NIWA scientists’ misconduct ‘absolutely clear’

NIWA scientists’ misconduct ‘absolutely clear’

NIWA has denied allegations that its scientists misled Ministers regarding the warming trend shown in New Zealand’s official historical temperature record. The accusations of misleading were made by Hon Rodney Hide in an address to Federated Farmers last Thursday.

Barry Brill, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, said today: “the evidence of misconduct by NIWA scientists is absolutely clear. It is exemplified by Dr David Wratt labelling the 1930 data from four selected stations as an ‘11-station Series’.

“The entire upwards trend in the last century was created by NIWA using ‘in-house’ adjustments to skew the pre-1950 figures downwards” said Mr Brill, “Anybody can check the Written Answer to Parliamentary Question #1201(2010) in Hansard, and see that 90% of the ‘adjusted’ years contributed to this artificial trend.

“In December 2009, by a press report in the New Zealand Herald, NIWA claimed that it had created a new Eleven-station Series from weather stations that had never been shifted – and ‘the analysis featured a guest appearance by former employee Jim Salinger.’

“Thereafter, this Eleven-station Series was regularly relied upon by NIWA as offering independent evidence of a 1°C warming trend, which corroborated the Seven-station Series – the official national temperature record. This claim was also repeated in Parliament by the Minister for Science, Hon Dr Wayne Mapp on more than one occasion.

“But the Eleven-station Series does not commence until June 1948, when data from Invercargill was averaged with ten others” said Mr Brill. “This is shown at

a document which was also tabled in Parliament by the Climate Change Minister, Hon Dr Nick Smith.”

Mr Brill continued: “The Coalition asserted in a letter of 26 April 2010 to the chairman of NIWA, Mr Chris Mace, that the 11 stations had been cherry-picked from a universe of 238 stations so as to fabricate the desired result. But worse, the entry dates had been manipulated, as set out in the following extract from our letter: “The warming trend of 1C relates to the period commencing in 1930. Yet the website discloses that data is available from only four stations in 1930 – Mount Ruapehu Chateau, Hamilton Ruakura, Palmerston North and Queenstown. Two of those four are mountain sites that constitute the coldest stations in the series and skew the starting point downwards. [The Coalition] believes the employment of this technique can only be seen as manipulation of the data. The remaining seven stations, which are dribbled in over a period of 18 years, are all coastal stations and reflect the relative warmth and stability of the Pacific Ocean. By this means, a significant warming trend has been artificially inserted into the initial 20-year period of the series.”

“The 11-station Series is thus revealed as a misleading statistical contrivance. The two cold stations comprise 50% of the group at the outset but dwindle to only 18% over 18 years – so the average temperature must inevitably increase. Dr Wratt's graph shows that the average temperature soared by about 2.0° C over this drip-feeding period A ‘trick’ is employed to ‘create an incline’.

“In his graph, Dr Wratt claims that the two series are almost identical during the 1930-50 period. How could this be? One curve represents New Zealand-wide temperatures while the other is a disparate and constantly-changing collection. The very fact that the two curves are massaged to coincide during this period is a damning indictment of NIWA’s statistical trickery.

“There are other serious problems with the 11-station Series. The two mountain weather stations are ‘Class 4’, carrying an error potential as high as 2°C, and are not normally used for climate research. Despite the claim that the selection was made because ‘these sites have never been shifted’ the Coalition has documented relocations in no fewer than six of the stations. For example, the Ruapehu thermometer was moved down the mountain to a more sheltered position – and showed warmer readings thereafter,” said Mr Brill.

Passing Ships “The Salinger paper attempts to discern a pattern from weather observations noted by thousands of different ships in various South Pacific locations over a 90-year period. The paper describes the data as ‘heavily homogenised’ by subjective means.

“The Coalition wrote NIWA on 29 January stating – ‘We understand that the margin of error for such informal records is approximately plus-or-minus 2.0°C, so that a century-long result of 0.7°C is essentially meaningless’ – unsurprisingly, this contention was not challenged in NIWA’s reply.

“In the period prior to the Second World War, ships used wooden and canvas buckets, different thermometers, untrained readers and patchy telegraphs. Everything was variable – weather conditions, seasons, latitudes, time of day, etc. Discerning any temperature patterns can be no more than guesswork, and to claim accuracy to a fraction of a degree is risible.

“It is notable that nearly all of the warming trend found in this paper occurred in the 1920-40 period, at a time when the land temperature record shows none. It shows no warming in the 1940-70 period when the Seven-station Series claims that New Zealand experienced its greatest-ever warming period,” Mr Brill continued.

Previous Disclosure On NIWA’s claim that it provided explanations in 2006 to a Coalition scientist, Mr Brill said this was before occurred before the Coalition came into existence. “If there was any email (and NIWA steadfastly refuses to supply a copy), it certainly did not include the requested Schedule of Adjustments, as this was not compiled until February 2010. When the Coalition raised this matter with the chair of NIWA, the allegations were removed from the website within the week” he added.

Conclusion Mr Brill concluded: “Whilst at NIWA, Dr Salinger produced three documents which travel by different mendacious routes but arrive at broadly the same conclusion – viz, that New Zealand experienced warming of around 1°C during the 20th century. All three use highly subjective and unprofessional methods to support his 1975 hypothesis about glacier melt. None of the papers have been subject to any approval process at NIWA, and nor have they been supported in the scientific literature anywhere. The correlation between the detail of Salinger’s documents is very poor and could not have withstood genuine scrutiny by any NIWA climate scientist who was acting in good faith.”

ENDS

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