Richard Treadgold emails with details of an interesting new paper, with quite an eye-opening end to the abstract.

Yesterday a paper on the New Zealand temperature record (NZTR) was accepted by Environmental Modeling & Assessment. Submitted in 2013, we can only imagine the colossal peer-review hurdles that had to be overcome in gaining acceptance for a paper that refutes the national temperature record in a developed country. The mere fact of acceptance attests to a fundamental shift in scientific attitudes to climate change, but expect strident opposition to this paper.

The authors present first a concise observational history of the NZTR, remarking that the established national record was a product of early methodology, then reconstruct an homogenised dataset using the peer-reviewed adjustment standards of Rhoades & Salinger, 1993 (RS93).

A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand was produced by principal author C.R. de Freitas with M.O. Dedekind and B.E. Brill.