Slashdot Mirror

You forgot the wind, and the Tsunamis, and asteroid strikes

Sorry, safety is an illusion.

There are twenty-two species of native freshwater fish and they are delicious..

And in the southern Hemisphere, We've had one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New Zealand.

But you only hear about climate change when people are hot.....

Wettest, yes (partly). Coldest, no. http://www.niwa.co.nz/summer-2011-12

Rainfall: Wettest summer on record for Takaka and Nelson. Very wet across the North Island, Otago and South Canterbury. Extremely dry over southwest of South Island.

Temperatures: A cooler than average summer between Timaru and Gisborne, as well as for the Central Plateau and Bay of Plenty. Warmer than usual for the West Coast of the South Island and Fiordland.

The link you post to The Telegraph is merely repost of a blog posting from NZ. The graph he posts is clearly wrong: he is objecting to a set of corrections being made to the data, but then turns around and makes *no* corrections. Here is an explanation: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington Weather stations move or are replaced, and patching one timeseries onto another requires figuring out how to handle data collected in different ways at different times. The NZ warming hasn't gone away, and this shrill report is nonsense.

a) the Yamal tree-ring data [telegraph.co.uk] - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers

Well according to Steve McIntyre, "It is not my belief that Briffa crudely cherry picked. My guess is that the Russians selected a limited number of 200-400 year trees - that's what they say - a number that might well have been appropriate for their purpose and that Briffa inherited their selection".

If you want to have a reasoned opinion on climate change and the data it is best not to use James Delingpole as your source. Simply put, Steve McIntyre did not like 12 trees used for the 1990 temperature so used 34 other trees from nearby. Can you do that? Simply take the growth from one area and directly compare to another?

b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.

Agree :)

c) New Zealand average temperature graphs [telegraph.co.uk] - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

Maybe or maybe not. I agree that the temperature corrections look rather dodgy. If the data did show that New Zealand was not warming while the rest of the globe is warming, would that invalidate AGW? There is a lot of data out there, most of it considered good science. A few blips here and there do seem to be taken too mean more than they should.

NIWA explanation for what is going on for the temperature adjustments.

http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington

And I doubt there are any nations in the world licensing weather data.

How about Canada or New Zealand, or EU wide. The UK data is licensed by the MET Office and the Department for Rural Affairs.

And that's just from a 30 second Google search.

alp glaciers have been growing the last years. http://www.niwa.co.nz/pubs/mr/archive/2003-05-26-1

The research was done in association with NIWA, heres a link to their computer: NIWA Bit old now, bit still an impressive computer to visit (yes i have) riki

Massey university just announced that it is going to build a 128 node beowulf cluster (no imagination necessary!). Auckland University have recently got an IBM Regatta class machine.

Just a (quite impressive) stone's throw away from Weta is NIWA's Cray T3E
bash-2.03$ uname -a
sn6908 kupe 2.0.5.51 unicosmk CRAY T3E

I love running that uname :-)