Fresh climate fraud scandals; NASA and New Zealand.

Cartoon; by Nicholson.

In the wake of climategate it seems that the response by the press is “Climategate; what Climategate?” and that from world leaders is a deep sense of urgency to get our feet on the sticky paper before the whole edifice collapses. Rudd is apparently in a nervous haste to get to Copenhagen to help his little buddy Obama.

Meanwhile “The Australian” points out that the Saudis are making waves:

SAUDI Arabia has seized on a series of stolen British university emails to become the first country to cast doubt on the consensus about man-made climate change ahead of next week's Copenhagen summit.

The world's largest oil exporter claims the emails stolen from researchers at the University of East Anglia undermine the scientific case that human activity is overheating the planet.

But its (Saudi Arabia) chief Copenhagen negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, suggested in an interview with the BBC yesterday that there was now no longer any point in seeking an agreement to reduce emissions.

"It appears from the details . . . that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he said.

The article is at pains to claim that “the emails do not prove that any evidence on climate change was falsified,” which is relatively bizarre given that they clearly indicate that the scientists involved were operating on a political rather than scientific agenda, concealing information which could lead to other conclusions, avoiding FOI requests and attempting to shut down opposing views. Attempting to get rid of the medieval warm period, and concealing temperature declines over the last decade strikes me as falsification.

In my experience those who conceal evidence usually have something to hide.



My old mate Bawb mentioned in a comment on my last post that NASA has now been caught out in this scandal. It seems that in an attempt to make October the hottest on record they decided to use September figures from Russia:

… On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The Kiwis are now finding themselves in the same position with a breaking scandal over manipulation of raw figures to show a significant rise in temperatures over the last century where none exists:

NIWA's news release in response to this story appears to have been delayed, and according to a radio news report a few minutes ago Rodney Hide, leader of the minority Act Party and a minister in the National Government, is now calling on his Cabinet colleague, Climate Change Minister Nick Smith, to "please explain."

The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century. …

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result. …

Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850. …

This whole hoax needs to be tossed out and a serious investigation done on malpractice, fraudulent use of taxpayer money, and in paticular whether or not the governments involved were paying for results that suited their agendas.