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Posts Tagged Climate science

Long way around the sea Gareth Renowden Sep 03

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With the northern hemisphere summer fading into autumn, time for a quick overview of Arctic events. The sea ice is nearing its annual low point, and appears to be heading for a minimum somewhere between 2009 and 2008 — 2007′s record minimum appears to be beyond reach. The latest batch of forecasts for the SEARCH exercise mostly agree, but it’s still a bit early to make a final call — reductions in extent can continue right up to the end of the month. This graph of sea ice extent (from the University of Bremen) puts the current situation in context (click to see a large, updated version):

Bremenextent030910.gif

Now let’s see what that data looks like on a map…

Bremenextenntvisual020910.jpg

White areas have high concentrations of ice, fading through grey, black (about 50% ice, 50% open water) and then dark blue to no ice at all (click the image to see the latest updated version with key). It looks to me as though there are very large areas of low concentration ice — some very near the Pole, something confirmed by looking at the MODIS Arctic Mosaic daily satellite images. Some of that low concentration ice will probably melt out before the autumn freeze-up begins, but how much is a very open question. It’s possible that the 2008 minimum could be beaten, particularly if wind compacts regions of ice that are currently well scattered.

The best place to monitor the melt season denouement, the final furlong, or as Neven prefers to call it, the fat lady’s closing chorus, is at his Arctic Sea Ice blog. He’s devoting a great deal of time and energy to covering the melt, and his commentariat are contributing a lot of interesting perspectives.

Meanwhile, there’s something of a race developing between the plucky Norwegian team in their catamaran Northern Passage and the Russian boat Peter 1 (aka Peter the Great) who are both aiming to circumnavigate the Arctic Ocean via both NE and NW Passages in a single season. At the time of writing, the Norwegians were at 69˚41 N, 170˚50’ W, in the middle of the Chukchi Sea halfway between Siberia and Alaska. Here’s an extract from their latest blog post:

It is obvious that the conditions met by the early explorers such as Vitus Bering, Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Roald Amundsen no longer exists. We passed through in a few weeks, while our predecessors were forced to overwinter once or even twice. Still, it is not an easy passage for any kind of boat or vessel.

The Russians, meanwhile, have crossed the 180º meridian — not too far behind, though the last time I checked, their Spot Adventures page was still showing them at their last port of call. The yachts face an interesting choice of routes through the NW Passage because both the southern route used by Amundsen (and most recent small boats), and the wider, deeper northern passage through the Parry Channel are both open, as the NSIDC noted last month. The southern route is probably safer, but the northern faster. What ever happens to the minimum, the progress of the boats is going to be interesting to watch. As a matter of interest, the first circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean in a sailing vessel was made by the French boat Vagabond in 2002-3. It took them two summer seasons. Things are certainly changing…

[Low]

The Quadruple Squeeze Gareth Renowden Sep 01

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Required viewing: Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre talking at TEDGlobal 2010 about the “quadruple squeeze” we’re putting on the planet through overpopulation, climate change, ecosystem loss and the problem of surprises — tipping points in the system. Rockström was lead author on last year’s Nature paper on planetary boundaries and is an interesting and compelling presenter. Bottom line? We face a huge challenge, but there are ways we can fix the problem… [Hat-tip to Resilience Science]

IPCC report: done well, could do better Gareth Renowden Aug 31

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The InterAcademy Council report on the IPCC — Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC — released yesterday, calls for “fundamental reforms” to the IPCC’s management structure and review processes. Climate Central provides a useful summary of the key findings:

  • The IPCC should create an Executive Committee to run the organization in between major conferences.
  • Rather than have the IPCC director serve for two six-year terms, a new director should be appointed for each major assessment report (there have been four so far). Since the IPCC is well into the fifth assessment, it isn’t clear whether Dr. Pachauri will step down (he’s evidently said that any decision will have to wait for the next IPCC meeting, in Korea in October).
  • The reviewers who decide what makes it into the final report and what doesn’t should work harder to address comments from authors, and to let dissenting views be reflected more fully in the finished product.
  • Statements about certainties and uncertainties about climate science need to be more explicit, need to be based on a more uniform set of criteria, and need to be clearer about how they were calculated.
  • The IPCC in general needs to be more open and transparent about how it goes about its business.
  • The IPCC needs to improve the way it deals with so-called “grey literature”– that is, non-peer-reviewed reports that contain valuable information, but which haven’t already been subjected to strict scientific scrutiny.

Professor Martin Manning, Director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington told the Science Media Centre that he welcomed the report:

The IAC has run a detailed review of the process used by the IPCC for assessing scientific understanding and this has produced a number of useful comments that I think most climate scientists will agree with. Their report accepts that scientific understanding of climate change is developing rapidly and this means that the process for assessing it for policymakers needs to become more dynamic.

More reaction: Roger Harrabin at the BBC, Guardian, New Scientist, plus the UN webcast of the press conference is here.

My take? It would be a miracle if a 22 year old organisation with minimal full-time staff that has seen its raison d’être move up to the top of the list of global priorities couldn’t be improved. The suggestions look sensible, and if they help to defuse the continuing attacks from the usual suspects, so much the better.

Questionnaire Gareth Renowden Aug 30

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The Cognitive Science Lab at the University of Western Australia has put together an internet survey to test people’s attitudes to science. Prof Stephan Lewandowsky describes it thus: “the rationale behind the survey is to draw linkages between attitudes to climate science and other scientific propositions (eg HIV/AIDS) and to look at what skepticism might mean (in terms of endorsing a variety of propositions made in the media)”. He’s particularly interested in the views of people who follow science blogs, so please go along and give it a try. Anonymity assured, and the results will find their way into the literature eventually.

[Rutles, if only for the lyrics...]

Report clears IPCC head Pachauri, UK paper apologises Bryan Walker Aug 27

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Back in March I posted on IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s stout defence of the IPCC report against the attacks to which it was being subjected by hysterical denialism.  But he has also had to defend himself against accusations in an article by Christopher Booker and Richard North in the Sunday Telegraph in December which claimed that the UN climate chief was “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies” and that payments from his work for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.

KPMG was engaged by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the non-profit organisation Pachauri heads, to conduct an independent review of personal financial records of Dr Pachauri and other records of TERI to confirm if there is any evidence that suggests that Dr Pachauri misused his position for personal benefit as alleged.

The KPMG report has now been made public.  The Guardian reports:

“The KPMG audit, completed in March, showed the allegation that Pachauri had made millions of dollars could not be further from the truth. In addition to his annual salary of £45,000, the auditors found that in the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009, Pachauri received 20,000 rupees (£278) from two national power commissions in India, on which he serves as director; 35,880 rupees (£498) for articles and lectures; and a maximum of 100,000 rupees (£1,389) in the form of royalties from his books and awards.

“Any money paid as a result of work that Pachauri had done for other organisations went to TERI. The accounts also show that Pachauri also donated to the institute a lifetime achievement award from the Environment Partnership Summit – a 200,000 rupee prize he would have been entitled to keep.”

The Sunday Telegraph has removed the article from its website and apologised, hardly handsomely but apparently to avoid libel proceedings:

“[The article] was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made ‘millions of dollars’ in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused.”

George Monbiot has made trenchant comment.

“Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ?

“…The story immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri’s ‘dodgy’ business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.

“There was just one problem: the story was untrue.

 “It’s not just that Pachauri hadn’t been profiting from the help he has given to charities, businesses and institutions, his accounts show that he is scrupulous to the point of self-denial.”

The Sunday Telegraph article also complained that we don’t know “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC. The answer, as Monbiot reports, is nothing.  This was information that the journalists could easily have obtained but driven by their intention to malign preferred not to.

This won’t be the end of the matter for denialists of course. North on his blog puts the apology down to the paper’s need to avoid libel proceedings from an “unethical law firm” and continues undaunted:

“If you wish to believe that means Pachauri didn’t make millions of dollars, that is your affair. But the crucial thing is that the paper has not apologised for accusing Pachauri of making millions of dollars. That accusation stands uncorrected. The paper simply accepts that KPMG has a claim in this respect.”

Monbiot expects that the smear campaign will continue, and become ever more lurid as new charges are invented.

“The best we can do is to set out the facts and appeal to whatever decency the people spreading these lies might have, and ask them to consider the impact of what they have done to an innocent man. Will it work? I wouldn’t bet on it. As we have seen in the United States, where some people (often the same people) continue to insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born abroad, certain views are impervious to evidence.”

If we need reminding, denialism will stop at nothing in its campaign to denigrate the science of climate change. That is what the attacks on Pachauri are about. He is chairman of the IPCC. Portray him as dishonest and hope thereby to spread doubt about the IPCC reports. It is determination to suppress the science which informs the attacks on him and on the scientists who have been falsely accused of various malpractices.

Keep right on to the end of the road Bryan Walker Aug 24

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When one spends a good deal of time following what scientists working on climate change are saying, it’s hard to understand how the community at large and politicians in particular can appear so unaffected by the prospect ahead if we don’t radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The only conclusion is that they haven’t yet understood the full reality of the science.

James Hansen is notably one scientist who has been much exercised by this fact. He and his co-writers offer some reflections on the communication of the status of global warming to the public in a summary discussion at the end of their revised paper Global Surface Temperature Change, which has been accepted for publication in Reviews of Geophysics. The comments on communication are carefully characterised as opinion and differentiated from the primary scientific contribution of the paper. But it is entirely understandable that scientists should be exercised about why there appears to be so much difficulty having a subject of such “surpassing importance” communicated clearly to the public.

The paper notes first that weather variability hampers lay people’s perceptions, a difficulty which can best be addressed by drawing attention to the changes in frequency and magnitude of changes from the norm apparent on decadal time scales as warming increases.

The writers then remark the media’s difficulties in framing long-term problems as news, the preference for sensationalism, the generally low level of familiarity with basic science, and the preference for ‘balance’ in every story.

The politicisation of reporting of global warming compounds these difficulties. The paper acknowledges that politicisation is perhaps inevitable given the economic and social implications of altering the course of human-made climate change. Alleviating it is made more difficult by attacks on the character and credibility of scientists, which appear to have been effective in causing many in the public to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change.

What can scientists do about this? Keep on keeping on:

“…the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description.”

Hansen acknowledges the danger is that while we wait for this to happen the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity’s control.

“Yet continuation of careful scientific description of ongoing climate change seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of future climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.”

The paper, these reflections apart, continues precisely such careful scientific description, updating and discussing the Goddard Institute’s analysis of global surface change and showing that contrary to popular misconception the rate of warming has not declined.

“Global warming on decadal time scales is continuing without letup… we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”   

The Australian Academy of Science last week produced a worthy effort to communicate the science with the publication of Climate Change: Questions and Answers (web, pdf). It is a lucid account for the lay reader of the central features of climate science as currently understood by its practitioners. In his foreword the President of the Academy, Kurt Lambeck, points to some of the complexities which beset the communication of climate science. It is at the intersection of a number of science disciplines and sub-disciplines.

“It is at this intersection of the disciplines where uncertainty can and will arise, both because of the yet poorly understood feedbacks between the different components of the climate system and because of the difficulty of bringing these components together into a single descriptive and predictive model.”

Equal complexities may be evident in many other areas of experimental science, but they bear special weight in climate:

“What makes climate change different is that the consequences are not only potentially global and serious but also that they occur over long time scales (decades to centuries) so that actions need to be contemplated before full understanding is achieved.”

The Academy has produced the document to try to aid public understanding and to tread a path through the often contradictory public commentary on the science. Lambeck emphasises that it is not intended as a formulation of a public response, but as “an attempt to improve the public understanding of the science upon which any policy response should be constructed.”

The document is a model of clarity in its explanations of the science and restrained in its presentation of the impacts of global warming. Look at the careful language which communicates truly alarming but well-founded predictions:

“If emissions continue unabated, current mid-range estimates are for 4.5°C higher global average temperatures by 2100 which would mean that the world would be hotter than at any time in the last few million years. Sea level would continue to rise for many centuries. The impacts of such changes are difficult to predict, but are likely to be severe for human populations and for the natural world. The further climate is pushed beyond the envelope of relative stability that has characterised the last several millennia, the greater becomes the risk of passing tipping points that will result in profound changes in climate, vegetation, ocean circulation or ice sheet stability.”

What policy response should be constructed on that?  A 5% reduction in emissions in Australia by 2020 from a 2000 base says Tony Abbott, who prevaricates on whether humans are causing climate change.  It depends what a citizen’s assembly comes up with says Julia Gillard, who affirms she believes in human-caused climate change. 

Scientific bodies must use measured language. But it shouldn’t be asking too much of policy makers and the educated public to translate it into the urgent awareness that it demands from anyone who takes the trouble to attend to it. How much longer will that be delayed?

[Harry Lauder!]

Tumbling dice Gareth Renowden Aug 23

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thirteen.jpg

Statement of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Mahmood Qureshi to the UN general assembly:

Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis. The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change. It also complicates the reconstruction and rehabilitation scenario in Pakistan. Nature has made a graphic endorsement to strengthen the case for a fair and equitable outcome from the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations.

For more on the Pakistan flood disaster, see the Guardian, BBC and The Cost of Energy amongst many others, and for those wishing to donate, 350.org has a useful page of options. My own choice for disaster relief is Oxfam.

Worth noting too that Indonesia is experiencing “super extreme” weather at the moment, and that floods have also hit the China/North Korea border region.

[Hat-tip to Only In It For The Gold for the cartoon. Do you feel lucky? Well, do you punk?]

[Rolling Stones, Knebworth '76]

Friday’s dust Gareth Renowden Aug 20

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The weekend’s coming, and so I’m clearing out some of the stuff that’s cluttering up my web browser. NIWA recently posted an excellent explanation of the carbon/greenhouse gas relationship in pastoral agriculture, taken from the July issue of their magazine, Water & Atmosphere: Why isn’t grass in, methane out, carbon neutral? Click on the image above to see the carbon flows in a typical paddock. The article’s a good overview of why agricultural methane’s important, worth a read.

Lord Nick Stern is giving this year’s Sir Douglas Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland (Sept 8 – 10, with live link to Wellington), on Managing the risks of climate change, overcoming world poverty and creating a new era of growth and prosperity: The challenges for global collaboration and rationality. Over three nights he’ll be considering how we can reconcile dealing with climate change while promoting development where its needed, the sorts of policies required, and the global context for action — developing themes from his book A Blueprint for a Safer Planet. I hope Key and co are paying attention…

The Australian Academy of Sciences has released The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers (web, pdf) this week, an attempt to:

… address confusion created by contradictory information in the public domain. It sets out to explain the current situation in climate science, including where there is consensus in the scientific community and where uncertainties exist.

It’s an excellent introduction for anyone new to the subject, and includes useful boxes dealing with standard sceptic questions (it’s the sun, cooling since 1998, etc & etc).

Finally, a snip from a screenshot from the climate deniers answer to John Cook’s excellent Skeptical Science iPhone app. The great and the good of scepticism (Monckton, Watts, Carter and the usual suspects) clubbed together to create a digital catechism of climate denial. Under “key climate theories” it provides a screenful of mutual contradictory arguments (as John Cook pointed out in the Guardian recently), but what made me laugh was this, snipped from their disclaimer page:

iPhonedenier.gif

If only all sceptic nonsense came with such a helpful disclaimer… and our policy makers read the small print. ;-)

[Doves]

When warming burns… Bryan Walker Aug 19

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Severe risks to human health will accompany the disturbed global climate which comes with global warming. We have only to consider the consequences of the heat waves, the flooding, the African droughts, of recent times to be alerted to that. Our experiences of climate change in New Zealand are unlikely to reach such extreme levels, but we would be wise to think and prepare ahead for the kind of human health hazards we may expect to encounter. Chapter 8 in Climate Change Adaptation in New Zealand (pdf download) is an attempt to sketch out measures we might prepare to take. Four of the five writers are from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago and one from Victoria University.

The paper rehearses some of the widespread major impacts which will affect human health globally. Higher maximum temperature will lead to increased heat-related deaths and illnesses and contribute to an extended range of some pest and disease vectors. Droughts and forest fires will increase in severity and frequency. More intense rainfall will lead to slope instability, flooding and contaminated water supplies. More intense large-scale cyclones increase the risk of infectious disease epidemics (e.g. via damaging water supplies and sewerage systems) and the erosion of low-lying and coastal land through storm surges. Indirect effects include economic instability, loss of livelihoods and forced migrations.

We have early indications of what the changes are likely to be, and it’s important to be ready with a range of policies to address them rather than wait and react as they occur. Prevention is better than cure. New Zealand may not experience the extremes which will be felt in some parts of the world, but there is much that would wisely be given attention.

One eventuality for which we need to be prepared, and which the article highlights, is the possibility of New Zealand becoming a lifeboat to those living in more vulnerable Pacific countries who are displaced by the impacts of climate change. Particularly is this to be expected if a high carbon scenario prevails, as increasingly seems on the cards. Families forced to leave their island homes are likely to form a pattern of chain migration to New Zealand. Unless, under such circumstances, we recognise the need to build extended-family houses or generally increase the supply of low-income family housing to accommodate these immigrants, we are likely to see an increase in overcrowding in state houses and other low-income housing. This could mean a dramatic increase in the risk of a number of infectious diseases.

Infectious diseases are likely to become more prominent with climate change. Warmer temperatures and increased rainfall variability can increase food-borne and water-borne diseases. Vector organisms such as mosquitoes, ticks and sandflies are strongly affected by temperature levels and fluctuations. Hopefully the risk of dengue in New Zealand may remain below the temperature threshold for local transmission, but there is likely to be a potential for outbreaks of Ross River virus infection.

Flooding is another aspect of climate change to which the paper gives some attention. Adaptive responses, such as health and housing protection and provision during and after extreme events, should not increase health inequalities.  The spectre of New Orleans is invoked to illustrate this. The possible need for relocation of towns and even parts of cities looms in some areas of the world. In New Zealand the sustainability of Kaeo, flooded several times in recent years, has been questioned. But given low income levels and less disposable income for private insurance in such towns, government assistance is likely to be needed to facilitate relocation.   

Other possible health impacts in New Zealand are touched on, including the effects of heat stress on outdoor workers, the exacerbation of asthma symptoms from increased amounts of allergen-producing pollens, the possibility of water charging by local authorities depriving lower income households of access sufficient to ensure general cleanliness.

Isolation and poor access to services puts people at increased risk. Severe mental health problems are identified as a likely risk in rural communities suffering the effects of extreme weather events. Such vulnerability extends also to low-income populations living in socio-economically disadvantaged, residentially segregated areas where there is less public transport and fewer people who own or have access to cars. The paper makes a good deal of the need for adaptation policies to be equitable and fair and inclusive.

Individual adaptive action can be hampered by lack of understanding, but may be attractive when there are co-benefits. An example is walking, cycling and taking public transport which can be presented as less a sacrifice of time and convenience and more an opportunity to socialise, keep fit, and do one’s bit towards a smaller carbon footprint.

At the community level the paper points to the critical role of local government. The progressive modification of urban form will be an important part of adaptation. Intensifying housing, for example, can reduce the vulnerability of dispersed communities and at the same time help build social capital that links together different social and ethnic groups, while reducing car dependence and energy use. Health and environmental benefits can flow from this.

New Zealand cities have little high density housing and a good many large sprawling suburbs. Some attention is beginning to be given to climate change adaptation issues. The paper focuses on dealing with storm-water run-off and urban heat island effects. Trees, parks and roof-top gardens and reduction of roads and parking lots are among the measures to reduce heat effects. Passive cooling of buildings through good design and the painting white of some surfaces also works to this end. Measures to slow storm water run-off, such as rooftop collection, replacement of hard surfaces by porous paving and well-vegetated low-lying areas can reduce risks. Steps to prevent the incursion of storm water into sewerage systems are important.  

Enhanced social networks in cities and other local communities will be needed to provide closer monitoring of, and assistance to, vulnerable people and populations. Living behind locked doors with little neighbourhood contact is not a good preparation for the stresses climate change will bring.

Some needed changes require central government involvement. The paper mentions such matters as retrofitting houses to make them more energy efficient, raising standards in the Building Code, providing social housing. But it also notes that the government record to date shows little sign of advance, and that lack of government progress on mitigation makes adaptation more difficult.

Local government in New Zealand is already expected to take climate change into consideration in its planning, and is provided with useful information by the Ministry for the Environment for doing so. The kind of thinking about health impacts expressed in this paper fits well into the overall intention to “avoid or limit adverse consequences and enable future generations to provide for their needs, safety and well-being.”  Some of it overlaps with measures already recommended to councils. All of it is worth taking up in the discussions and reports that mark local government.  Central government seems trickier ground, more subject to the vagaries of ministers and politics, but one hopes that the good sense represented in papers such as this makes its way there too.

NIWA v cranks 3: the economics of truthiness Gareth Renowden Aug 18

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Bryan Leyland’s dissembling about the funding of the NZ Climate Science Coalition under direct questioning from Sean Plunkett on Monday morning’s Morning Report on RNZ National — he repeatedly asserted his ignorance of financial matters, directing Plunkett to Terry Dunleavy — puts him in an awkward position. Leyland is a trustee of the NZ Climate Science Education Trust (along with Dunleavy and Doug Edmeades), the body hastily established to request a judicial review of NIWA’s national temperature record. Before lodging papers with the High Court, the trustees should have held a properly minuted meeting and discussed how they intended to fund the action — both in terms of meeting any legal fees, or dealing with any costs awarded against them. This would be standard good governance practice in a charitable trust, and if such a meeting were held then Leyland must be fully aware of the NZCSET’s current funding, and how it expects to fund an expensive and risky legal action. If no meeting were held, or Leyland has no idea how the trust expects to fund the action, then he is failing in his duty as trustee. Perhaps this is an issue that Plunkett and Morning Report might like to follow up…

Listen to the Morning Report segment here:

Climate sceptics take NIWA to court over data

Some interesting dates: I understand that the Statement of Claim lodged with the High Court is dated July 5th, and refers to the NZ Climate Science Education Trust. However the NZCSET’s Deed of Trust (go here, and enter 2539286 in the organisation number search box) is dated July 30th so did not exist when the Statement of Claim was drawn up. The Statement of Claim also states that the NZCSET is a registered trust, but registration was not granted until August 10th. Minor administrative matters, I am sure, but hardly indicative of the creation of trust intended, as its deed says, to:

…promote a heightened awareness and understanding of, and knowledge about, the climate, environment and climate and environmental issues among scholars and researchers, members of the professions and members of the public… (Sec 4.1.1)

One might suggest that the cart was put a very long way in front of the horse. More reaction to this strange affair below the fold…

In the NZ Herald this morning Brian Rudman demonstrates the value of a long memory, and the stupidity of the CSC’s stance:

In a press release coinciding with their trip to the High Court to file papers, the coalition claims “The NZ MetService record shows no warming during the last century.”

The joke is that in February 2002, I had some fun at the MetService’s expense, revealing that for $100,000 it would happily shift a weather station anywhere a mayor requested in order to improve his or her town’s temperature on the nightly television weather spot. And who did I find to criticise this sleight of hand but none other than the deniers’ bete noir, Jim Salinger, then a senior scientist at Niwa.

My investigations had been sparked by a reader noting that Wellington seemed to share Auckland’s temperature on the telly each night, which we all knew couldn’t be true.

It turned out that Mark Blumsky, the capital’s mayor from 1995 to 2001, became unhappy with the low temperatures reported from the traditional weather recording stations at Wellington airport, the Kelburn hills and Lower Hutt and demanded MetService find a warmer spot.

MetService said name your spot, and as long as it meets certain guidelines such as being over grass, and the mayor paid $100,000 in set-up costs, that would be it.

Which is how the sheltered lawn in front of the Michael Fowler Centre became a new MetService weather station, and Wellington’s daily temperature on the telly suddenly increased by about 1.5C.

Rudman also draws attention to the real losers here — the long-suffering tax payer:

The image of the flat-earthers in court making fools of themselves, trying to prove that if you travel to the horizon you’ll fall off into oblivion, is rather appealing. But court proceedings are ruinously expensive, and while the mystery money-bags funding the coalition – Act Party supporters are mentioned – may be able to afford it, taxpayers cannot.

Yet we are the ones who will have to fund Niwa’s day in court defending itself against this attention-seeking stunt of the deniers.

Meanwhile, denier-in-chief Barry Brill provides a typically wooden response (Chair challenges Science Media Centre) to comments on the case by leading scientists, and in so doing nicely demonstrates he hasn’t got a leg to sit on:

“Most of the comments by these learned scientists is limited to ad hominem, rhetorical cant, providing little confidence that they are well-informed on either the New Zealand temperature record or its significance.”

Another sceptic who needs to learn the correct meaning of ad hominem.

At Pundit, Andrew Geddis considers some of the legal aspects of the cranks putative case — it’s worth reading all the comments there — while the Timaru Herald waxes equivocal in its leader today. And while the legal case was gestating, that loquacious polymath Bryan Leyland was happily predicting an imminent global cooling by drawing on the infamous McLean, De Freitas & Carter paper and his own gut-feeling about sunspots. I think we’ll file that hostage to fortune away for future reference…

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