Courtroom Chaos as New Zealand Skeptics Rout Government Climatists
New Zealand skeptics of man-made global warming score historic legal victory as discredited government climate scientists perform U-turn and refuse to allow a third party peer-review report of official temperature adjustments to be shown in court. Skeptic lawyers move for sanctions likely to prove fatal to government’s case.
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) are reeling after what may prove a fatally embarrassing admission that it is breaking a solemn undertaking given to parliament. NIWA had assured ministers that it would disclose a third party peer-reviewed report of its science for courtroom verification as part of its defense against a petition in the case of NZ Skeptics-v-NIWA.
NIWA’s decision renders an almighty self-inflicted wound to the government agency’s already dire credibility. But worse, the move will be regarded as contempt of court and thus permits the court to grant the plaintiff’s motions for punitive sanctions, including summary judgment. As such, this would bring a swift victory for skeptics with profound legal ramifications around the world. In the sparsely-measured southern hemisphere the New Zealand climate data is critical to claims about a verified global temperature record.
At a stroke this case may affirm that up to one quarter of our planet’s climate records have been fraudulently audited. As such this provides compelling legal ammunition to other pending/ongoing lawsuits that have arisen in the aftermath of the Climategate scandal. Immediate ramifications will be felt in Canada where popular skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball is defending two vexatious libel suits against IPCC climatologists. Of those cases the one most likely to be impacted is that of Andrew Weaver-v-Tim Ball currently underway in the British Columbia Supreme Court. Weaver was lead author of a chapter on Global Climate Projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s report Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis . Weaver took exception to Ball’s widely-published denouncements of cherry-picking models.
Last year NIWA gave an undertaking to the Kiwi Parliament that it would permit external peer-review by scientists from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). This evidence was to be presented to the court to help resolve a drawn out legal battle to prove whether or not NIWA had cooked the country’s climate books. Lawyers for the jubilant skeptics are to motion for an adverse inference against the defendants on the grounds that they intentionally have “spoliated” the evidence (spoliation is the withholding/destroying of evidence).
As with the Kiwi case, over in Canada Tim Ball is having a hard time getting his court adversaries to be forthcoming in releasing their hidden data and records. As in any common law jurisdiction, when a litigant refuses to comply with the opposing party’s motions for disclosure then spoliation doctrine comes into play. Persistent refusal by any party in a lawsuit to hand over evidence on request renders them liable to severe sanctions. As with his Kiwi counterparts Ball will be hoping to win the adverse inference. If granted in these cases the jury will be directed to rule that the party withholding the evidence has done so “from a consciousness of guilt.” In other words, the juries will be directed to rule that climatologists refused to disclose the evidence because to do so would prove they intentionally falsified the climate records to get a predetermined outcome.
A jubilant Richard Treadgold, one of the skeptics involved in the case writes: ”This boils down to a confession to the Court that NIWA has no evidence to show that the BoM approves of NIWA’s review. NIWA does not even bother to present the ineffectual BoM covering letter at page 15 of the Review, for it expresses no approval of the report – though NIWA claims it does.”
But why is this victory in New Zealand so important in the world context?
Well, alarmists in the UN’s IPCC have touted the NIWA record, known widely as the Seven Station Series (7SS), Eleven Station Series (11SS), and NZTR, as proof of antipodean man-made climate warming. These number sets, along with the discredited Australian (BOM) records, represent the cornerstone of Australasia/South Pacific (Oceania) warming. That’s an area that constitutes two of our planet’s eight terrestrial ecozones; or, one quarter of the world’s ‘official’ climate record. In effect, this is a monumental blow to the legal validity of 25 percent of all the world’s climate records. Richard Treadgold has more of the details in ‘Affidavits are for ever’ (August 1, 2012)
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