Raw climate data in New Zealand tells a different story than “official” one.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/

by cwan • 17 years ago

30 44 17 years ago

I can think of a half-dozen reasons off the top of my head as to why the records might have had to been adjusted, starting with "equipment calibration" and moving widely on from there. I think the media's been a little too eager to jump on the climate change denial bandwagon...

pyre2• 17 years ago

Let's just face the fact that 'climate change' has become a political topic more than it's a rational and/or scientific one.

"Climate change denial" has become secret code for, "I'm a neo-conservative and I really want it stick it to Those Damn Liberals(tm) because not only do they want to take away my Hummer and my hamburgers, they want to take away my guns too!"

There are plenty of journalists and talk-show pundits on the conservative side of the spectrum that see this as some sort of vindication that they were, "right all along," or just as a chance to get all sorts of coverage/attention/viewership/advertising money.

anamax2• 17 years ago

Similarly, AGW has become secret code for, well, you can fill in the blanks.

However, there are some differences. For example, the skeptics haven't been suggesting that their opponents be thrown into jail for their beliefs. And, they aren't proposing restrictions or taxes.

natmaster• 17 years ago

I'm not familiar with the hamburger political controversy. Do enlighten me.

anamax2• 17 years ago

There are valid reasons and there are invalid reasons. That's why being open about the raw data is important.

[Edit] I should have also mentioned that it's also important to be open about how the data is adjusted. Explaining your reason for adjusting the data is not enough.

Which reminds me. Someone commented that scientists don't share code. That's not quite true. In many areas, it suffices to share data because the analysis routines are already shared.

JCThoughtscream3• 17 years ago

I fully agree! But both sides are guilty of subjective analysis. As to which side is most guilty... well, choosing either/or gives away your position on the issue.

thaumaturgy5• 17 years ago

Yes; I think the simplest and most likely explanation here is going to involve specific facets of the data or analysis which people won't be familiar with unless they've been studying it for several years.

That doesn't mean it isn't sloppy though, and while I can sympathize with scientists' decisions not to release their data or their methodologies -- they aren't well-enough funded to spend their time answering the various challenges of laypeople that aren't educated enough to understand the field -- it's still a really poor choice in the longer term that's going to result in a lot of suspicion regarding their work.

Or, alternatively: we're seeing some confirmation bias at work.

nickjohnson• 17 years ago

"while I can sympathize with scientists' decisions not to release their data or their methodologies " - I can't. If your results can't be reproduced independently, it's not science, it's an assertion from authority.

This is a really, really basic part of scientific research. Failing to do it should raise huge red flags.

rudin2• 17 years ago

Have a look at this. They "shift" the data so it is all on the same scale and create one graph. This is horrible science. They should be treating each temperature probe as a separate entity.

I am also dubious about the use of airports for temperature readings (Note this is a recent development). Airports can introduce a mini-UHI effect producing an artificially higher temperature.

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/niwa-co...

thaumaturgy5• 17 years ago

It's not horrible science. It's very simple analysis and maths.

Graphs are used to answer a question: "what is the relationship between these objects" or "how are these things changing" or "what is the trend in their rates of change".

In this case, we're less concerned with the actual temperatures at the individual stations than we are with how they're changing over time. So, there's nothing wrong with adjusting and merging them together like that.

Think of it this way: what if we were to remove the temperatures from the left side of the graph, and instead plot the temperatures as a series of differences? i.e., temperature station 1 has +5 at one point, -1 at another point, and so on.

You could plot the changes in temperature for a number of stations that way, all on the same graph, and it would make perfect sense.

That's really all they're doing.

As for measuring temperature at airports: if there is such an effect, then it will produce uniformly higher temperatures, but it will not affect the rate of temperature changes -- so, again, as long as the question is, "how is the temperature changing", taking measurements at airports is acceptable.

rudin2• 17 years ago

My point is they are shifting the data arbitrarily. The Thordon data points are lower than both the Kelburn and Airport data points for the following reason: "Thorndon (closed 31 Dec 1927) has no overlap with Kelburn (opened 1 Jan 1928). For the purpose of illustration, we have applied the same offset to Thorndon as was calculated for the Airport." - i.e. they shifted it down as much as the Airport even though the Airport has a higher average temperature

InclinedPlane3• 17 years ago

But there must be a justification, a theory borne out by observation, in order to make these adjustments. If you have two data series that do not overlap and you make an adjustment to one you better have a good reason to do so. Now, certainly you may have a good reason (e.g. altitude differences), but the reasoning for that and the scientific backing justifying such changes must be put forth. Otherwise you're just fiddling around with numbers and making it up as you go, which is not science.

Hypothesize. Predict. Observe. Judge the prediction. Refine the hypothesis. That is science.

As for airports, this should be obvious. Many major airports have grown over the past several decades. And have seen major increases in air traffic. And have been situated in neighborhoods that have seen massive increases in development. All of these factors contribute to the urban heat island effect (more traffic, more tarmac, etc.) These effects can cause an increase in measured temperatures over time even if overall the local climate saw no increase in temperature. This is an important effect due to the very high proportion of weather stations placed in urban areas and at airports.

mmphosis• 17 years ago

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2008/ann/globa...

radu_floricica2• 17 years ago

For those who mentioned there are many good reasons for the data to be adjusted:

- the fact that data is adjusted predominantly toward a worming trend and the fact that we do not have an official reason for this is suspicious

- we need "the other guy's version" to make an informed opinion

- you cannot talk about good science without some degree of openness. No matter what the data shows you need all of it to be verifiable and reproducible, otherwise something is very wrong.

Tichy4• 17 years ago

It doesn't seem possible to get an informed opinion on this subject anymore. Reading "another guy's version" does not really make for better information. Note that publishing a plethora of contradictory information is tried and proven political strategy (FUD).

radu_floricica2• 17 years ago

We as laymen can't really trust a source, any source. But we can still reasonably trust a process. If we hear that a part is not "showing the math", the process is flawed.

Why do we trust physicians or mathematicians? Why don't psychologists or historians have the same disputes? It's not the difficulty or fuzziness of the subject that's the difference, it's the process: openness and reproducibility.

lucumo2• 17 years ago

Okay, here's the thing. If you're publishing scientific stuff on a blog or in a newspaper, instead of in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, then you're playing politics, not science.

This topic has been politicised enough. Stop doing that. If you're critical of some peer-reviewed paper, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. Those dudes know if what you're saying is truthful and valuable, the general public (including me) does not.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

Yes, this amateurish analysis detracts from what ought to be the real outrage from the CRU leak: the lack of transparency, denying FOI requests, and lying to the public about it. That, and the apparent irreproducibility of some IPCC analyses due to shoddy coding practices. Stuff like this is genuinely shocking: http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/willis-eschenbachs-... http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/data-horribilis-harry...

Crackpot analysis is not really as interesting, and frankly just reduces the credibility of those rightly calling for transparency after the incident.

gaius• 17 years ago

There's a story in the British papers about how our delegation to the climate conference in Denmark is dozens of people, and they're all flying. Regardless of the climate change argument, it's undeniable that for these people it merely represents a gravy train,.

wisty• 17 years ago

I agree. The skeptics will claim (with some merit) that the climate journals (and even Science and Nature) are a little biased against denial articles. But that's no excuse to just publish in blogs though.

Even if they can't find a climate journal to publish in, there would be other journals (physics journals, economics journals, applied mathematics journals) that would take a good skeptical article.

They could even pull a Sokal, and use fake data and dodgy analysis to write an article aimed at discrediting the climate community.

I haven't seen either of those happening, so I'm guessing that their position is still pretty weak.

hop2• 17 years ago

Those dudes know if what you're saying is truthful and valuable, the general public (including me) does not.

Not necessarily. They are incentivized by fame and grant money to produce studies with a wow factor. Climatologists skeptical of global warming are outcasts among their peers - the leaked CRU emails illustrate this, as well as, intimidation to scholarly journals that publish skeptical papers.

I am not a climatologist, but I've done some complicated math simulations in college and there is no way you can future predictions look like these - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predictions... - how the fuck do you have squiggly lines, not a range, after 20 years from now - fails the common sense test.

Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription?

lucumo2• 17 years ago

> They are incentivized by fame and grant money to produce studies with a wow factor.

That's why I said "peer reviewed".

Sceptics have the same incentives as climatologists and when they just publish in newspapers and blogs, they don't have the peer review stage. There is absolutely NO guarantee of correctness or even scientific soundness. Whatever you may think of the peer review process, it's a good deal better than nothing.

ewjordan3• 17 years ago

Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription?

Yes - go to any local university library, walk to the section labeled "scientific journals" and go nuts. You won't be able to take the journals home with you (they're too damn expensive for libraries to have multiple copies), but most decent university libraries will let anyone in to do research without paying anything, and photocopies are relatively cheap.

Obviously that's much more difficult if you're not near a university, and it is a sad state of affairs when publicly funded research is not instantly available for free online - anyone in academia should fight against this trend, and I think many are starting to, which is a good sign for the future.

But it's at least possible to get to this stuff in person, and worth doing from time to time if you're interested in academic matters.

ewjordan3• 17 years ago

There's more on this at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_... [PDF], including some more detailed graphs at the end.

Full disclosure: I'm coming at this from the initial point of view that the global warming folks are probably right, primarily because all of my experience with scientists in other fields (mostly physics and biology) has taught me that the scientific "establishment" is generally far more interested in seeking the actual truth than pandering to convenient politics.

However, without explanation for why the slopes of the graphs were shifted during the adjustments, I'd say there's some definite cause for concern here. At the very least, these adjustments should be explained in detail so the rationale can be examined.

Back on the other hand, I'm very suspicious of a blanket statement that there's no reason to apply any adjustments here, especially coming from someone that opportunistically publishes this right on the heels of a very negative PR blitz against AGW. So I think we should reserve judgment until the people that made these adjustments explain in detail how they calculated them; it's very possible that they had excellent reasons to adjust things the way they did, but they really ought to provide the supplemental data sets that are required to compute these adjustments if they want to save face here.

And I absolutely agree that the fact that this information is missing in the first place is unacceptable in a scientific field; future AGW researchers need to learn a lesson from all of this, that even if they are right, they need to tread carefully because of the intense scrutiny they are under. And by "tread carefully" I mean treat your data as rigorously and make it available as easily as if this was any other scientific pursuit. Evolutionary biologists are under a lot of fire, too, from a lot of the same asshats that are funding anti-AGW work, but you don't see them witholding data or stonewalling people asking questions, at least until they become obnoxious or take the argument past science.

You only get to shout people down once they already have access to all the data they need in order to see (if only they weren't so dense) that you are right!

Edit: it's worth noting that the only references I've seen on any of this come straight from the blog post, not from NIWA itself. So I don't know if we can trust those pictures at all, or if perhaps the alterations are, in fact, explained somewhere.

davidppp2• 17 years ago

I'm a New Zealander.

The source of the "facts" in this blog post is none other than Ian Wishart, who is regarded by many in New Zealand as a crackpot. He is anti-gay, anti-science, anti-evolution, and very right wing. If you cross Murray from "Flight of the Chonchords" with Glenn Beck, you'll have a pretty good idea of who the guy is. Here's a review of one of his more recent books:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/books/news/article.cfm?c_id=134...

Ian Wishart will not be very well known outside New Zealand, so I just wanted to point out that he has a massive agenda, as well as a reputation for relentlessly cherry-picking facts to support his points of view. Very few in NZ take him seriously. I strongly encourage all of you to treat his writings (which were mostly just reprinted in the link posted by cwan) with an extreme level of skepticism.

Finally, the New Zealand scientist mentioned in the post, Jim Salinger, does have an excellent reputation in New Zealand and around the world. He was part of the IPCC group, for example. It is a real shame, but I have a feeling his name is about to be dragged through the mud by these crackpots. I was very, very surprised to see his name associated with science as bad as that mentioned in the original blog post, until I saw that Ian Wishart was the source of the information.

hop2• 17 years ago

I'm a New Zealander

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ian Wishart is nowhere in the post or the source of "facts". Why write a diatribe about him?

The source is this organization - http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_...

davidppp2• 17 years ago

The post on wattsupwiththat.com is essentially just a rehash of one of Ian Wishart's blog posts. The relevant post is here:

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/br...

This was linked at the top of the blog post linked to by cwan.

EDIT: I should add that while you're right about the source of the graphs and numbers, the scare-quoted "facts" in my first paragraph referred to way in which the post simply reprinted Ian Wishart's assertions as fact.

The individual graphs obviously come from official sources, but they are arranged in a very duplicitous way. I'm not sure how you can build a case from just two graphs and a few emails when there is an absolute torrent of data available. I assume it would be quite easy for me to find two more graphs that "prove" that the world will be covered in water in only five years and that we're all doomed.

InclinedPlane3• 17 years ago

Do you have any FACTS to present? Or anything other than arguments from authority and ad hominem attacks?

simc2• 17 years ago

The facts can speak for themselves. Most laypeople don't have the time or training to make sense of them, so depend on reputation. So who would you trust, a reputable scientist or a partisan crackpot?

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

What if I started my reply off with:

"I'm a HN'er. The source of the parent comment is davidppp, who is a notorious crackpot and illiterate fool..."

I just was curious if you understood an ad hominem attack when it was directed at you, because you obviously aren't noticing it when you use it against others.

Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not a popularity test or a beauty contest. We're on an equal playing ground where data and reproducible experimentation is all that matters.

thaumaturgy5• 17 years ago

Absolutely right.

Now that that's settled, I think we need to start giving some serious credence to the scientific theories of everyone who earnestly believes that the moon landing was a hoax.

ewjordan3• 17 years ago

Sure, it's always possible.

But the prior probability that the crackpot got it right and the thousands of mainstream scientists all got it wrong (or worse, actually committed perhaps the furthest reaching fraud in the history of science by falsifying dozens and dozens of data sets, which is what is being alleged here) is properly very low, and we'd have to be fools to pretend otherwise.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore the questions altogether, but it's all the more reason to be skeptical. The behavior of some of these clowns when talking about evolution indicates that they haven't a care in the world for truth or science, and while that may be an ad hominem indictment and not a proof that they are wrong, it is more than enough to tell us to treat anything they say about science with some suspicion.

simc2• 17 years ago

Ian Wishart also publishes a magazine called "Investigate" which instead of doing investigative journalism publishes rumors and exaggerations. On the front cover of his magazine once he claimed to have the "smoking gun" that the Prime Ministers' husband was gay. The "evidence" was a photograph of him kissing somebody who was a close relative, so no he wasn't gay.

Tichy4• 17 years ago

The next iPhone should come with a thermometer. Let's create the worlds greatest grid of temperature sensors, all open.

mukyu• 17 years ago

I don't think recording the temperature of the insides of people's pockets inside of air conditioned buildings would be a good measure of climate. Also, iPhone and open do not go together.

Tichy4• 17 years ago

True - somehow I picture iPhone people always holding their phones in front of them, looking at some location based service (and no, the iPhone isn't the best phone for LBS either, but still).

spoondan• 17 years ago

The unadjusted data these people present do not account for the relocation of measurement sites. If a measurement site for an area were to be moved higher above sea level, we would expect its readings to be consistently lower than those recorded prior to its move. Since New Zealand's measurement sites have moved over the last 150 years, the use of these unadjusted data are a complete distortion of reality.

This is an inexcusable mistake. Not only do these people not know the first thing about the data they attempt to analyze, they have evidently never attempted to learn anything at all about the data.

It's also rather implausible that the NIWA is part of a global conspiracy to cook numbers but still provides free, open access to the raw data that reveal the whole nefarious plot to any fool who can plot a chart.

sleepingbot• 17 years ago

This is getting nastier as we are getting close to COP15, which USA and China will attend, as they officially announced.

An advice: be aware of what's being told, take a look at different sources, consume different media and keep your eyes open. There's a big interest in blocking any climate negotiation.

Raw climate data in New Zealand tells a different story than “official” one.

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