normal. So these scientists are being deliberately alarming by exaggerating the rise.

Cloudiness change of 1% could cause Little Ice Age

They mention the warming occurred on every continent, “including Antarctica”, but since they’ve already called it “global warming” we know that. It’s exactly what the term “global” means. You might like to know that NIWA tells us the global warming in the late 20th Century did not affect New Zealand. Our temperatures did not rise. Their graph proves it.

These scientists claim that they cannot imagine what caused this warming that they have exaggerated. This may be because they don’t know very much about the climate system.

Do they know, as Dr Roy Spencer has said, that a sustained change of only about 1% in cloud cover is enough to create a Medieval Warm Period or a Little Ice Age?

Do they know that water vapour, which the IPCC maintains will dangerously warm the earth, has been observed to considerably cool the earth in the tropics by forming clouds which move vast quantities of heat aloft and reflect the sunlight?

Two things are clear: not much is known about such cloud formation and it is capable of causing the warming our scientific team quickly ascribes to their oil-burning civilisation because they can’t think of anything else.

The Independent goes on:

The study updates a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans, such as an increasing amount of water vapour evaporating from the warmer oceans into the atmosphere and a corresponding increase in the saltiness of the sea.

This is slippery. First, the study “updates” the IPCC’s AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) of 2007 — but what does that mean? The AR4 hasn’t been reissued; this study is not connected in any way with the IPCC. I don’t know what this means. It’s misleading and aims to connect itself with the authority of the IPCC.

This is rubbish

Then we read “and has discovered” — which means we’ve left the AR4 behind, but we retain the flavour of it, so we might imagine that we’re reading it now. But we’re not fooled, are we? So they’re saying the study “has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans …”

I can’t go on quoting that passage. It’s rubbish. No new elements of climate have been discovered. The salt content of the sea doesn’t affect the climate.

“There is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic [man-made] factors,” the scientists concluded in their study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Climate Change.

That’s their conclusion. But no evidence has been given for it. It’s just an opinion.

Scientific observations based on temperature recordings on every continent, as well as thermometer readings on, in and above the oceans, leave “little room for doubt” that the earth is warming.

What are scientific observations “based on” temperature recordings? A “recording” is a scientific observation. The writer is functionally illiterate, certainly unpractised in thinking. But he mentions the temperature of the oceans. Why does he say they are warming?

Argos project

The Argos network of over 3300 drifting buoys, first started about seven years ago, constantly measure temperature, salinity and velocity in all oceans. What have they reported regarding temperature? I’m glad you asked.

Graph of upper ocean heat content reported by the Argos network of 3300 drifting buoys. Four and a half years of data show cooling. Click for larger version.

According to a paper by Craig Loehle, Ph.D., National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. (NCASI), ocean heat content data from 2003 to 2008 (4.5 years) were evaluated for trend. A trend plus periodic (annual cycle) model fit with R2 = 0.85. The linear component of the model showed a trend of -0.35 (~0.2) x 10²² Joules per year. The result is consistent with other data showing a lack of warming over the past few years.”

In other words, for the last four and a half years the oceans have shown significant cooling. There is, contrary to what this article says, substantial room for doubt that the earth is warming. Particularly from “thermometer readings on, in and above the oceans.”

What a mushroom: so many opinions, there’s not mushroom for truth. Where can they go from here?

Statistical chicanery

They try this:

trying to attribute a cause for this global warming is not possible unless man-made activity in the form of carbon dioxide emissions is taken into account, the scientists said.

Which doesn’t work. There exist other plausible explanations. This argumentum ad ignorantiam, or argument to ignorance, is a logical fallacy. When you don’t know the cause of the temperature increase, nominating a cause is meaningless because you’re acting from ignorance.

The review … found the “fingerprints” of human activity on many different aspects of climate change, including the overall warming of the Antarctic recently documented for the first time by other researchers.

The Antarctic warming was created by statistical chicanery, in effect “spreading” the warming of the Antarctic Peninsula (which projects 500 km beyond the Antarctic Circle into warmer waters) over the rest of the frozen continent. It is a spurious warming, torn apart by other scientists.

The mention of fingerprints sends our mind into a whorl …

But what fingerprints? What evidence links “many different aspects of climate change” with human activity? Most importantly — and this is where the Herald should have been our proxy interrogator — why is it they don’t tell us the evidence?

What planet is he measuring

There is no evidence, or they would have told us what it is. If there was actual evidence, they would have mentioned it ten times at least. In the first two paragraphs. We don’t believe this story.

“The observations cannot be explained by natural factors,” Dr Stott said. Since 1980, the Earth has warmed by about 0.5C and is now warming at a rate of about 0.16C per decade, with even higher rates at higher latitudes such as in the Arctic.

Global lower tropospheric temperatures from UAH, 1978–2009. Click for larger version.

Stott claims warming of 0.5°C over 30 years, which is 0.17°C per decade. This is wrong; it is too high. The graph of the UAH MSU lower troposphere temperatures shows warming from 1980 to Dec 2009 of about 0.2°C. It went a bit higher (more in 1998, the big El Nino), but came down again. What planet is he measuring?

In Dec 1980 the UAH anomaly was about +0.1°C; in Dec 2008 it was about +0.3°C. Stott is exaggerating the warming.

Dr Stott said, “What we see here are observations consistent with a warming world. This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors.”

He’s leaving an escape hatch

He mentions evidence as if we’ve seen some. But even though he says there’s lots of evidence, he still can’t bring himself to say it proves humanity is harming the climate. He says only that it’s an increasing possibility.

It’s more accurate to say he won’t come right out and say it, because he has to leave himself an escape route. One day, he’ll be asked to account for his alarmism, his advocacy and his deception and he wants to be able to deny he ever said humanity was harming the climate. He’ll claim he only said it was a possibility. There are many scientists in the same position, trying to leave themselves a way out of the mess.

But now the story takes a bizarre turn.

He also said that more water vapour is evaporating into the atmosphere as a result of warmer oceans and this is driving the water cycle harder, causing wetter areas in northern latitudes such as Britain to get wetter and drier areas in tropical regions such as East Africa to get drier.

Remember that the Argos data shows cooling oceans, so there cannot have been more water vapour recently from warming oceans, but he claims a strange effect he calls “driving the water cycle harder”. Can anyone explain what he means? Notice that the Herald didn’t bother asking; their eyes were probably glazed over as they fought sleep.

Water vapour causes drying?

Increased water vapour might well lead to more precipitation, but he’s claiming that increased amounts of atmospheric water vapour cause more drying in areas already dry. What? We’ve heard recently how global warming causes cooling in places. Now water vapour causes drying? This article is beyond humorous — it’s stupid. The NZ Press Council would chew it up and spit it out.

Has the Herald done any checking on this creative piece of editorialising? It should not have been presented as journalism, for surely no journalist was involved. The Herald has, however, performed admirably, once again flying the pennants of the IPCC, NIWA and the vested interests anxious to launch the global warming juggernaut before the scam falls apart around them.

Dr Peter Stott is with the Met Office Hadley Centre and how he got his PhD is a complete mystery. The only excuse for this excursion into blatant advocacy would be that the Independent’s “Science Editor”, Steve Connor, made a complete hash of the story and misquoted the good doctor on almost everything he said.

The final paragraph, even if it’s misquoting him, we can at last agree with:

Asked whether climate sceptics would agree with the findings, Dr Stott said: “I just hope people look at the evidence of how the climate is changing in such a systematic way. I hope they make up their minds on the scientific evidence.”

Well, Pete, that’s just what we’ll do, then. We’ll take note of such evidence as:

• cooling oceans
• cooling atmosphere
• water vapour thermostat (negative feedback, Spencer)
• iris effect (negative feedback, Lindzen)

We’ll also take note there’s no evidence for:

• runaway warming in the last 4500 million years
• human causation of strong warming
• carbon dioxide causing strong warming

That’s enough for me. I don’t believe in your new religion.

Peeling the onion in the Parliament. Like the onion, everything associated with Parliament has layers. As we make our way through the Parliamentary questions we discover more and more.

We’re working through several answers from the Hon Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, concerning questions posed by ACT about the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Dr Mapp was asked on 19 Feb, 2010:

If only raw temperature data is supplied by NIWA to NASA, NOAA and the Hadley Centre, what additional information is supplied so that NASA, NOAA and the Hadley Centre are able to make their own judgements about temperature adjustments?

To which he answered:

Along with the raw data NIWA provides latitude, longitude, altitude of the site, period of record, along with information on site exposure and instrument history.

Why don’t the overseas agencies trust NIWA to make accurate adjustments? Have they found reasons to doubt they were made properly?

For that matter, why do NIWA mistrust the adjustments made by NASA, NOAA and the others? Why do they make their own?

Peeling the onion in the Parliament. Like the onion, everything associated with Parliament has layers. As we make our way through the Parliamentary questions we discover more and more.

We’re working through several answers from the Hon Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, concerning questions posed by ACT about the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). This is a real good one, you just have to know what happened elsewhen to appreciate the depth of its stupidity.

Proposed NIWA-gate screenplay

Weekly NIWA management meeting

“OK, Dave, we’ve received a request from the Coalition for all the info from when Jim put together … no, old Jim … put together the national temp series. It’s pretty dusty, but there’s something in those old boxes, I’ve seen them moving. What should we send them?”

“Damn! Who the hell told them about the Act! Look, don’t SEND them ANYthing. Official information! That Act doesn’t really apply to us. This is war, we’re trying to save the planet, ah, national security’s at stake here, ah, these are operational matters and ah, we don’t have to answer questions. Oh, Tim, don’t look so worried, Wayne’ll back us up; he always has. He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Let’s move forward. What’s next? Come on.”

Actually, boys, the game is up.

When the Hon Dr Mapp was asked in the Parliament “what source material was consulted in [the] preparation [of the specific document of adjustments to the Hokitika site]“, why did you advise the minister to answer this week as follows?

Source material used to construct the document comprised: notes in the Hokitika station history file; raw monthly mean temperature data for the Hokitika sites (NIWA National Climate Database “agent numbers” 3907 and 3909); original paper records of monthly data over 1943-1945; raw monthly temperature data from the Climate Database for a number of other sites around New Zealand, which were used in station comparisons described in the final document; NIWA’s “Virtual Climate Station” described in the final document); Appendix C from Dr Jim Salinger’s 1981 Ph.D. thesis; and the “schedule of adjustments”.

Because earlier, when asked by the Coalition under the Official Information Act for:

An explanation of how those original observations were processed to provide the current individual records. Please provide copies of the original worksheets and/or computer records used for such processing.

You advised your legal counsel to send them precisely no documents whatsoever.

Which was very silly of you. When you tell lies, you must have a very good memory. Because our next question is going to be:

Why, in answer to our request under the Official Information Act, did you not send us the material you specified in the Parliament in answer to a written question? Which material you must have, for you wouldn’t lie to the Parliament, would you?

You’re a distinct problem. Which of you should we sack first? Jim, Jim or Jim, err, Dave? Ah, Jim was already sacked. Oh, I’m confused already.

Does anyone else have a sense of farce? Or Abbott and Costello? The Two Ronnies? Chaplin, anyone? Monty Python?

NIWA, or the Climate Science section of it, must be about to become defunct. Its own scientists are dragging its good name through the mud.

It’s incredible.

Is this the start of something fresh and open from the Board of Directors?

The book Hot Topic is as mistaken in its theme as in its angst-ridden depiction of a melting New Zealand. It’s author defends NIWA, no matter what, yet NIWA’s own graph demonstrates no New Zealand warming since about 1950. Why doesn’t he believe what they’re telling us? His book is entirely superfluous.

I see now that two days ago Ken Perrott made a short but incorrect comment at Hot Topic which should be rebutted:

My comments at Treadgold’s blog are now deleted.

Ken, whose repetitive comments here, with their artificial argumentation, became quite vexing, risks misleading Hot Topic’s readers into believing I deleted all his comments. For that is not true.

Actually, only Ken’s latest comment was deleted, for being derogatory, personal and in bad taste. I deleted a comment only after repeated warnings not to indulge in ad hominem remarks, which he ignored. It’s easy to verify that all his previous comments are still sitting here, ready to illuminate us.

Just stand around shouting insults

No doubt pluralising his “comment” was indeliberate and I look forward to his apology when he hears of my rebuttal.

Looking at some of the other comments, I’m surprised to see that scarcely a sentence mentions the national temperature record, which is what I’m talking about. Or perhaps not surprised, having noticed before that most contributors there (but not all) seem happy just to stand around muttering insults.

I might say that some of the remarks are in the most dreadfully poor taste. It’s a wonder that Mr Renowden lets them stand.

However, I should congratulate him on his writing this time. For a post that basically tells me to naff off from his blog, it is remarkably well-researched. I suppose I should feel flattered he went to such trouble over someone unimportant, without influence, not threatening or notable.

I’m almost of a mind to post a riposte — just to return the flattery, you understand.

But then, one notices he spends no time at all actually answering the charges against NIWA’s behaviour, or joining me in asking why they don’t publish the adjustments or why their citations were empty of content, why neither Salinger’s thesis nor Rhoades and Salinger contain a description of the methodology they’ve just used to produce the Hokitika Schedule of Adjustments, why they accepted a mere student’s thesis over the peer-reviewed paper from the experienced contemporary climate scientist Hessell, why they have never reviewed their methods in thirty years or why the higher-altitude station in Hokitika is warmer, when they made a huge song-and-dance about the fact that it should (by “standard scientific principles”) be colder.

Still, we won’t let the facts get in the way of a good diatribe, will we? Renowden is looking weaker by the weak… er, by the week.

More research is required, Gareth!

PS: Has he seen the Parliamentary Questions lately? Lovely juicy things, all about NIWA.

Peeling the onion in the Parliament. Like the onion, everything associated with Parliament has layers. As we make our way through the Parliamentary questions we discover more and more.

We’re working through several answers from the Hon Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, concerning questions posed by ACT about the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

A further question asked the minister why he tabled the Hokitika analysis instead of an analysis for all seven stations, as Rodney Hide had asked and David Wratt had agreed to do during the December meeting of MPs. Nick Smith prevented a record being kept of that famous meeting, so the only account of it came from Rodney Hide in a late-night phone call. You can read it here on the CCG blog.

If you haven’t seen the “NIWA squirms” article before, I’ll ask you to take particular notice of this part:

Rodney said, “That’s the sort of thing [a description of the adjustments at Wellington] I want to see for every site.” Wratt admitted there were other adjustments at Hokitika. Rodney said, “Well, just explain those, then do the same for the other five sites” [Rodney thought that the Wellington adjustments had been described, so only five sites remained. It proved to be untrue — they have still not described Wellington, so there are six to go.]

Rodney’s request to see all seven stations is unambiguous and undeniable.

NIWA were clearly asked to describe all the stations

Our own request, first expressed in the paper Are we feeling warmer yet? was similarly unambiguous (we know that NIWA scientists read that study, since David Wratt complained about it in a very public press release the very next day):

At a minimum, the adjustments made to the official NZ temperature record must be made public.

We have repeated it clearly in press releases and here on the CCG blog many times. I know they read the blog because they’ve told me.

In a letter to David Wratt dated 10 December, 2009, Rodney Hide said, after acknowledging NIWA’s promise to place the Hokitika adjustments in public a few days later:

I would be grateful if you could advise me when all the adjustments and their rationale will be made public on the NIWA webpage.

So, after this clear exposition of what the people of New Zealand want to see, what answer does NIWA give to explain why they released details for only one site?

They flatly contradict what we asked for

First, they say they released the Hokitika details just because Rodney Hide asked for them. Oh, that’s so thoughtful! We don’t believe them. Then they say:

It was not envisaged at the time that a “line by line” explanation of all the adjustments at the other six sites would be required, since the scientific principles in question are standard to all sites in the seven-station series. Consequently, NIWA has not yet prepared detailed similar documents for the other six sites.

Saying they didn’t “envisage” an explanation for all the sites is a flat contradiction of what they had been clearly asked to do. They have ignored our questions.

Salinger’s student theories not accepted

Will NIWA ever cease their blatant obfuscation? They know perfectly well they are expected to provide the adjustment descriptions for all the sites. Not only because they’ve been asked for them, but simply because good science requires it of them.

Then, claiming the “scientific principles” are standard is further nonsense. The adjustment “principles” described in Salinger’s student thesis are not described anywhere but in his thesis. They were at the time new, untried and have since never been used elsewhere, much less have they been accepted as “standard”. In any case, we didn’t ask for the principles — we asked for the adjustments and the reasons.

NIWA in an unsupportable position

NIWA are incapable of following the “methodology” they recommend to everybody else for creating the adjustments and they know that nobody can recreate Salinger’s results because there are just too many subjective decisions to be made.

They are currently in the unsupportable position of presenting vital national climate statistics which have no scientific standing, and they know it. They’re trying to wriggle out of admitting it.

Explanations mutually contradictory

NIWA explained in some detail, when this scandal erupted in November, that for Wellington, the higher station was colder. They went on about it and accused the Coalition of ignoring simple facts like that. But in Hokitika, the station at the higher altitude is warmer! Now they say, through Wayne Mapp: “the scientific principles in question are standard to all sites.” I wish they would explain how that principle could be standard to Wellington. Their explanations contradict each other.

I wonder if Hokitika is the only station they can recreate without the lost data, and they’re trying to hide the fact that they can’t do it for the others?

Shonky science, it looks like. Same as Phil Jones’ CRU at the UEA. Somebody in Wellington is heading for a fall.

The mighty Merz Glacier. When sea ice fills this area after a piece is knocked off and floats away, why and how is the freezing of the water influenced?

A story in the NZ Herald a few days ago talked about giant Antarctic icebergs:

A massive iceberg struck Antarctica, dislodging another giant block of ice from a glacier, Australian and French scientists said.

The end of the mighty Mertz Glacier had been repeatedly hammered by the 97-kilometre-long iceberg as it moved in the ocean currents. Note that there’s no mention of global warming to explain this “breakup” of ice.

This event was driven entirely by mechanical forces …

… until the final paragraph, when the article talks about oxygen levels and quotes “a leading climate expert”, Steve Rintoul:

Oxygen levels being fed into the world’s ocean currents are now changing “and the overturning circulation currents will respond to that change,” Rintoul said. Observing what happens “will … allow us to improve predictions of future climate change.”

One wonders whether Rintoul is accurately quoted.

It is understandable that the overturning circulation might transport water of differing oxygen levels around the oceans, but it is incredible that differing oxygen levels might affect the overturning circulation.

I do not understand how observing the effects of oxygen on the overturning circulation might have any effect on our predictions of “climate change”, much less allow us to improve them.

Further explanation is required, and it ought to have been obtained by our beloved Herald before publication of this nonsense.

Peeling the onion in the Parliament. Like the onion, everything associated with Parliament has layers. As we make our way through the Parliamentary questions we discover more and more.

We’re working through several answers from the Hon Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, concerning questions posed by ACT about the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

One question concerns the production of what we have referred to as the Schedule of Adjustments (SOA). It’s simply a statement of what changes were made to the raw temperature readings, why and when, in order to record the scientific justification for them.

The Climate Conversation Group (CCG) and the NZ Climate Science Coalition (CSC) have been asking NIWA since November to disclose the SOA. Privately, they have told us they are “reconstructing” the SOA, and, indeed, on February 9, they quietly posted a list of all the adjustments to the seven-station series together with a discussion of the reasons for Hokitika. Well done, them.

On January 30, Eloise Gibson wrote in the NZ Herald:

The country’s climate forecaster is bowing to public pressure and putting all of its temperature data and calculations on the internet because of mistrust fuelled by errors overseas.

Principal climate scientist James Renwick said Niwa had decided to bare all because “if we don’t we appear to be hiding something”.

Two people in Niwa’s climate group have prepared a full set of documents including all the data from climate stations and a full explanation of the adjustments made to records, which should be available online in about a week.

The next day, we said:

In the NZ Herald yesterday morning came news that NIWA is “putting all of its temperature data and calculations on the internet”.

It’s been five weeks since the NZCSC request to NIWA’s CEO, John Morgan, under the Official Information Act; it’s only two months since we published our study critical of the handling of the NZ temperature record; and it is decades since Dr Vincent Gray, Dr Warwick Hughes, Dr Jim Hessell and others started asking Dr Jim Salinger for his data and calculations.

About a week later they posted the Hokitika information. It was produced by Principal Climate Scientist Dr Brett Mullan, and a very good analysis it was, very clear and well researched.

NIWA breaks a promise

Now, it appears that’s all we’re getting! They’ve sold us short. They haven’t kept their promise. But without acknowledging they’ve broken their promise to the nation, they announce they are “undertaking a review” of the seven-station series. Is that what they call it? What happened to the “reconstruction”, which patently advertises the fact they have lost something? Have the spin-doctors told them the public would be better pleased to hear of a “review” instead of a mistake?

Well, we haven’t forgotten, and whoever reads this will hear of it: NIWA have broken their promise to reconstruct the Schedule of Adjustments for the seven-station series by about February 9 and tried to paper it over with sweet-sounding words like “review” and “next financial year”.

From our analysis of Salinger’s thesis, other papers and their report on Hokitika, we know they are not re-doing Salinger’s work as they told us to do, but recalculating everything differently. We’re most interested and curious about this and look forward to seeing the details in due course.

Slippery as eels

But did you spot the mistake? This is yet another example of slippery communication from NIWA. If you’re following the story here, you’ll remember they got really angry that the Coalition didn’t construct their own SOA from Salinger’s thesis, Rhoades and Salinger and a whole bunch of meaningless twaddle in other obscure citations that took us hours and hours to wade through. They even said we already had everything we needed to produce our own schedule. Now they’ve proved they didn’t even have it themselves, else why “review it” — which, it is now obvious, really means “reconstruct it”!

What a load of bullshit!

Now they’re doing the job themselves, which they should have done all along, they’ve stopped calling it a reconstruction, they’re not taking their own advice to use Salinger’s “method” (for what it’s worth — more on this later), they’re not doing what they told us we should do and they have not yet apologised for sending our scientists off in completely the wrong direction with false citations.

Withdraw the groundless graph

We are seriously angry! This is unscientific discourtesy!

Since they’re not doing the review until the next financial year, they should do the decent thing and withdraw the unsubstantiated graph from their web site until they can provide proper grounds for it.

NIWA are putting the expenditure for the reconstruction into the 2010/11 financial year, which might make some sense to them but, frankly, signals to the rest of us their complete lack of interest in moving promptly to plug this gaping hole in their credibility.

At least they acknowledge “there is currently much public and scientific interest in the issue.”

That is, unusually for NIWA, a true statement; we agree with it.