Yesterday Alison Collins, Chief Science Advisor at the Ministry for the Environment, penned a doom-spruiking op-ed for the Dompost.
Our ‘Chief Science Advisor’ begins her piece, which is headlined “Oceans are like the planet’s heart, and they’re ailing”, with a fairy-tale (no, I’m not kidding): “In The Lion King Mufasa called it the ‘circle of life’…” and continues in similar vein, with more fairy-tales.
One tall-tale, though, wouldn’t make it past even the Brothers Grimm’s fact-checkers. They’d say it was too ridiculous to print because nobody would believe it. Here it is:
“Our Marine Environment, 2019 reports that New Zealand coastal waters have, on average, warmed 0.2 degrees per decade since 1981.”
Crikey! 0.2 degrees per decade, you must be kidding me, that’s more than three times the supposed global average; how can this possibly be?
Just over two years ago we were assured that the entire era of satellite monitoring (since 1993) showed zero temperature increase: “No sea-surface temperature trend could be determined for New Zealand’s oceanic, subtropical, and subantarctic waters and the Tasman Sea for 1993 to 2016. Trends were assessed at the 95 percent confidence level.” And here it is, in colour; Zero, Nothing, Niet:
What happened? Oh, what a miracle! – Alison found data we don’t have and retrofitted them to the record to make her fairy-tale come true, in exactly the same way land-temperature records have been fiddled by continuously cooling the past records to ‘prove’ warming. Alison produces a nice bar-graph in her report, to which I added the trend-line:
As you can see, all of Alison’s ‘warming’, all 0.65 degrees of it, occurs in a single decade (at ten times the global average), a period for which we simply do not have accurate satellite data.
Isn’t it amazing what Alison can do with data? Please sit up straight and pay attention, for Alison is a very settled ‘scientist’ and if she tells you fairy-tales, you jolly well better believe her.
