New Zealand Media – A Scandalous Silence

There has been a scathing attack on NIWA in a recent post in the Climate Conversation Group. All the evidence that is being presented is indicative of a serious scientific fraud being perpetrated by NIWA regarding the New Zealand temperature record. It is a fraud that is being funded by taxpayer money, and it is a fraud that is, and will continue, to cost taxpayer money. Government policy is being directed by fraudulent science but, unbelievably, the fraud appears to be gaining no attention from the news media. It seems that the news media are self-censoring on this issue. I have included a long extract from the Climate Conversation Group post below:

NIWA didn’t use Rhoades & Salinger. We can prove it. They lied.

NZ Climate Science Coalition statisticians have uncovered evidence of scarcely believable deception from our National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA).

Last December, NIWA released a reconstructed NZ temperature series Report on the Review of NIWA’s Seven Station Temperature Series (“7SS Review”) (pdf, 8.5 MB). It has a fresh new graph (below) that’s all but indistinguishable from the previous graph. But that’s not the point.

The point is the new series is a lie.

It’s important to understand that NIWA have a Bible and they know how to thump it. Rhoades and Salinger 1993, Adjustment of temperature and rainfall records for site changes (R&S), is the NIWA Bible for estimating the effect of known site changes on temperature and rainfall measurements.

How do we know this? Because NIWA told us. Oh, how often they’ve told us! For they never tire of saying: “the adjustments to the multiple sites comprising the ‘seven-station’ series were calculated by Salinger et al. (1992), using the methodology of Rhoades and Salinger (1993).”

NIWA said one thing, did another

That wearisome statement appears in the Overview portion of the 7SS Review, in the discussion on each and every one of the seven stations, and R&S is mentioned as an authority many times in its 169 pages — nowhere does it mention any deviation from the well-established scientific methodology in R&S. Before the 7SS Review began, NIWA and its minister, Wayne Mapp, made it crystal clear in media releases and in answer to questions in the Parliament that they’d be using R&S to make the adjustments.

But NIWA didn’t follow Rhoades & Salinger. They did whatever they liked so they could show warming.

The evidence that is being produced by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition is damning. It is evidence that should be headline news, but where is the coverage in the press and on television? I checked the New Zealand Herald, and conducted a search for New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, and found no mention of the scandal. Instead, I found an article which is an attack on an Associate Professor Chris de Freitas that leads with examples of so-called ‘weather extremes’. Associate Professor de Freitas is not teaching climate change alarmism, and the implication of the article is that, in questioning anthropogenic climate change, Professor de Freitas is a ‘nut’.

The emphasis in the de Freitas article is on the ‘science’, but curiously the Herald’s taking the high ground on ‘science’ does not extend to reporting the scientific fraud that is being perpetrated by NIWA. It seems that science is only important when confirming the Herald’s editorial policy.What of other news outlets? I searched stuff.co.nz and found nothing, and the same for TVNZ’s website. I tried TV3’s search, with no discussion of the issue, and then tried some regional newspapers, all with the same lack of results.

Perhaps I am missing the coverage in my searches (which is possible), but it appears that a major scandal is being completely ignored by the media. Complete silence. I actually expected that I would find some kind of coverage, albeit expected that the usual suspects would be trotted out to denigrate NZCSC as ‘nuts’. Quite honestly I am astonished. It seems that the media is completely uninterested in what can only be described as a massive scientific fraud.

There really is something very wrong here. The news media have a duty to inform their readers of important news. As the post in the Climate Conversation Group points out, NIWA’s temperature record determines $NZ billions of spending, and is therefore a matter of great import. Even if editorial policy is ‘warmist’, this does not excuse or explain the complete silence from the media on this scandal. At the very least, there should be some kind of coverage. The lack of coverage is of itself a scandal.