There's more on this at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_nz2.pdf http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_... [PDF

There's more on this at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_nz2.pdf http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_... [PDF], including some more detailed graphs at the end. Full disclosure: I'm coming at this from the initial point of view that the global warming folks are probably right, primarily because all of my experience with scientists in other fields (mostly physics and biology) has taught me that the scientific "establishment" is generally far more interested in seeking the actual truth than pandering to convenient politics. However, without explanation for why the slopes of the graphs were shifted during the adjustments, I'd say there's some definite cause for concern here. At the very least, these adjustments should be explained in detail so the rationale can be examined. Back on the other hand, I'm very suspicious of a blanket statement that there's no reason to apply any adjustments here, especially coming from someone that opportunistically publishes this right on the heels of a very negative PR blitz against AGW. So I think we should reserve judgment until the people that made these adjustments explain in detail how they calculated them; it's very possible that they had excellent reasons to adjust things the way they did, but they really ought to provide the supplemental data sets that are required to compute these adjustments if they want to save face here. And I absolutely agree that the fact that this information is missing in the first place is unacceptable in a scientific field; future AGW researchers need to learn a lesson from all of this, that even if they are right, they need to tread carefully because of the intense scrutiny they are under. And by "tread carefully" I mean treat your data as rigorously and make it available as easily as if this was any other scientific pursuit. Evolutionary biologists are under a lot of fire, too, from a lot of the same asshats that are funding anti-AGW work, but you don't see them witholding data or stonewalling people asking questions, at least until they become obnoxious or take the argument past science. You only get to shout people down once they already have access to all the data they need in order to see (if only they weren't so dense) that you are right! Edit: it's worth noting that the only references I've seen on any of this come straight from the blog post, not from NIWA itself. So I don't know if we can trust those pictures at all, or if perhaps the alterations are, in fact, explained somewhere.