Yesterday I stumbled on a story that, for me at least as scandalous as the covid19 story. It relates to New Zealand’s public bodies and the weather.
I stumbled across reference on X to this headline
New Zealand records third-warmest winter on record
This winter was New Zealand’s third-warmest since records began, the country’s climate monitoring agency says.
Earth Sciences New Zealand’s (ESNZ) winter climate summary showed the average temperature across the country over June, July and August was 9.7C – 1.1C above the 1991-2020 winter average.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/weather/1258085/new-zealand-records-third-warmest-winter-on-record
I will tell my story but first I will say this. I used to be a believer in the most extreme version of the climate change movement (‘abrupt climate change’), but being confronted by the lies of the covid era was led to reassess my previous assumptions and adopt a more open minded approach.
I am a great believer in observational, empirical science and an enemy of computer models that I have learned over the years are more likely than not to distort things to suit vested interests. Something along the lines of ‘garbage in- garbage out’.
I have, as you will see, been aware of this for several years.
Quite simply, information put out by government agencies (I am talking here of NIWA that has now morphed with Metservice to become Earth Sciences NZ) is spurious to say the least making NIWA, in my mind,outside the Ministry of Health, the most corrupt and opaque public body in the country.
I still have the certain knowledge, based on real data and personal experience, that climate systems in NZ and globally have become very dysregulated.
My point-of-reference is a personal one.
The last year, living in Wellington, that I experienced frosts where I broke ice puddles was 2003 on early horse rides.
Since then we have not returned to anything like in the intervening years until the last year or so when the cooler weather (albeit just as strange and unpredictable as previous years), returned.
The climate was quite stable throughout the earlier part of my life and in fact from the early lifetime of my father in the early 20th century.
So, for me the facts of a changing climate and climate dysregulation are not up for debate.
However, I have come to the conclusion that much of what we are being told – the narrative – is largely false and some of it demonstrably so.
But back to my story.
THE 3RD WARMEST WINTER ON RECORD’
Yesterday before rushing off I stumbled across a post on X which referred to an article from RNZ that has been plastered across the national media.
New Zealand records third-warmest winter on record
I posted the tweet onto Telegram and forgot about it. However, when I came back and tried to open it I encountered the following messages.
X had a message treating the tweet as if it contained “inappropriate content”, abuse or something.
Of course it didn’t!
It was more along the lines of this tweet that I did manage to capture.
Many people around the country would agree.
I don’t think for a minute that this was internal to X.
This was the New Zealand government using methods available to it to stifle any online discussion about what is an outrageous piece of government propaganda.
I find it very alarming because of what it tells us about how things are changing in terms of what we can and cannot say and what we are allowed to know. I have the feeling that the noose is tightening around us.
Never mind AI and deep fakes.
In addition to that we now have the government seemingly now able to censor what we see on social media.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, although the statistical odds tell me otherwise but a strange thing happened when I went looking for articles I had written in the mid-2010s.
I found them but with great difficulty. The search engine on Blogspot worked fine for some of the articles I was looking for but everytime I entered the terms “Metservice, winter weather” to find the article below I got an error message.
This happened, not once, but up to five times with several successful searches in between.
https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2018/08/lieslies-and-statistics-reported.html
I finally found what I wanted through finding internal links contained within other articles. I emailed the articles to myself and even took the precaution of sending them on to a second email address.
THE REALITY OF THE SITUATION
Anyone who notices anything and has walked out of their heated homes will have noticed that this last winter, far from being the third warmest on record will know that this has been one of the coldest (albeit with the weather swings that come with climate dysregulation!) that we have seen in several years.
Frosts appeared again in many parts of the country and this has been noticed by many.
My own brother in Taupo took a spill because he slipped on the ice on the ramp leading up to his house.
Now, I get regional variations.
The North Island may have been colder and parts of the South Island warmer. These statistical aberrations usually get smoothed out when you get the averages and there is no way in the world that this can translate into the reported “third warmest winter on record”.
These people must take us for fools.
An interesting sideline was that none of the media articles linked to a source from Niwa/Earth Sciences NZ and indeed on searching I could not find any such report on the search engines, not that I would have been any the wiser.
I think I was already onto all this 8 years ago when I wrote an article,
https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-are-actual-termpetures-4-degrees.html
I shall now go into more detail.
EL- NINO OF THE MID 2010s
If I go back to the mid-2010s, 2018 in particular, we were in the grip of a major el-Nino.
Temperatures were much higher than the norm.
We were in drought and I remember going on expeditions up the Hutt River to chronicle it all. we had a serious marine heat wave that affected fish migration patterns.
When I was reporting on it regularly using temperature anomaly data from Climate Reanalyzer, there was silence from NIWA and the media.
It was only when the Labour government came into power that the organisation started reporting on this.
In particular, it was the winter that I particularly noticed.
I have a vivid recollection of those days but I have tracked down the articles I wrote at the time.
2018 was the year that I recorded maximum and minimum temperatures every day. What was noteworthy was that every day the temperatures I was recording were 5 degrees Celsius higher than what was being reported by Metservice on the internet.
https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2018/08/lieslies-and-statistics-reported.html
I decided to do a little factchecking and rang Metservice and got through to a real human being (those were the days when that was still possible. the riddle was solved very quickly.
What I have noticed and have been recording is how daily temperatures have been warmer than that reported by Metservice. In particular the minimum temperatures have been much warmer than what one would “expect” and what has been reported on the internet.
For example the other day the minimum night-time termperature was a toasty 12 degrees Celsius whereas Metservice reported the minimum temperature as being 8 degrees Celsius.
The maximum temperature for the day was reported as 12 degrees. It was over this at breakfast time and reached almost 20 degrees!
I decided to ring Metservice to get their explanation for this state of affairs.
After a long-winded explanation from a helpful meteorologist it turned out that the situation is that the temperatures I read every day are a forecast the comes from a model which uses average temperatures as part of the equation.
In other words, nothing that has any bearing with reality!!
So, we had real temperatures that were 5C higher than recorded. This was never mentioned anywhere and when Niwa produced their report for the winter of 2018 they blandly mentioned “a mild winter for much of the country and dry in parts of the South Island” and the “6th-warmest winter on record”.
Here is their report.
https://niwa.co.nz/climate-and-weather/seasonal/winter-2018
I hardly think so.
And I didn’t think so at the time.
Now we have the coldest winter that people can remember and yet it is the 3rd warmest on record – warmer than anything we had during a strong el-Nino in 2018?!!
So, I think we have fraud aplenty, (and yes, I will call it that).
It happened on both sides of the ledger on the climate debate, depending on which government was in power.
I wish, finally, to mention some points to illustrate this.
First, on one side of the ledger of the climate change debate.
JIM SALINGER
I first want to mention Jim Salinger who was a climate scientist employed by Niwa until he was sacked in 2009 for going off the official reservation for going to the media with the truth.
It is interesting to me that the sceptic climate researcher, Ian Wishart does not question Salinger’s credibility – only NIWA’s (see below).
Early in the 2010s NIWA scientists produced a report on warming in New Zealand. Salinger and colleagues produced a paper showing a higher level of warming based on observations from a wider selection of weather stations than Niwa.
This was taken to the High Court in 2010 but the Climate Science Education lost the case although the truth is plain to see to those that look.
Two other things I shall mention.
Jim Salinger was the one to mention that the first thing New Zealanders would notice would be the winter weather – the disappearance of frosts.
With the exception of this year, the “3rd warmest on record” (sic) this is indeed the case.
A few years ago I was passively involved in an ambush interview with Jim Salinger with the main role played by leftist ideologue, Kevin Hester.
https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2015/11/drjim-salinger-on-rapid-climate-change.html
I am deeply ashamed of my involvement in this interview to this day.
THE GLACIERS
In the mid-2000s I was involved in studying changes in the Southern Alps.
I recall articles from overseas on this but noted what I saw as a lack of coverage in the NZ media.
But on checking there has been coverage including this report that originated with Salinger.
I don’t know how I missed it.
This is all part of the empirical, observational science that I mentioned and not computer modelling, still less IPCC projections.
Apparently, there has been (during the “warmest years on record”) some reported limited recovery in the glaciers.
On the other side of the ledger
IAN WISHART
I come now to Ian Wishart, a climate change sceptic researcher I have come to respect for his rigour.
I reported on a book he wrote some years ago that helped me reevaluate everything I thought I knew about global warming during the covid area.
Modifying one’s assumptions in the light of new evidence
·
21 February 2024
27 March, 2023
Since then he has been particularly scathing of NIWA and revealed that pronouncements by NIWA that such-and-such extreme event was the worst on record were fake.
It took him minimal time and effort to go back to the historical record and demonstrate that events in the 1860s were more serious by far, and he did this time-after-time.
Here he is interviewed by Sean Plunket.
He has recently written an open letter to political leaders.
https://centrist.nz/ian-wishart-an-open-letter-to-political-leaders-on-climate-extremes
THE HUNGA HUNGA ERUPTION
In 2022 there was an unprecedented volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga – Hunga Hunga – that released a massive ash plume that reached the stratosphere. While there have been studies done by NIWA on tsunami monitoring and the oceanographical impact there has also been landmark research by the University of Auckland that has demonstrated the huge impact this has had on the world’s climate.
There have been articles on this in overseas media but although this research heavily involved the University of Auckland there has not, to my knowledge, been not a peep from New Zealand media or public organisations, presumably because it does not suit the ruling narrative.
Indications of the Hunga Tonga Eruption as Prime Suspect Behind Recent Temperature Spike
·
9 February 2025
Is this the reason why in New Zealand there is scarcely a word about the Hunga-Hunga volcanic eruption despite it being in our backyard?
CHRIS BRANDALINO
Finally, I have to mention Chris Brandalino, principle scientist – forecasting at NIWA, very much the public voice of NIWA on weather matters.
A few years ago, in 2016, he did a TV interview in which he spoke candidly on the el- Nino.
He was obviously pulled over the coals by his bosses for his candour for he appeared on RNZ with a totally different tone, saying it was uncertain and needed “more research”
Well, catastrophic climate change has made it onto the soundwaves of mainstream television in the form of an interview with the infamous Paul Henry.
You can see that NIWA scientist Chris Brandolino is more than slightly anxious to get his message out. To be fair Paul hears him out until a certain point where he collapses into nervous laughter and the interview is more or less complete.
https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2026/09/chris-brandalini-interviewed.html
He appears to be kept on a very short leash to this very day.
See this.
How political narratives distort scientific research
23 Feb
I woke up this morning geeling cold in bed at a time that is \traditionally, our hottest month.
CONCLUSION
As I have pointed out the new pronouncements from NIWA are spurious to say the least, probably false for the reasons I have elucidated.
It is evident that it has metamorphosed from underplaying climate change under the John Key government of 2008-16 into an organisation, under Jacinda Adern and beyond, into one pushing a climate change narrative that suits the government of the day but often ignoring or underplaying research that matters and making false pronouncements about the weather record and extreme weather events.
It has to be asked, why do they have to lie.
I have to come back to my earlier point. After the obvious example of the Ministry of Health and its covid narrative NIWA (or rather, Earth Sciences NZ into which the very good Metservice has been subsumed), is the most corrupt and opaque government bodies in the country.
Photo Credit: pixabay.com
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