If, as they insist, the Climate Cultists have The Science™ 100 per cent on their side, why do they have to lie so much? Whether it’s claiming that ‘global warming is causing hurricanes to increase in frequency and intensity’ (in fact, both are at historic lows) or Antonio Guterres posing beside a house in Samoa which he claimed had been abandoned ‘because of sea level rise’ (when, in fact, the owners abandoned it when it was damaged by the 2009 earthquake and tsunami), the supposed arbiters of ‘settled science’ can’t help spouting the most audacious whoppers.
Few more audacious than their constant shrieking of ‘hottest on record’. State broadcasters like the ABC in Australia are frequently the worst offenders. New Zealand’s Centrist has caught out NZ’s own state broadcaster getting in on the disinformation game.
State broadcaster RNZ News has been caught publishing blatant climate change misinformation, after their top climate reporter and RNZ’s CEO chose to hide key data from listeners that would have shown her work was faulty.
As you might have guessed, it’s the Ol’ Reliable for the Climate Cult: ‘hottest on record’.
Eloise Gibson last month published a story, originally headlined “Hamilton’s run of hot days shatters previous record”, which claimed that Hamilton in the previous 11 days had likely just experienced its longest stretch of hot days since temperature records began.
The story was based on some preliminary calculations by one of Waikato University’s top climate scientists, Luke Harrington, who noted that the average maximum temperature of an official 10 day streak in Hamilton from 31 January to 9 February this year was higher than 2018, 2019 and even higher than 1998 – the previous record-holder.
Harrington stated that even though the records he had only went back to the early 90’s [sic], the hot streak was probably unprecedented in history.
Based on Met Service [sic] data, the average daily maximum for the 10 days was 28.63C. RNZ’s Gibson wrote that the hot streak “likely beats anything the city has experienced since temperature records began”. She defined the streak as days above 27C, and the streak expired at 15 days.
Like similarly hysterical claims about Australia’s 2019–20 bushfires, all anyone had to do was read a few old newspapers to see that it was all so much bunkum. In fact, as was the case for the rest of the globe, the 1930s were a hot period to knock any recent decade into the shade.
Unfortunately for both Gibson and Harrington, historic newspaper records revealed Hamilton endured an almost unbroken streak of 63 days above 27C in the summer of 1934/35, and although there were numerous 10 day stretches above 30C, the hottest formal 10 day stretch averaged 32.66C–more than 4C higher than anything Hamilton has experienced under climate change since the 1990s. The 1934/35 heatwave beats everything Hamilton has experienced in NZ’s so-called hottest decade, since 2016.
Don’t expect the Cult to come clean when they’re caught out, though. It’s all about the Narrative.
So, what did Eloise Gibson do? On advice from Waikato Uni’s Harrington – who appears to have wanted to keep what he told Gibson was the “broader messaging” intact […]
What was climate scientist Harrington’s broader messaging? “Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely,” he claimed in an email.
That’s ‘Post-Normal Science’ for you. If you’re wondering what that means, it’s a term coined by alarmist climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who argued that it was more important for scientists to influence political policy than tell the truth. I’m not making that up.
Implicit in that response was an embarrassing admission for one of the world’s leading experts in Extreme Weather Event Attribution (the attempt to link extreme weather to climate change, regarded by some climate scientists as pseudoscience): it was possible that the 2025 event, the hottest 10 day stretch since the early 90s, might indeed have been dwarfed by 1935 or other historic heatwaves buried in old records misplaced by NIWA.
Even though Harrington was now conceding the 2025 event might not be the hottest, Gibson apparently didn’t want the facts getting in the way of the “broader messaging”, and she refused to add the new data.
This is where RNZ News goes from misinformation to outright disinformation: knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth for malicious or deceptive purposes.
RNZ Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson signed off on an Editorial Policy manual last year which says, under “Accuracy”:
“Factual work must conform to reality, be in context and not in any way misleading or false… Research for all material must be thorough. Staff must be prepared to check, cross-check and seek advice… Check facts and statistics, identifying qualifying factors… Facts must be presented in a clear, not misleading, fashion… accuracy can also be compromised by the omission of relevant facts.”
Under the heading “Correcting Mistakes”, Thompson writes:
“RNZ will not hesitate to correct an error when it is established one has been made. To do otherwise would inevitably lead to loss of credibility.”
What makes the RNZ “fake news” story much more serious is that the same Editor-in-Chief, Paul Thompson, appears to have signed off on the cover-up.
And all it took was a simple search of old newspapers.
If you punch the words “Hamilton” and “heat wave” (separate, not joined in the modern style) in the PapersPast database, and choose Waikato newspapers, the trail will lead you in seconds to the summer of 1934/35.
Harrington could have done it. Gibson should have done it. But neither did.
This is what you get for your taxes, New Zealand.
There’s a lot more damning stuff to this story, so be sure to check out the full article.
