Over at Auckland Trains Jon C notes: “the Western Line performance stats for January were 36.1% punctionality. Southern was only 73%.”
In other words on the Western Line 2 in every 3 trains is late. And on the Southern it is better but still 1 in every 4 trains is late. How can this be even remotely acceptable performance?
I did a quick check of the Sydney train performance stats, for January they had a 97.4% on time performance. 1 train in every 40 is late. That is 10x better performance than the best that Auckland can deliver. And yet people in Sydney are constantly moaning about the poor performance of the rail network.
A major shakeup needs to happen with Auckland’s rail network. Being electrified by 2013 is too far away, by then no one will be left to use the service.
I just watched the Top Gear America Special on TV it is a few years old but I had not seen it before. The end of the episode has a really serious side to it and Jeremy Clarkson provides a real stinging but truthful social commentary as shown in this clip:
I was surprised to learn that NZ Bus has decided to reject the Athiest Bus Ads that were to run on the buses in Auckland.
The ads were to read “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
However Auckland bus operator NZ Bus is not going to run the ads because of complaints.
I find this move odd and think in the long run that it is sets a bad prescient. The ads are not worded offensively and they are not provocative either.
If christians and other religious folk are willing to scream when prayers are removed form school, parliament, and other places etc, then surely they should be willing to stand beside the athiests when they are expressing their views with the same freedoms that they demand at other times.
Overall this is a bad move and look for the religious folk.
Jon at Auckland Trains covers from a New Zealand perspective the release of the new transport plan for Sydney.
The main features of her plan:
The $4.5 billion Western Express CityRail Service to slash travelling times from western Sydney to the city. It will achieve faster and more frequent services with a goal of up to 50 per cent more services and 17 per cent more passengers on the CityRail network on an average weekday. This will occur through: Separating a dedicated track from all other traffic;
Construction of a new five kilometre priority tunnel –City Relief Line – will be built from 2015 in the city to separate western services from inner-city trains to provide shorter journey times;
Construction of eight new platforms to increase capacity at Redfern, Central, Town Hall and Wynyard to relieve congestion;
New express train services will be introduced for the Blue Mountains, Richmond, Penrith, Blacktown and Parramatta; and Increase CityRail’s capacity on all lines and allow the introduction of express rail services to western Sydney.
Start of work on the $6.7 billion North West rail link from Epping to Rouse Hill with six stations at Franklin Road, Castle Hill, Hills Centre, Norwest, Burns Road and Rouse Hill in 2017;
A $500 million expansion of the current light rail system – bringing its total length to 16.9 kilometres with up to 20 new stations and almost 10 kilometres of new track – a more than doubling of the distance of the existing route.
I added my two cents to the discussion on his blog:
Having just moved to Sydney from Auckland only three weeks ago I have had to quickly adjust from using a car on a daily basis to having to use a bus on a daily basis and a train about twice a week.
The public transport system here is a lot bigger than Auckland and is a lot better in same ways, having said that at rush hour it is a nightmare.
There are two key problems. The first is the centralisation of all routes at the city centre, there needs to be a lot more cross town services both buses and trains. Second a lot of major bus routes need to be replaced by high capacity trains or light rail.
The shelving of the metro is a good idea. However they need to get all buses off the central CBD and replace them with trams/light rail like Melbourne, they also need to extend the train from Bondi Junction down to the South Sydney Beaches and then back up ANZAC parade to Central, this would reduce massive congestion through this area of Sydney which has been left out of this new plan.
As far as the west and north go I haven’t been there much but the investment needs to go in rail not roads and not buses.
And there you have it, my first blog on Australian politics, albeit a bit of cut and paste.
Got to love the logic of Auckland politicians sometimes.
Mayor of Auckland City, John Banks today on the release of a report that suggests that Auckland’s Public Transport will not cope with the Rugby World Cup:
“$58 million was being spent on the Eden Park precinct and thousands were expected to walk from the central city well ahead of game kick-offs.” – NZ Herald
Google Maps suggests this is a 3.6km or 47 minute walk (see here). This is quite a long way, not to mention it is up a massive hill to the top of Queen Street, then over a series of major intersections that are not predistrian friendly then down a number of suburban roads. Quite basically the roads are not designed for the foot traffic that Mayor Banks suggests they could handle.
But coming back to the title of this post, walking is not public transport. What is more shocking is that the article where Mayor Banks is quoted also suggests that:
Nearly 2km of roadside parking had to be found around Eden Park for 130 buses and the entire fleet of 38 Auckland trains would be needed on match days.
If all the trains are being pressed into service to get people to Eden Park then how is any going about their daily lives meant to get about. Surely this should have been seen well in advance and more trains be ordered or borrowed or something!
It seems that now a year out from the Cup that there is a sudden realisation that Auckland is not ready for the cup. That either the waterfront stadium should have been built (at least there would be more and easier public transport to it), or North Harbour stadium should have been used. Sure North Harbour does not have train access but it has a dedicated bus way, and plenty of car parking. The closer that you get to the cup the more you realise that what a disaster it will be using Eden Park as the main game venue.
Who wants to start a little wager on how many days into the cup it will be before there is a signal failure at Newmarket or a massive meltdown with the train system that sees many hundreds late for a match?
I don’t normally bother to look at the spam that the AA sends out once a month but for some reason today I opened it.
A little bit down the page is this ad:
This is completely crazy that a government funded education institute is offering discounts to AA members. It just doesn’t seem right. In my opinion everyone should be paying the same for publicly education not given discounts for driving carbon polluting vehicles.
Now before someone screams that I did not check the fine print, here it is:
* ‘Qualifying Courses’ means each course made available to ‘Domestic Students’ for enrolment by the Polytechnic that is Government (EFTS) funded through the Polytechnic. For clarity, this excludes the ‘full fee’ and ‘trades training’ courses as defined by the Polytechnic and other courses that may already be subject to a special promotion as defined by the Polytechnic and at the Polytechnic’s discretion. For more information about qualifying courses call the Open Polytechnic on toll free 0508 650 200. Open Polytechnic’s $50.00 annual administration fee may apply.
I sure hope someone picks up on this. Most stupid thing I have seen in a long time.
BTW AA in NZ stands for Automobile Association (called AAA elsewhere), Not Alcoholics Anonymous
The previous Labour Government used to be called the Nanny State after the number of restrictions they placed on the lives of citizens doing day to day tasks. However, one of the better things that the previous Government did was to lower the restrictions on some pharmaceutical drugs so that you would not need a doctors prescription to get access to some medications. This means that people who need the drugs but cannot afford to visit the doctor regularly for repeat prescriptions can more easily purchase what they needed.
Since the National Government took power a little over a year ago there has been a steady increase in restricting access to common and well used drugs. One of the first drugs to be restricted was pseudoephedrine which is commonly used in cold and flu medications but also used as a precursor ingredient in the manufacture of pure methamphetamine aka ‘P’. Following on from this the Government decided to make it illegal to drive while under the influence of benzodiazepines. Now the Herald reports that the government is looking at putting restrictions on the use of codeine because of “addiction fears”.
These restrictions are now beginning to get plain stupid. The government was elected on a policy of getting tough on drugs. Restricting access to common pharmaceuticals to ordinary citizens is not the approach to take on this. The major drug rings do not get the majority of their chemicals through pharmacies – they don’t get enough volumes this way, it is too expensive and too many questions get asked. Instead of restricting access and making life deliberately and unnecessarily complex for ordinary uses of common medications the government needs to invest more in the police, border security and actually targeting the major importers and cooks of the drug manufacturing process. However, this will probably require more action than hot talk, so somehow I doubt it will happen.
ABC News Australia is reporting that Prince William is not very popular in New Zealand:
Only about a dozen people turned up this morning to see Prince William fly into Auckland.
The small crowd displeased one Australian television crew so much, it decided to make up its own signs and hand them out.
A reporter from Channel Nine’s Today show was asked by her bosses to find some fans holding signs.
When she couldn’t, the reporter says she was told by the studio in Sydney to “make some up herself”.
The Channel Nine reporter wrote signs in pen saying “I love William” and gave them to a small group of women.
The reporter then did a live cross in front of the signs but did not mention they were her own creation.
The sooner we ditch the dinosaurs of the past and move into being an independent state of a greater republic of Australia the better. We have been foreign policy and trade independent for many years now. Many United Kingdomers consider themselves more part of Europe than part of the Commonwealth as we consider ourselves more part of the Pacific and sometimes South East Asia than any part of some former fallen empire.
The Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University has an interesting article in the Herald today about education funding:
Over the last thirty years, our educational institutions have created a $2.3 billion per annum export education industry – now the fifth largest export earner in the country. We can surely do it again with research.
So what would I do to bring about this change?
I would invest in education, valuing our teachers – from pre-school to professors – as the professionals they truly are. I would focus on supporting our most able students to continue on to postgraduate study and research careers, rather than terminating the very scholarships that keep our best doctoral students in New Zealand, as the government has recently done.
The removal of the highest value scholarships for PhD students by the incoming National government was an incredibly silly thing to do.
Look at the number and value of scholarships available to Australians and New Zealanders provided by the Australian Government. Look at the way they are offering massive incentives to our young doctors to move to the lucky country. It is little wonder we have such a big brain drain when our smartest are being snatched by our neighbour. And it will require more than a rugby team and national pride to keep them here.
Sadly New Zealand has been reducing its investment in the tertiary education of each student for 20 years, choosing instead to directly support students, most recently with interest free loans. This must inevitably compromise the quality of education and research at a time when other countries are investing heavily in these areas.
Interest free student loans are a good thing for supporting students and giving them opportunities they would have been unable to otherwise afford. However, as I blogged a few days ago there needs to be much tighter controls on who is allowed at university to reduce wasteful spending on those who are never going to complete their degree.
I would concentrate our research investment on “blue skies” projects, the kind that will create radical innovation, and with it undreamt-of opportunities.
After all, the single most important technology in New Zealand’s history, refrigeration, came out not because of attempts to preserve dairy and meat products so they could be exported – though that was what it achieved – but rather from fundamental university research on the thermodynamics of expanding gases.
At the moment a lot of new products come out of private enterprise in New Zealand. Most of these products are not mainstream consumer products either but rather for specialised industry. However, little of these products are information sciences based, instead they are physical products. Investing in information sciences based research at university and CRI level makes sense. If we want to succeed in the knowledge economy we must first join it (by getting into the top half and higher of the OECD averages) then we must actively lead the way in new ventures in the economy and not just follow what others are doing. How about getting past web 2.0 and start thinking about cloud 3.0?
Over at No Right Turn Idiot/Savant is calling the police “blue-uniformed thugs who decide for themselves what is and isn’t acceptable” in response to the arrest of an individual for protesting against tennis player Shahar Peer just because of her nationality.
This is nonsense on two counts. Lets first deal with the issue of the arrest of the protestor. The individual in question was using a loudhailer to voice his opinion. That message that he was being broadcast so loudly that it was being heard right across into the tennis game while the match was in question. The protestor was allowed to continue for 45 minutes before he was made to stop. That is more than enough time to make your point and if you want to continue do so – but without breaching the peace of others through the use of a loudhailer. I believe that the police did the right thing in arresting the individual for breaching the peace and did not violate his human rights unlike what NRT would want us to believe.
The second point is since when was it ever acceptable to make racist comments about an individual as a means of protest? The herald reports that the protestors were chanting: “blood, blood on your hands”, “freedom for Palestine”, “go home, Shahar”. Lets look at these slogans a little more closely because it appears that the protestors need a history lesson:
“blood, blood on your hands” now I have no idea if Peer has completed her compulsory time in the IDF as required under Israeli law, however, what is the relevance of this to a tennis match? Let alone something that you have no control over. If the protestors wanted to make this point go and protest outside the Israeli embassy or something. Don’t target an individual just because of their nationality. Not online is it naive it is also just plain stupid.
“freedom for Palestine” firstly how is protesting at a tennis match going to achieve this? The person is a tennis player not a politician! Second there is freedom in Palestine there are two countries that make up the traditional land of Palestine the Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic state of Jordan. Furthermore there are many more Islamic states throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. There is only one Jewish state.
“go home, Shahar” this is the most dumb line of them all. The protestors do not believe that the state of Israel should exist so therefore where is home? By telling Peer to go home the protestors are stuffing their message so well that they are in fact expressing their desire for Israel to actually exist. Brilliant.
And what bugs me most about this? I blogged on exactly the same incident twice lastyear.
It is amazing how fast a year, and then a decade goes by. I have spent almost half my life in the noughties and the events of the decade both locally and abroad will forever change me.
2000 of course was the start of the new millennium and despite it being 10 years ago I still remember the New Years celebrations well. In Auckland it was pouring with rain the entire night of New Years Eve there was fireworks launched off Sky Tower, the Harbour Bridge, boats in the harbour and a number of other buildings in the central city. Unfortunately, the rain did extremely well at ruining the party and all you saw was glowing clouds but no fireworks. However, early the next morning my family went out to Okahu Bay to see the first dawn of the new century. The rain clouds cleared just in time for an amazing sunrise shared with thousands of other Aucklanders. 2000 was also the year that I started high school.
2001 will for a long time be remembered as the year that the entire world changed. The terrorist attacks on America changed the world and no longer could you trust anybody as being the person they said they were. I remember waking on the morning of September 12 2001 to my mom’s radio running the news this was not unusual except it was 5.30 in the morning and not 7. Furthermore the news was turned up loud talking about attacks on America. As I lay in my bed I thought world war three had broken out. 2001 was also the year that I hurt my cartilage in my knee mucking about at school, an injury that still mucks with me today.
2002 must have been a pretty boring year as I cannot remember much from it. I believe this was the first year that I tramped to the Pinnacles but I am not sure on this.
2003 was the year that I started maturing from a kid to an adult. On April 27 I was baptised beneath Hunua Falls. I late May I started working at my first part time job as a checkout operator at the local supermarket.
2004 started fantastically well when I tramped to the top of Mt Ruapehu. It remains the best thing I have ever done in my life. 2004 was also my final year at high school.
If 2003 was the start of maturing to an adult then 2005 was the coming of age year. I started university and started to independently set my own direction in life. I also tramped the Tongariro Crossing for first time in complete white out and terrible weather conditions. An experience that still haunts me to this day.
2006 was the year that I moved out of home; it was also the start of my involvement in student politics. Other than that I can’t remember much else of what happened.
2007 saw me serve as the Vice-President of the students’ association, it was also the final year of my undergraduate degree at uni.
In 2008 I served as president of the students’ association. It was a good experience and allowed me to gain a lot of life experience.
2009 can be summed up in three words: first class honours.
The decade in review
It is amazing how fast a year, and then a decade goes by. I have spent almost half my life in the noughties and the events of the decade both locally and abroad will forever change me.
2000 of course was the start of the new millennium and despite it being 10 years ago I still remember the New Years celebrations well. In Auckland it was pouring with rain the entire night of New Years Eve there was fireworks launched off Sky Tower, the Harbour Bridge, boats in the harbour and a number of other buildings in the central city. Unfortunately, the rain did extremely well at ruining the party and all you saw was glowing clouds but no fireworks. However, early the next morning my family went out to Okahu Bay to see the first dawn of the new century. The rain clouds cleared just in time for an amazing sunrise shared with thousands of other Aucklanders. 2000 was also the year that I started high school.
2001 will for a long time be remembered as the year that the entire world changed. The terrorist attacks on America changed the world and no longer could you trust anybody as being the person they said they were. I remember waking on the morning of September 12 2001 to my mom’s radio running the news this was not unusual except it was 5.30 in the morning and not 7. Furthermore the news was turned up loud talking about attacks on America. As I lay in my bed I thought world war three had broken out. 2001 was also the year that I hurt my cartilage in my knee mucking about at school, an injury that still mucks with me today.
2002 must have been a pretty boring year as I cannot remember much from it. I believe this was the first year that I tramped to the Pinnacles but I am not sure on this.
2003 was the year that I started maturing from a kid to an adult. On April 27 I was baptised beneath Hunua Falls. I late May I started working at my first part time job as a checkout operator at the local supermarket.
2004 started fantastically well when I tramped to the top of Mt Ruapehu. It remains the best thing I have ever done in my life. 2004 was also my final year at high school.
If 2003 was the start of maturing to an adult then 2005 was the coming of age year. I started university and started to independently set my own direction in life. I also tramped the Tongariro Crossing for first time in complete white out and terrible weather conditions. An experience that still haunts me to this day.
2006 was the year that I moved out of home; it was also the start of my involvement in student politics. Other than that I can’t remember much else of what happened.
2007 saw me serve as the Vice-President of the students’ association, it was also the final year of my undergraduate degree at uni.
In 2008 I served as president of the students’ association. It was a good experience and allowed me to gain a lot of life experience.
2009 can be summed up in three words: first class honours.
2009 has been a very odd year for me, a year of many highs and extreme lows. Of trials and triumph, of hurt and pain, of joy and euphoria, of sorrow and misery, and of anticipation and expectation. And while the fifty words I have written as an introduction may be nothing more than cliché they compactly summarise my feelings at the end of one of the most dramatic years of my short life.
My year started in January (as all years do in the Gregorian calendar); at the time I was exhausted after a year of intense stress serving as President of the Students’ Association at University. The experience of student politics had left me very bitter and in a way messed up. I was in a state where I wanted to be left alone to my own devices and at the time I was actively working to avoid people and block out the year before. I managed to find some space and time to myself in the middle of Parachute music festival in late January. It is ironic that I can find solace in the middle of 30,000 people but sometimes being around people but not knowing people can be a good form of rehabilitation.
February was a much more exciting month. I spent a number of afternoons and evenings perched on the top of North Head watching America’s Cup Class yachts race in the Auckland Harbour for the first time in more than five years. Later in the month I left NZ for the first time in my life to spend two days holidaying in Melbourne. While I was over there I set myself a goal of moving to Australia to study in 2010 (a goal that I am pleased to have achieved). However, February was also the start of an intense drama in my life that carried on as a drawn out and ridiculous soap opera until mid December. For the last two years I have been going out with on and off with Malaysian Girl. However, I was not comfortable with this and after picking Malaysian Girl up from Auckland Airport at 5am one morning after flying back from holiday I explained that I was sick of the games and I wanted things to either be going out or not going out. Unfortunately for me I was not firm enough and the games continued for another 11 months.
The memories of March, April, and May are all lost in a blur. In March I started my honours degree and for the semester I put my head down and didn’t lift it to breathe again until June.
June will be remembered most for the marks that I achieved on my first semester papers. Although I have always been relatively smart and typically get good grades I have never been a straight A student, however, this changed in June when my marks for my first semester came back with 2 A+ and 1 A grade. To celebrate I went skiing at my happy place, Mt Ruapehu. The first day of skiing was in typical Whakapapa misty shit, but the second day was a beautiful bluebird day on the slopes of Turoa after 10cm of overnight snow fell.
July saw university restart for Semester Two and the rest is a blur.
August was the beginning of the end for any friendship or future with Malaysian Girl. As mentioned I was not firm enough with stopping the game playing back in February and by August it got to the ridiculous situation where I was being played off against someone else of closer ethnicity. I didn’t have a hope and within two weeks of being told that Chinese Boy was on the radar I was flicked off like an ant that tried to follow the wrong pheromone trail for far too long. This left me in a state of intense distress and the pain of how I was treated by someone who I really cared about still leaves a bitter aftertaste even now. August also saw a nice weekend away in Christchurch skiing at Porters Ski Area where I rocketed down a 400m vertical double black diamond run, not once, but twice, it is an awesome way to get the adrenaline pumping and one of the absolute highlights of my year.
In comparison to the hell of August, September was like being in another world. Early in the month I was successful in being awarded a travel grant to fly to Sydney to visit University New South Wales (UNSW). Having spent the last five years studying at the awesome but tiny Albany campus of Massey University the experience was eye opening. I also began an ill-fated relationship with West Auckland Girl.
October was a month where the hell of August began to set back in. As the end of the semester and exams drew near I began to have nasty panic attacks (something I have been fighting for two years). In an urgent bid to get my head back I decided at 2am one morning to drive to my happy place, Mt Ruapehu for a day of skiing, this was great until a) I hurt my leg and b) four days later the panic attacks were back with a vengeance. October also opened my eyes to just how bad an employer can treat a staff member and after my workplace fired a staff member and close friend on the basis of unsubstantiated and circumstantial claims shit really hit the fan. On the morning before one of my final exams I had a massive panic attack which spelt the end of my part time work, but fortunately for me I somehow aced the test.
If there was one month that was a bellweather indicator of the rest of the year it would be November. The main stress of the month was getting my thesis complete and handed in on time. No easy task when your supervisor is on the other side of the world and because of all the dramas of August and October in particular there had been little progress on it since July. In the midst of the stress was the ending of my relationship with West Auckland Girl – the second breakup in 4 months, and when I have had less than 5 serious relationships in my life it was quite a blow. However, the good thing to come from the month was starting to play summer Hockey. I am completely useless at team sports – especially ones that involve hand and eye coordination so I was stoked to score a goal in my second ever game (and since then have only scored one more).
The final month of the year, December was by far the best, all because of a few simple words: “first class honours” and “full PhD scholarship”. Despite all the trials, challenges, pain, and torment the year had thrown at me I had made it through with a few battle scars and a massive piece of treasure at the end. In hindsight there are things that I would have done differently, there are still many things that I am very bitter about, and there are things that I am sorry about, however, in saying that you cannot celebrate the good times until you have first felt the pain and suffering of the bad times. Now the question is what does the new start in life hold?
We basked through the warmest winter in 150 years and shivered through the coldest spring in decades – all during a year of weird weather.
Globally, this year was the fifth warmest in the past 130 years, and capped off New Zealand’s hottest decade on record.
But that would have been little comfort to those stuck in record snowstorms during the coldest October in six decades.
MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said three months stood out as the “weirdest weather”. A chilly May was countered by an unseasonably warm August, before temperatures plunged to record lows in October.
McDavitt said the icy spring weather was caused by troughs stalled over New Zealand because of large anticyclones over Australia – coating Sydney with dust storms while Kiwis shivered in late snowfalls.
The hottest temperature was 38C, recorded in Culverden in Canterbury on February 8.
At the moment all the Climate Change Deniers are carrying on about the massive snow falls as being proof that the world is not warming. However the point is not about a few isolated snow storms (yes the top of the USA and Europe are isolated in the size of the world), they completely missing the point claiming this. While the overall temperture of the world may be increasing becuase of this it will unsettle the weather patterns around the world and we are clearly seeing the affects of this in NZ. Instead of Winter being cold and Summer being hot we are getting dramatically changing weather patterns throughout the seasons and the year. Take a look at Winter this year – May and June coldest in decades – we even had ice and -4c in northern Albany! And then the traditional coldest month of August was warmest on recored. And lets not even start on October.
It is simple. The world’s climate is changing and I find it hard to believe that all this changes in the weather patterns are anything but caused by humans and their direct actions.
I have been watching the whole climategate saga for a few weeks now. So far I have not blogged on it because I was hoping that it would either be shown to be such the stupid smokescreen that it really is, or that there would be some truth to it and there would be some form of outcome. However, as it stands at the moment both sides are claiming victory over a situation that has become very messy.
In a nutshell: sometime in November (or earlier) the computers are the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and a large amount of emails and other data were then selective leaked onto the internet. The right wingers/nutcases/conspiracy theorist/deniers claim that this stolen data shows collusion amongst climate researchers in deliberately trying to prove climate change is man made when the data shows a decline in global temperatures. Of course this is complete and utter nonsense, the content of the emails that have been leaked are damaging to the reputation of a few scientists. However, they completely fail to prove any worldwide conspiracy.
There are two great articles that have been produced dismissing the points that have attempted to be made by climategate. The first is from New Scientist:
We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer
Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.
You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.
Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong? It is incredibly unlikely. The evidence that CO2 levels are rising is irrefutable, and the idea that rising levels lead to warming has withstood more than a century of genuine scientific scepticism.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ’smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
Back in New Zealand we have had our own little mini conspiracy theory with Ian Wishart among others trying to claim that NIWA have deliberately altered their data to artificially create a warming trend. The truth is they have deliberately altered their data but only to adjust changes in the physical locations of weather stations. NIWA has close to a 100 years of data and over time both the way in which you collect data and the instruments use change as a result the data collected by one method has to be adjusted to match up with the data collected through a different method. This is standard scientific practice. In fact if you didn’t do this any analysis done over time would be wrong! But because the scientists at NIWA have done the right thing the crazy climate change deniers are claiming a conspiracy.
So here we have NIWA with this plot of adjusted data:
and the deniers with this plot of unadjusted data:
The most interesting thing about both of these plots is in the end of both of them I can see an overall rise trending!
A few days ago NIWA responded to the nutcases who are claiming conspiracy everywhere by producing a plot of only the 11 weather stations that have not been moved or adjusted (see below) note that the rise is 1C and the P-Value (extremely small this an absolutely confirmed rise there is no arguing with it). Now the conspiracy crazies are claiming the graph should include all weather stations and thus a circle begins.
For more on the stupidity of Climategate there are some good blogs on Open Parachute:
. Open Polytechnic’s $50.00 annual administration fee may apply.
