NZ warming ‘transformation’ wrong

The Herald’s false headline, decorated by a bushfire. But the weather does not light fires. Fires are caused by arson and lightning.

The NZ Herald reports on a new paper that claims to see a “growing hand-print of climate change” on the New Zealand climate since 1871, calling it a “150-year climate transformation.”

However, doubts have been raised. The paper claims our “wider region” has warmed by 0.66 °C from 1871 to 2019. But that is wrong, because records from 1850 show they recorded exactly the same temperatures as today: the country has NOT warmed.

The records are in Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand of 1868, held in the National Library in Wellington (image below, right). Today’s temperatures are the same as they were in the 1850s and ’60s.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 104

Maverick NIWA muscles in on MetService turf

Hills? Clouds? Ocean? — from MetService website

A curious climate scandal was raised this week by one of our long-time favourite readers, biologist Dr Maggy Wassilieff (here is her comment).

Maggy reports on an article in the Sunday Star-Times by Paul Gorman, who describes the extraordinary duplication of national weather forecasting by both the MetService and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), both Crown Research Institutes (CRI).

As an aside, I must say how pleased I am to see a Stuff journalist inquiring into matters of climate—truly exciting, like spotting a unicorn.
Continue Reading →

Visits: 199

Unscientific views of scientist Salinger

Herald headline, 4 August – Climate scientist: It’s cold now, but NZ region just saw its warmest July.

Image result for Jim Salinger climate

Prof Jim Salinger

Professor Jim Salinger, who helped create the benchmark seven-station national temperature series, the 7SS (or SSS, if you prefer), now runs a competing series using 22 hand-picked land weather stations (let’s call it the 22-station Salinger series, or 22SS). He claims July is an all-time record 1.79 °C above average, while the previous record of 1.74 °C above average in July, 1998, is demoted to second. Continue Reading →

Visits: 349

The activists are hotting up

Here’s a piece, including graph, regarding Jim Salinger’s opinions on global warming that I thought the NZ Herald might like for an op-ed three weeks ago. They didn’t. It’s now slightly improved and I’ve added the earliest NZ temperature records. I like the fact that the error margins swallow these Lilliputian record margins. — Richard Treadgold

A week ago, Dr Jim Salinger, jumping the gun a little, predicted 2018 would prove to be NZ’s hottest year. The Herald indulged his forecast (inadvertently awarding him the title professor) with the heading 2018 NZ’s hottest year on record. Unfortunately, when they published NIWA’s official data a few days later, Jim’s claim turned out to be wrong, with 2018 declared the second-hottest year, following 2016. Continue Reading →

Visits: 754

Study shows NZ has been cooling for 26 years

Franz Josef glacier — simply massive.

A lot of people know that New Zealand’s official weather data show that this country’s mean temperature has remained remarkably stable for at least 150 years.

So, a handful of government scientists (whose fame and fortune depend upon scary warming) have spent years looking for evidence that the historical data is so wrong that “adjustments” are essential. In this quest, the most fertile ground has long seemed to be the retreat of New Zealand’s numerous glaciers, particularly in the Southern Alps. Continue Reading →

Visits: 1446

Tiresome climate propaganda

Here’s a (lightly improved) op-ed I submitted to the Herald a month ago with no acknowledgement. Prof Geoff Duffy describes scientific properties of greenhouse gases that raise significant doubt about the wisdom of mitigating our emissions of any gas. How odd that these fully informed colleagues make no argument against his criticisms, preferring an ineffectual allegation of being “wrong about many [unspecified] aspects of science.” So I ask you, lady and gentlemen: what aspects and how is he wrong? — RT

The letter Our impact on climate very clear, of 8 Oct 2018 (right), by Prof Dave Frame and seven other local climate scientists, gives misleading information about greenhouse gases.

Seeing a letter over those scholarly signatures sparks interest in the pending illumination. But, sadly, Frame et al. (or Frame ‘n Pals) recite the tiresome propaganda of the IPCC without demur and tip-toe around the scientific points made so well by our friend Dr Geoff Duffy.

They present sentences arranged to resemble a logical argument that are in fact unconnected. Each one tells part of the truth, so it’s not wrong, but it neither contributes to an argument nor supports the next sentence.

Any connection between them rests only on our gullibility. Continue Reading →

Visits: 955

Bite the third

toast-with-bite-660

… and another bite…

There’s a third bite to be had from Gareth Renowden’s inept rebuttal of the new paper A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand by de Freitas, Dedekind and Brill (2014), just published in Environmental Modeling & Assessment. Recall that he said:

The paper as published contains no workings or supplemental material that would allow reproduction of their results,

Continue Reading →

Visits: 91

Bite the second

toast-with-bite-660

Now for another bite…

Let me take a second bite at Gareth Renowden’s toxic commentary on the new national temperature reanalysis.

Remember that Renowden says in his vitriolic post:

dFDB 2014 repeats the old canard that NIWA’s Seven Station Series (7SS) before the 2010 review was based on the adjustments made in Jim Salinger’s 1981 thesis. This was … so transparently at odds with written reports and papers from 1992 onwards that it was easy for NIWA to refute.

There are two rebuttals I can make: Continue Reading →

Visits: 106

Renowden on the reanalysis

Gareth Renowden posted comment on the new paper in what seems to be his customary style: unpleasant, vexing, offensive, loathsome and short on fact. Still, along the way he did venture some factoids which I shall rebut while ignoring the vexatious.

First, his article was headlined: NZ cranks finally publish an NZ temperature series – but their paper’s stuffed with errors. To the first phrase, I note that publishing a temperature series is clearly beyond him and, to the second, I say we’ll see about that. Continue Reading →

Visits: 145

Man-made temperatures

Ex-climatologist Jim Salinger has penned an article for Australia’s The Conversation regarding his 30-year-old version of New Zealand average temperature trends and recent efforts to have the High Court order its removal from NIWA’s official website.

caption

Salinger’s version was initially published in 1980, when he was a student at Victoria University. It relied upon seven geographically representative stations with long-term data (‘Seven-station Series’, or ‘7SS’). The article acknowledged the temperature data had been ‘homogenised’ but offered no details. The graph showed a warming trend of 1.1 °C from 1853 to 1975. Continue Reading →

Visits: 460

Salinger’s status: secret?

By the end of my post Salinger’s status clarified earlier today we were assured by Professor Paul Kench, the friendly Head of the School of Environment, University of Auckland, that Dr Jim Salinger is, indeed, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland.

I had queried the fact because the current UofA web site no longer mentions Dr Salinger as an honorary appointment. Continue Reading →

Visits: 113

Salinger’s status clarified

Auckland Uni takes more than a year to update their website

Last Thursday, Dr Jim Salinger published an article at The Conversation entitled An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science. In it Salinger dishonestly characterises the Coalition’s court action against NIWA as an attack on science.

Salinger is conspicuously described at the top of that article as working for the University of Auckland — but as the university’s web site doesn’t list him as working for them, it seemed to be a fabrication. Continue Reading →

Visits: 131

No evidence no reason for complacency

Chris de Freitas is a proper scientist with a wonderful sense of humour — just wait until you see his conclusion! His articles are easy to read and I always read them.


Regrettably, the Herald has turned comments off, but that’s why blogs exist — leave your comments here where influential people will see them!


Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

Chris de Freitas: Science proves alarmist global warming claims nothing but hot air

Several aspects of Jim Salinger’s op-ed “Climate hurtling towards a hothouse Earth” Herald 24/5/13 are quite misleading. It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not. Continue Reading →

Visits: 127

One man’s mission

Will NIWA ever be free of Jim Salinger? What will it take to rid the organisation of his pervasive influence? He was fired long ago for his maverick media mouth, but his spirit never leaves, and the bright ideas of his younger self, not good enough to attract other scientists, still torment NIWA’s management as they strive to defend them. Salinger’s youthful enthusiasm for the then-radical crisis of man-made global warming, hatched by his mates in his old stamping ground at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has crippled New Zealand with a “scientific” temperature “record” that shows remarkable warming — a feature we now know is entirely reliant on fiction, not on fact. – RT

Jim Salinger

When young geographer James Salinger was at Otago University in 1974, he noticed that a number of the glaciers in the Southern Alps were retreating. So he wrote an article for the journal Nature, contending that New Zealand was warming up.

This made him a noted sceptic, as the scientific consensus then was that the world was rapidly cooling. The news media worldwide were running horror stories, demanding that governments “do something” about the impending ice age. Continue Reading →

Visits: 110

Only threat to Christchurch is Salinger’s alarmism

the beginning of the Christchurch earthquakes

From the Christchurch Press today comes alarming news:

Rising sea levels are a greater threat to Christchurch’s seaside suburbs than previously realised, a climate scientist is warning.

Speaking at Canterbury University this afternoon, Jim Salinger said latest estimates could have major implications for Christchurch’s earthquake rebuild.

Christchurch City Council should be working to a one-metre estimate for sea level rise, he said.

“It’s the opportunity for Christchurch in its rebuild, it should be looking at at least a metre. Some local bodies in Australia are using one metre.”

Salinger plucks the same alarmist harp strings he’s been picking for decades. He specifies one metre: does he include those places which are 500mm higher after the earthquake? They should get a discount.

But the Coalition chairman Barry Brill decisively puts this loose cannon of a climate scientist down, demanding evidence: Continue Reading →

Visits: 108

NIWA generating warmth

NIWA temperature adjustments, before and after

— by Barry Brill, Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

This graph summarises how NIWA’s recent adjustments to the historical temperature data has created a 20th century warming trend of 1.0°C. There were 22 changes in the period 1900-75 and almost all of those adjustments went downwards. Over 90% of the adjusted station-years moved in the same direction – a very surprising result.

Another curious aspect of the NIWA adjustments is that their amplitude is almost directly proportional to their chronological age. The further back one goes from 1975, the larger the adjustment becomes. Continue Reading →

Visits: 69

Ice, anyone?

A gigantic glacier

Hot Topic has just released a rant against Barry Brill’s article “Crisis in New Zealand climatology”, just published at Quadrant.

Readers here, waiting for NIWA to release the reasons for the adjustments to the official national temperature record, will be pleased to learn that Renowden has the answer so NIWA needn’t bother with all that scientific mumbo-jumbo.

First he quotes Barry’s article pointing out that the average NZ temperature in the 1860s was 13.1°C, the same as the average temperature in 2005. Renowden scoffs at this but does not refute it. I find that strange. He has no argument with those facts. He lets them stand.

Instead, he waves a book cover at us, showing melting glaciers, falsely insinuating that rising temperatures are the only reason for glaciers to recede. Continue Reading →

Visits: 416

Salinger claims warming but can’t feel the heat

A man with his head in the sand

The Waikato Times today carries an interview with Dr Jim Salinger by Jeff Neems.

The heading is Salinger doesn’t feel critics’ heat. Which probably explains why he doesn’t reply to the criticism.

I think there is something to be said to Dr Salinger. He gets away with some elasticisation of the facts. Do you think we’ve attacked Salinger personally and not on facts? I don’t. We’ve directed our criticism squarely at his PhD thesis and some things he has said. We have deliberately not attacked Jimmy himself.

Do you think Salinger is being a mite hypocritical? First he says:

Science is about facts, not beliefs. I like to look at the facts and see what they say – if people want to attack me as a person, that has nothing to do with my science. It doesn’t worry me.

Then he attacks the Coalition on personal grounds through their alleged connection with big oil. I myself have no connection with the oil industry; I suppose that’s why my cheque from them is overdue. Continue Reading →

Visits: 81