My first big doubts about global warming came when I found out about the temperature data manipulation at NASA (climategate - USA edition). The recent hacking scandal at UEA (climategate - UK edition) put me firmly on the skeptic camp. Now confirmation comes from the other side of the world that indeed the global warming campaign is a bogus scheme for some hidden agenda.

Climategate Scandal Spreads to New Zealand as MSM Continues Ostrich Act

By P.J. Gladnick
November 26, 2009 - 11:32 ET

Oops! If the mainstream media was hoping that the Climategate
scandal would be limited to the University of East Anglia's Climate
Reasearch Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, they are out of luck. This
scandal has now reared its ugly head on the other side of the globe at
New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research
(NIWA)  which is that nation's chief climate advisory unit.

Watts Up With That? reposting from New Zealand's TBR.cc Investigate magazine's breaking news forum explains this latest development in the widening Climategate scandal: 

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that
corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU
climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s website
suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.

A warming trend! This must be serious enough to shout "ManBearPig!"  And here is a NIWA graph of the supposed warming trend:

Here is the caption under that NIWA graph:

Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand,
from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from
1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual
differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a
smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear
trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).

Mama, save me! I'm scared! But wait. Watts Up With That? provides us with a very important caveat in the form of another graph:

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and
instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming,
consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the
Little Ice Age in 1850.

The revelations are published today in a news alert from The Climate Science Coalition of NZ:

Straight away you can see there’s no slope—either up or down. The
temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course,
the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays
level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.

Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?

Yeah? What is going on? Why did NIWA frighten your humble correspondent?

Why does NIWA’s graph show strong warming, but graphing
their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows
warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!

Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?

It is relatively easy to find out. We compared raw data for each
station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which
we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the
years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we
might discover the truth.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable.
There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished
to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where
none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All
the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only
one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original
trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way
down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression
of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station
histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA
have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge
1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no
apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past
156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions
of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s
a disgrace.

NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per
century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the
globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century
was only about 0.6°C.

Pardon the interruption here but does anybody else notice how it is
the much maligned blogosphere that is doing the detailed footwork that
the mainstream media should, but won't, do? Okay, I return you now to
the unfolding Climategate scandal:

NIWA’s David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this
afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims
NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward.
Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this
afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.

“Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?”

“No, no,” replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science
Coalition and accusing them of “misleading” people about the
temperature adjustments.

Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt
scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently
claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were
“destroyed” or “lost”, meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.

So far this New Zealand scandal remains unreported in the American MSM but, to its credit, there is a report
on this latest Climategate outbreak across the pond by James Delingpole
the UK Telegraph. Meanwhile, if the U.S. media ever pull their ostrich
heads out of the sand, they will have a huge amount of catching up to
do in this scandal.

—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.