New Zealand’s “Warming” Is Based On Temperature Adjustments & Artificial Airport Heat Islands
By Paul Homewood
Graeme Hook left this comment yesterday:
Unfortunately Wayback does not have a copy of the earlier Berkeley Earth graph; if anybody can track it down, give me a shout.
However what I have found is just as interesting.
Let’s start with the current Berkeley Earth graph for New Zealand:
https://berkeleyearth.org/temperature-region/new-zealand
Since the 1880s, temperatures have risen by about 1C, up to 2020. Most of this increase has occurred since the 1950s.
This is more or less in line with the GISS chart of adjusted temperature data for Auckland Int Airport – (ignore the 2023 spike):
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v4.cgi?id=NZM00093110&ds=15&dt=1
However the unadjusted data tells a completely different story; as is often the case, GISS have cooled the past, by about half a degree. In particular, there appears to have been little increase since the 1950, prior to last year:
Far from cooling the past at Auckland, GISS should be doing the opposite.
There are, apparently, two weather stations at Auckland Int Airport. This is the location of the one that GISS quote:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/homr/#ncdcstnid=30095746&tab=LOCATIONS
It’s on top of a roof of an airport building, in the middle of the airport complex. But a closer look shows it is just yards from a number of air conditioning vents:
The other station is no better, about 20m from the tarmac:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/homr/#ncdcstnid=30151541&tab=LOCATIONS
What is absolutely certain is that the airport would have looked much different in the 1950s. It started life in 1928 as a dairy field with three Gypsy Moths.
In 1965, when the first commercial flight took off, a DC8 to Sydney, it looked like this:
Over the years, of course, the airport has been massively expanded, and now handles 16 million passengers a year, now looking like this:
The so-called New Zealand temperature record, which claims to show significant warming since the 19thC, is based on heavily adjusted data and artificial,warming at airports. It has no basis at all in reality.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
More of the same old climate change fraud. And of course , they can get away with it (perhaps better to say they are rewarded handsomely for their fraud – sounds a bit like the Post Office / Horizon scandal).
Quite so.
CBEs all round!
(Climate Bribes Extraordinaire)
Governments not serving their people. It’s happening throughout the West.
Governments serving their interests, and not their people’s, are totalitarian. In a word, evil.
I wonder if NZ MPs have an equivalent to our CEN…
A universal explanation to rising temperatures due to man – Follow the Money, Not the science
So every thermometer in NZ was reading significantly lower than reality for 100 years or so then suddenly they weren’t?
And that was caused by what?
There is no way this is correct. Homogenised averages with random errors would not all adjust the same amount in the same direction. The algorithms are deliberately cooling.
I have constructed a regional average maximum temperature history for NZ back to 1863, UHI is not an issue in the result, it shows a 1C warming over the 20th century, in line with that found for “nearby” South East Australia:
Analysis details: https://diymetanalysis.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/example-04-new-zealand-tmax/
Of course UHI is an issue here as is the funding of NIWA and other NZ institutes by special policies to promote AGW (55 million from the Labour party to journalism), just Wellingtons station is notorious for reading higher than the rest of the region, right now it’s reading 19 C at 7.11 in the morning while it’s dark with a cold wind outside and I have 19 C on a cheap instrument in my bedroom.
“The nationwide average temperature for 2023 calculated from NIWA’s seven station series was 13.61˚C, being 0.87˚C above the 1991-2020 annual average. Both minimum and maximum temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record. New Zealand’s three warmest years on record have all occurred in the last three years.5 days ago”
Meanwhile..
Quote from C. R. de Freitas; Christopher Rhodes de Freitas was a New Zealand climate scientist. He was an associate professor in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland.
“New Zealand was one of the first countries in the Southern Hemisphere to establish an official nationwide system of weather records. These records provide a rare long time series for temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, informing the data sparse interpolations required for early temperature series. Extant 1868 archives record the national normal mean surface temperature at 13.1 °C (when converted from degrees Fahrenheit) being the average of 10+years read at six representative weather stations.”
I live in NZ, there is no way we are experiencing record heat as claimed by the NZ media via NIWA.
People are not putting up home swimming pools but pulling then down and it was much hotter 23 years ago in Wellington.
Yes, temperatures in cities are higher than in rural sites, but it is temperature CHANGE that matters, not absolute values. Temperatures in rural sites differ due to several influences, such as elevation, but that does not invalidate any of them.
Climanrecon. You stipulate CHANGE to back up the nonsense that Graeme has exposed. If you read Paul’s article, the only major change is the development of the airfield and the siting of the temperature measuring devices (not MET standard Stephenson screens), not to mention the advent of the jet age. As usual, rubbish in, rubbish out.
As an addendum, I used to park my Airbus A340 and Boeing 747 tails pointing onto the weather station site. Air at 350°C would rush out of all 4 engines and envelope the ‘thermometer’. If the half-hourly measurement was taken (by a human until very recently) as I was doing so (or any other jet was parking/starting up) then you can imagine the ensuing ‘phew it’s a scorcher’ result.
climanrecon, you appear to have a strange view of UHI.
Roy Spencer’s work showed categorically that UHI was the cause of not just the difference, but also the change in temperatures to get to that difference for cities and towns.
I see that Chris de Freitas sadly died of cancer in 2017. He was an attack victim of the climategate crew, Mann, Jones et al:
https://www.cato.org/commentary/climategate-whitewash-continues#
The BoM (Aust) have been adjusting temps since at least 2007 with the use of HQD and later ACORN. Attached is the original graph that showed adjustments – note those prior to 1960. These have been adjusted even further – for instance , 1914 has been reduced from a mean of 0.51C to 0.13C. From at least 2000-2017, mean av temps have been adjusted upwards by between 0.1C – 0.2C. 2001 and 2011 were originally years with below average annual means – not any more they’re not. GISS NASA and HADCRUT are the same with their adjustments. They all started panicking around 2008 when the temps started to ‘plateau’.
Sorry – forget to link.
Click to access 5-ACORN-SAT-TAF-TOR3.pdf
Adjusted data is contaminated data. Reject.
It’s not even data.
It’s data, Jim – but not as we know it!
If all the worlds temperature measuring instruments are located at or close to airport runways, and in the last couple of decades there has been a massive increase in aeroplane traffic ….well you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to note the increase in temperature is in direct proportion to the number of aircraft taking off and landing
It’s those private jets heading to COP and the WEF.
That would work if all the World’s temp sensors had been sited at jet airports a hundred years ago…Oh, hang on…got a call from some guy called Whittle….
Once I have confirmation that all temperature data published today is from the identical locations, situations and methodology to those measured in the 19th century and earlier, I’ll be inclined to believe them.
Data from satellites compared with whatever was to hand a couple of hundred years ago are as unlikely to match as chalk and cheese.
Jump to the conclusion in this reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand by C. R. de Freitas and we see no warming outside of margins of error.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267568082_A_Reanalysis_of_Long-Term_Surface_Air_Temperature_Trends_in_New_Zealand
From Christchurch NZ. My opinion is that it is still New Zealand Summer holiday time and the newsmedia still on duty
have to fill the web pages as they do the newspaper columns each day with recycled news. Otherwise we have pages of pet dogs being rescued .Sea lions blocking roads and rehashes of old murder stories and reuniting families after generations. Pity the poor editors.
Is the empirical data available in the original format ? i.e. untampered.
Auckland airport is part-owned by Auckland Council, does the NZ equivalent of “Freedom of Information” apply ?
Wayback archive for BEST NZ temps:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161015101338/http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/new-zealand
Incredible sham from NIWA
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/2011/08/fraud-or-fumble-from-niwa/