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The very foundations of NIWA’s global warming data are facing an unprecedented assault, legal no less than scientific. Hugh de Lacy explains.
A clique – nay, a caste – of recidivist sceptics calling itself the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust (CSET) is taking the revered National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to the High Court, to try to force it to renounce its faith in a curious assemblage of calculations that purport to show that New Zealand’s climate has warmed by about one degree Celsius over the past century. The membership of CSET, which includes no less a personage than the lisping British biologist David Bellamy, comprises a who’s who of otherwise local scientists who have yet to travel the road to man-made global warming Damascus. Instead they cling to the godless belief that the science of climate change is as yet no more than theory. Such a perception is diametrically opposed to that of the self-styled scientific establishment to whom global warming is not only a gilded goose but an irrefutable one. The fowl’s eggs have funded a host of expensive studies world-wide that might have otherwise been consigned to the waste-bin of science, and have conveniently filled the political vacuum created by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which at a stroke terminated freemarket capitalism’s erstwhile role as under-funded scientists’ favourite whipping boy. The notion that human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, is dangerously heating the planet has spread from the scientific to the political mainstream, ensnaring even the mighty United Nations. It continues to hog public credibility despite being lately dealt two serious blows: the UN’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has had to admit its prediction of the imminent melting of the Himalayan glaciers was a mistake, and a series of inquiries has failed to totally exonerate Britain’s University of East Anglia of charges of exuberantly distorting data to support the theory. In its legal challenge to NIWA, CSET is thus climbing aboard a bandwagon lately reversed from the direction it took early this decade when first Gore’s movie, and then a supportive report from respected British economist Lord Nicholas Stern, provided the tipping point towards broad acceptance of man-made global warming as fact. This acceptance was a little dented by concerned English parent Stuart Dimmock’s partially successful 2007 court challenge against the United Kingdom Department of Education for distributing Gore’s movie to schools as a fact-based learning aid. In that case the court declined to make the department’s distribution of the movie illegal, but it listed no fewer than nine instances of Gore’s claims being scientifically inaccurate. Though the scientific and political challenges to the sanctity of anthropogenic global warming have since become legion, CSET is the first to attack it from a specifically legal perspective. If it succeeds the case will not only be damning of the methodology of the New Zealand Government’s principal advisory agency on climate policy, but the aftershocks would rattle the windows of the IPCC itself. That’s because there’s a dearth of historic temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere, rendering the NIWA data disproportionately significant. As a Crown Research Institute, NIWA is contracted to the New Zealand Government to maintain a national climate database using NZ Meteorological Service records compiled between 1853 and 1992. The government relies on the NIWA data not only for its own domestic climate change policy, but also as its contribution to the IPCC’s on-going assessments which, incidentally, put the level of global temperature increases over the past century at a significantly lower 0.7˚C. CSET’s lawyer, barrister and former MP Barry Brill, summed up the trust’s agrument to EnergyNZ this way: “The official New Zealand temperature record – the seven-stations series, showing 1oC warming in the 20th century – is wrong and needs to be replaced. Essentially, the in-house amendments to historical records were biased and unjustified.” The seven weather recording stations in point are sited at Auckland, Masterton, Wellington, Nelson, Hokitika, Lincoln and Dunedin – a geographical spread intended to represent New Zealand as a whole. CSET claims that the seven-stations series of temperature recordings, adopted by NIWA in 1999 as the basis for its advice to the Government, was tweaked in 1981 to take account of sites being shifted round over the years, and of other factors such as urbanisation and shading. The author of this tweaking was a then Victory University of Wellington doctorate student Jim Salinger, and his methodology, contained in the appendices to his thesis paper, was apparently lost for all time when the university computerised its records in 1983. This was the same Jim Salinger who in April this year was sacked by NIWA for talking to the media out of turn, though Brill says he, “is not a party to the case.” When Salinger wrote his thesis, climate science was in so embryonic a state that the general consensus was that the planet was headed not for warming but for another mini ice-age. Be that as it may, CSET maintains that Salinger’s in-house tweaking resulted in the seven stations series creating a warming effect where none previously existed, and the court case will bring NIWA to account for adopting it. “NIWA can be, and almost certainly will be, required to disclose and justify the in-house amendments which ‘caused’ the warming trend in the seven-stations series,” Brill told the magazine. CSET’s statement of claim and NIWA’s response – which in its legal format amounts essentially to a clause-by-clause denial - were filed in the Auckland High Court on September 23. A court management conference is scheduled for November 5, and the full hearing is expected in March or April of next year. NIWA’s response to CSET’s charges has largely been to treat the whole matter as sub judice, though spokesperson Geoff Baird was prepared to characterise them to EnergyNZ as a, “disingenuous attack on the validity of our climate research” resulting from CSET’s failure to “believe in anthropogenic climate change”. “We absolutely stand by the integrity of our science and our scientists, and of our interpretation of what the climate data tells us,” Baird says. No doubt it does, but if NIWA is unable to defend the faith to the satisfaction of the high court, CSET may succeed in driving the thin edge of a very sharp wedge between the science and the credibility of global warming whose leveraging effect could affect even global perceptions.
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.6 November-December 2010 |
Not since a British judge pointed out the convenient falsehoods in former US President Al Gore’s Oscar-winning polemic “An Inconvenient Truth” has the holy gospel of climate change been subjected to so sacrilegious a scrutiny as it is about to encounter in little old New Zealand.