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.
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, the hot streak was probably unprecedented in history. Based on Met Service data, the average daily maximum for the ten 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.
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 ten day stretches above 30C, the hottest formal ten 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.
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, Gibson chose not to correct her false story by adding a comparison to the 1935 temperatures, which meant that listeners and readers could not put Hamilton’s climate change “unprecedented” 15 day hot streak in context against a genuine 63 day heatwave 90 years ago that left Hamilton surrounded by wildfires and residents choking in the smoke.
Follow the link to read the full story at Centrist.nz.
