Cooling The Past In New Zealand
February 9, 2015
By Paul Homewood
In case you thought widespread temperature adjustments were confined to the Arctic and South America, consider again. Apparently, New Zealand has caught Paraguayan fever!
There are five stations currently operational under GHCN in New Zealand and surrounding islands. It will come as no great surprise now to learn that GHCN warming adjustments have been added to every single one. (Full set of graphs below).
In all cases, other than Hokitika, the adjustment has been made in the mid 1970’s.
This adjustment has been triggered by a drop in temperatures in 1976, as we can see with Gisborne, below. (The algorithm did not spot that temperatures recovered to previous levels two years later!)
Raw Data
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507932920000&dt=1&ds=1
Was this temperature drop due to some local, non-climatic factor at Gisborne. Apparently not, because the same drop occurred at all eleven of the other NZ stations operating at that time.
Below is a comparison of the unadjusted annual temperatures for 1975 and 1976.
| 1975 | 1976 | Change | | Gisborne | 14.37 | 13.37 | -1.00 | | Napier | 14.65 | 13.69 | -0.96 | | New Plymouth | 14.22 | 13.07 | -1.15 | | Auckland | 15.59 | 14.66 | -0.93 | | Wellington | 12.84 | 11.53 | -1.31 | | Nelson | 12.87 | 11.72 | -1.15 | | Kaitaia | 15.87 | 15.00 | -0.87 | | Christchurch | 11.86 | 10.52 | -1.34 | | Hokitika | 12.17 | 11.09 | -1.08 | | Chatham I | 11.58 | 10.36 | -1.22 | | Invercargill | 10.34 | 9.17 | -1.17 | | Raoul I | 19.57 | 19.04 | -0.53 |
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v2/
As a result of the adjustment, Gisborne’s temperatures for 1974 and earlier have been lowered by 0.7C. Similar sized adjustments seem to have been made at the other stations.
As the algorithm cannot have arrived at the adjustment by comparing NZ stations with each other, it must have used stations further away, presumably in Australia.
But can we really compare the two? Once again, the evidence points strongly to the adjustments being incorrect, and reacting to a genuine drop in temperature.
It is often claimed that, overall, temperature adjustments up and down largely cancel each other out. But, while we keep coming across warming adjustments that are questionable, I don’t see cooling ones similarly criticised. Maybe most of these are justifiable.
If this is the case, and many of the warming ones are not, then the overall effect would be much greater than suggested.
On the other hand, if many cooling adjustments are also incorrect, it does not inspire much confidence in the process.
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