Legal Defeat for Global Warming in Kiwigate Scandal
In the climate controversy dubbed Kiwigate, New Zealand skeptics inflict shock courtroom defeat on climatologists implicated in temperature data fraud.
By John O’Sullivan, Suite 101, Oct 6, 2010 [here]
New Zealand’s government via its National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has announced it has nothing to do with the country’s “official” climate record in what commentators are calling a capitulation from the tainted climate reconstruction. The story is also covered at ICECAP.com [here]
NIWA’s statement of defense claims they were never responsible for the national temperature record (NZTR).The climb down is seen as a legal triumph for skeptics of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) who had initiated their challenge last August when petitioning the high court of New Zealand to invalidate the weather service’s reconstruction of antipodean temperatures. The NZCSC Petition may be read [here].
According to the August official statement of the claim from NZCSC, climate scientists cooked the books by using the same alleged ‘trick’ employed by British and American scientists. This involves subtly imposing a warming bias during what is known as the ‘homogenisation’ process that occurs when climate data needs to be adjusted.
The specific charge brought against the Kiwi government was that its climate scientists had taken the raw temperature records of the country and then adjusted them artificially with the result that a steeper warming trend was created than would otherwise exist by examination of the raw data alone.
Indeed, the original Kiwi records show no warming during the 20th century, but after government sponsored climatologists had manipulated the data a warming trend of 1C appeared. … [more]