Here we go again, as the climate denial front group called the “New Zealand Climate Science Coalition” tries to cash in on the stolen CRU email story, by floating another false claim about temperature readings — a claim dutifully circulated by dozens of right wing blogs, of course, with no fact checking.

Here’s their press release:

New Zealand may have its own “Climategate”, including manipulation of temperature readings, according to a combined research project undertaken by members of the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. The researchers claim that temperature readings from seven weather stations throughout New Zealand have been adjusted to show a higher degree of warming than is justified by a study of the original raw data.

Spokesman for the group, Richard Treadgold, said that recent claims that New Zealand is warming have been proved wrong. “Official information clearly shows that temperatures in New Zealand have actually been remarkably stable since 1850. We got the data from the online National Climate Database maintained by NIWA and we made our own graph, which we compared with theirs. The results are shocking.”

Not only is this claim entirely false, the NZ Climate Science Coalition knows that it’s false — because they’ve tried to pull this nonsense before and were exposed. There’s no excuse for this kind of deliberate dishonesty.

Here’s the full story of this creepy attempt to defraud the public: NZ sceptics lie about temp records, try to smear top scientist — Hot Topic.

So what was Treadgold saying again?

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

Nothing in the station histories? It’s all there for anyone who can be bothered to look, or to ask politely. But Treadgold and the NZ CSC have no excuse, because the NZ CSC were told about this information at least two years ago, the last time they tried to make a fuss about “adjusted data”. In other words, Treadgold and whoever in the NZ CSC helped him with the data are being more than economical with the truth, they are lying through their teeth. But they keep on digging.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

Yes there is. Another station move.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2 – it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

The real disgrace here is that the NZ CSC and Richard Treadgold have published a piece of incompetent research and are either too ignorant to notice or are deliberately attempting to mislead the press and public. They have pushed it to the media and the more credulous blogs, and attempted to smear a respected scientist.

Read the whole sorry story. This is a perfect example of the dishonest claims of the climate denial industry. They’re lying to you.