Bite the second

Let me take a second bite at Gareth Renowden’s toxic commentary on the new national temperature reanalysis.

Remember that Renowden says in his vitriolic post:

dFDB 2014 repeats the old canard that NIWA’s Seven Station Series (7SS) before the 2010 review was based on the adjustments made in Jim Salinger’s 1981 thesis. This was … so transparently at odds with written reports and papers from 1992 onwards that it was easy for NIWA to refute.

There are two rebuttals I can make:

1. NIWA told us the methodology was in the thesis.
2. Renowden told us the methodology was in the thesis.

1. NIWA’s first citation to us of Salinger’s thesis after we requested the methodology of adjustments to the national temperature series (7SS) in 2009 was in a letter from their counsel dated 29 January, 2010. NIWA scientists instructed the amiable Tim Mahood, their corporate solicitor, to tell us that we’d find the methodology we wanted in the thesis. It’s plain in his letter:

3. You asked about adjustments made to the seven station data series. Information regarding those adjustments is available from the following publicly available sources [including]:
• Salinger, M.J., 1981. New Zealand Climate: The instrumental record. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Victoria University of Wellington, January 1981;

Renowden now claims that was never true. But we took it as true at the time, spending many voluntary hours obtaining the thesis and studying it in a vain attempt to understand how the adjustments were made.

2. On 8 February 2010, under the title Treadgold and the NZ CSC: dogging a fled horse, Renowden wrote:

Everything is in the public domain. This is what happens in real science: knowledge exists in the literature. In fact, a lot of it is in Jim Salinger’s PhD thesis, a copy of which has been in the VUW library since 1981. Appendix C covers the details, I’m told. I could order it through my local library, if I really wanted to check the details. But even without that information, the CSC/CCG could take the raw data and the station histories and, using statistical techniques readily available in the literature construct their own long-term temperature series. That would be an independent replication of the method used by Jim Salinger and NIWA over the years.

So five years ago he said that the adjustment methodology was in Salinger’s thesis, and there are other passages in which he says the same thing. Yesterday he said we were making it up. He has either a short or a selective memory but either way he cannot be trusted.

Supplementary questions: Which NIWA scientist lied to their own solicitor? Who recently inspired Renowden to repeat reverse the lie?

 

Views: 106