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.
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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.
What was climate scientist Harrington’s broader messaging? “Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely,” he claimed in an email.
But implicit in that response was an embarrassing admission for one of the world’s leading experts in Extreme Weather Event Attribution (the attempt to link extreme weather to climate change, regarded by some climate scientists as pseudoscience): it was possible that the 2025 event, the hottest 10 day stretch since the early 90s, might indeed have been dwarfed by 1935 or other historic heatwaves buried in old records misplaced by NIWA.
Even though Harrington was now conceding the 2025 event might not be the hottest, Gibson apparently didn’t want the facts getting in the way of the “broader messaging”, and she refused to add the new data.
As for whether climate change made the 28.63C event in February 2025 “more intense” than the 32.66C event in February 1935, readers can do the math on that logic.
RNZ Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson signed off on an Editorial Policy manual last year which says, under “Accuracy”:
“Factual work must conform to reality, be in context and not in any way misleading or false…Research for all material must be thorough. Staff must be prepared to check, cross-check and seek advice…Check facts and statistics, identifying qualifying factors…Facts must be presented in a clear, not misleading, fashion…accuracy can also be compromised by the omission of relevant facts.”
Under the heading “Correcting Mistakes”, Thompson writes:
“RNZ will not hesitate to correct an error when it is established one has been made. To do otherwise would inevitably lead to loss of credibility.”
What makes the RNZ “fake news” story much more serious is that the same Editor-in-Chief, Paul Thompson, appears to have signed off on the cover-up.
How did it get to this sorry state of affairs? Let’s go back to square one and join the dots.
On Feb 13, RNZ published a story by climate reporter Eloise Gibson that began:
Hamilton’s recent run of hot days likely beats anything the city has experienced since temperature records began, says a climate scientist.
The place once dubbed the City of the Future by a marketing campaign is experiencing a taste of its own climate future with a run of hot days, which senior climate scientist Luke Harrington says is probably unprecedented.
“The last 10 days, actually now 11, have been the hottest continuous 10 or 11 days stretch certainly of the records that I have available. They go back to the early 1990s, but I think if you went further back in time they would still remain the worst on record.”
For good measure, to add insult to their credibility injury, RNZ added a line further down the story suggesting Hamilton had never experienced heatwave trauma before:
Council climate change manager Charlotte Catmur said part of the council strategy’s for climate change was being ready for future climate.
The council had been studying community flooding risks for a while, but “heat is relatively new for us,” she said.
As Spanish philosopher George Santayana remarked in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Gibson and Harrington’s pitch – that 2025 was “probably unprecedented…since temperature records began” – was throwing out an open invitation to climate researchers everywhere to prove them wrong. It didn’t take long.
Knowing where the bodies in this climate “CSI” were likely buried, yours truly, on behalf of Centrist and the wider public, grabbed a spade and started digging.
If you punch the words “Hamilton” and “heat wave” (separate, not joined in the modern style) in the PapersPast database, and choose Waikato newspapers, the trail will lead you in seconds to the summer of 1934/35.
Harrington could have done it. Gibson should have done it. But neither did.
Bedevilled by a lack of rain in late 1934, the Waikato baked in the summer sun causing peat bogs and bush to catch fire in the tinder dry conditions. Hamilton was besieged from nearly all sides by fire for weeks, and the acrid smoke choked citizens in the city where visibility frequently dropped as low as a hundred metres.
For 27 days between 15 December 1934 and 10 January 1935, the daily maximum temperature never dropped below 27C. In fact, the average maximum temperature across those 27 days was 31.88C.
Remember, the hottest that Hamilton could muster in 2025 after decades supposedly fuelled by greenhouse gas emissions was 10 days at an average of 28.63C.
But extreme climate wasn’t finished with Hamilton. From 12 January 1935 through 21 January (a 10 day stretch), maximum temperatures averaged 31.1C.
Finally, in terms of long stretches, a further 26-day streak emerged on 26 January 1935 and lasted until 20 February 1935, at an average of 31.1C again.
Buried within this 63-day heatwave, however, were numerous 10-day superhot streaks, and the hottest of these ran from 1 February 1935 to 10 February, at an average of 32.66C.
How does this fit the “broader messaging”?
You will recall that Eloise Gibson’s entire story was anchored in the premise that Hamilton’s 10 day hot streak in 2025 had likely beaten “anything the city has experienced since temperature records began” and was “probably unprecedented”.
The obvious implication, to Blind Freddy and anyone else listening, was that climate change was rolling inexorably onwards leaving heatwave records broken in its wake.
That’s why, in an email to myself and Eloise Gibson, climate scientist Luke Harrington was trying to play down the significance of 1935. Gibson swallowed it. I didn’t:
“Finally, none of the above points really change the broader messaging. Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely.”
In fact, as is probably obvious to most, 1935 suggests that if the climate 90 years ago can throw out heatwaves 4C hotter than anything under climate change, and four times longer in duration, then real doubts emerge about the credibility of claims from climate scientists and their media “repeaters”. Our most extreme heatwaves remain firmly in our past.
Harrington tried to bat away the 1935 problem with the usual “Climate for Dummies” responses.
First, he tried to cast doubt on the credibility of the Hamilton temperature readings:
“Comparing absolute temperatures, or sequences of absolute temperature exceedances, only make sense in the context of consistent data from the same weather station.”
On the face of it, this makes sense, but it turns out to be irrelevant given the challenge he threw down by saying it was probably the hottest in history.
Harrington knew that the 28.63C streak was the hottest in the modern era since his records began in 1993. But he chose to go further, claiming it was probably hotter than all the old records as well – predating the 1993 site.
By definition, fact checking that would need to involve going through records from other Hamilton sites. So having invited the comparison, the story should have been updated when the new data emerged.
NIWA relies on seven temperature stations to measure climate change in NZ, and every single one of those sites has changed locations or equipment over time. To work out just how much temperatures were being affected by this, NIWA undertook a series of studies. They found that the difference between Auckland CBD and airport temps was about 0.6C. At Masterton, a close analogy to Hamilton, being on an inland plain without cooling sea breezes, CBD temperatures were again about 0.6C warmer than the modern rural site.
So, even if you cooled the 1935 Hamilton CBD temperatures by 0.6C for comparison to modern readings at Hamilton airport, that only drops the 1935 10-day average to 32.06C, still 3.4C clear of the 2025 claimed record of 28.63.
In the late 1890s/early 1900s, Hamilton weather readings were taken at the city hospital by medical superintendent Hugh Douglas for Met Service and the Waikato Times newspaper. On his retirement, the job passed in 1917 to local optometrist, astronomer and weather equipment retailer James Bremner (described by the Times as their “weather correspondent”), until his death in 1929. One of his fellow optometrists, Ruth Budd, then took over for the next couple of decades.
Budd gave expert testimony, in a court case about sun stroke, about the weather records on a particular day and the difference between the CBD reading and the then-rural Ruakura site (on the day Ruakura was actually about 1.5C hotter than the CBD).
The point being that the 1935 Hamilton data was professionally taken on professional equipment at the same location it had been faithfully recording Hamilton’s weather every day since 1917.
Another factor that climate scientists look for to cross check between different sites is “correlation”: do the temperature trends correlate (track up and down together)? If they do, it indicates climate is the main driver at each site and they can be trusted. A site, for example, showing heat spikes that don’t correlate might be doing so because it is sited next to an aircon exhaust vent.
The Hamilton site correlated well. Proof of this is found in the reading for Hamilton’s hottest day in recorded history. If you search that up on Google, it will lead you to a NIWA news release that claims:
“Two main centres broke their maximum temperature records on 29 January [2019]. Hamilton hit 32.9C, beating the old mark of 32.6C set in March 2013, data since 1940.
“In addition, Wellington (Kelburn) reached its all time maximum the same day, soaring to 30.3C (data since 1927). This was the first time two main centres broke their all time maximum temperature records in the same day.”
Actually, that’s not true. Hamilton and Auckland broke their all-time records on 1 February 1935, when Hamilton hit 35C (95F) for the first time and Auckland reached 30.5C (86.5F), its highest temperature in 93 years of records to that date.
That’s an example of correlation: a heat dome breaking records in Auckland and Hamilton. At nearby Otorohanga the 1 Feb temp hit 36.4 (97.5F), before climbing to a record 37.8C (100F) on 2 February.
Hamilton would break its new all time record again the following week on 10 February, reaching 35.6C (96F).
Remember, according to NIWA which has no records before 1940 at Hamilton, the city’s highest temperature was 32.9C set on 29 January 2019.
And the media swallowed it.
So Luke Harrington’s siting comparison objection crumbles because the sheer scale of the 1935 event, 4C hotter than 2025, far exceeds the margin of error between the CBD and the airport sites.
It crumbles for another reason: while NIWA is quick to tell media that different sites can’t be directly compared, what NIWA does in practice is the opposite: every time you read a story about your town’s “hottest day”, NIWA has cherrypicked that morsel from whatever thermometer in your town is reading hottest on any given day.
The same is done in NIWA’s official Climate Summaries, where it includes the disclaimer:
“The rankings (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) in Tables 1 to 11 are relative to climate data from a group of nearby stations, some of which may no longer be operating. The current climate value is compared against all values from any member of the group, without any regard for homogeneity between one station’s record and another. This approach is used because of the practical limitations of performing homogeneity checks in real-time.”
If it’s good enough for NIWA to ignore the rule of only comparing exact sites, it’s good enough to ignore Harrington’s attempt to blind with science. Again, Eloise Gibson swallowed it. Arguably by failing to read the fine print in NIWA press releases she has enabled herself to be played like a Stradivarius by the climate scientists she relies on.
There are even serious questions arising from all this as to the competency of New Zealand’s climate change reporters. Odd to me, in the current case, when I first drew Gibson’s attention to the fact that 2025’s hottest streak was nowhere near the record, her immediate reaction was to ask for data that she could take to Harrington:
“Where is that data from? If you let me know what temperature record you’re talking about I can let Dr Harrington know and check it out.”
It was odd because a science journalist should be able to understand concepts and data themselves. My own automatic reaction is not to find an expert to explain what it means; I should already have those skills from reading thousands of scientific studies.
More disturbing to me was what happened next.
I sent Gibson a simple spreadsheet laying out the 63 day hot streak in the summer of 34/35, with the day’s maximum temperature expressed in Fahrenheit.
In the covering email I explained she was looking for any day or sequence of days with a temperature of 80F (26.7C rounded up to 27C) or higher, and I gave her the date range of the streak. It was paint by numbers stuff. I assumed, as an actual climate researcher myself, that Fahrenheit would be easily understood by an award-winning climate journalist who headed Stuff’s team before heading RNZ’s.
It was a foolish assumption on my part. She took one look at the simple spreadsheet and reacted like a superstitious medieval explorer reading a map marked “Here be dragons”:
“At first glance I can’t tell if this is comparable, because Luke Harrington was talking about a run of days including 28C, 29C, 30C etc. But I will pass your email on to him to take a look.”
And so, I converted all Fahrenheit readings, used in 1935, into Celsius, so that Gibson could understand it.
It was a wasted effort. Apart from changing the word “shatters” in the original headline to “breaks”, Gibson responded:
“As far as I’m concerned, Luke’s comprehensive initial reply and that small tweak has answered the questions you raised.”
On what planet, I mused, had Harrington delivered a “comprehensive” reply that solved RNZ’s misinformation problem?
I fired back an email:
“Thanks, but to be fair Eloise you didn’t seem to understand how to read or convert a Fahrenheit temperature chart so I find your assessment of “Luke’s comprehensive initial reply” less than reassuring.
“As indicated, fairness requires me to put that aspect and a couple of others to you, which will come through shortly.”
Asking the hard questions
This is what I then asked Eloise to comment on:
Having now seen the existence of much longer and hotter streaks in Hamilton’s past, how do you justify your story now?
To put the problem you now face because of your hyperbole into focus, the 10 day average for 2025 Luke was working from, assuming he was using Met Service as you did, was 28.63C. That means the 1998 average was also within cooey of that but a fraction lower, even though you forgot in your story to actually report the previous record that you claimed had been “shattered”. My follow-up questions to Luke, none of which he dared answer, pointed out that the average temp of the hottest 10 day streak in 1935 was 32.66C, more than FOUR WHOLE DEGREES higher than 2025 or 1998. Luke attempted to head this off in advance by claiming you couldn’t use different sites, but when I pointed out that NIWA does exactly that in every climate summary Luke went quiet.
When I also pointed out that if we apply NIWA site adjustments, 1935 still wins hands down. Again, senior climate scientist Luke Harrington can’t rebut.
So, when you say “As far as I am concerned, Luke’s comprehensive initial reply…has answered the questions you raised”, can you explain specifically how those questions have been answered?
In accordance with RNZ Editorial Policy on Accuracy at 2.1, you knew your source’s sweeping claims carried a caveat – that evidence like the 63 day streak in 1935 might emerge – but despite a duty to corroborate and factcheck your source’s claims you did no independent verification yourself and in fact when contrary evidence emerged of a streak so hot it set thousands of acres on fire and left Hamilton choking in smoke, you refused to run the new information or do any research yourself. As RNZ’s chief climate reporter, how exactly did you comply with the duties you had?
The RNZ Accuracy policy required you to “Check facts and statistics, identifying qualifying factors”. Your story as written made it clear that “qualifying factors” might exist, but again when handed simple to understand evidence you did not actually understand it yourself and essentially gave editorial control to your single preferred source who had made the outlandish and untrue sweeping claims in the first place in what Dr Harrington admitted was to get a story published on “the broader messaging. Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely.”
Clearly the evidence actually shows 34/35 was far more intense than 1998 or 2025 in Hamilton, so that premise is questionable and should have automatically raised questions in your own mind. But again, in what way have your actions complied with RNZ editorial policy which states “Independence…is central to our integrity and credibility. It demands that staff not be influenced by pressures from political, commercial or other sectional interests or by their own personal views or activities. There must be no external interference in the presentation or content of our work…RNZ alone has the legal and editorial responsibility for what it publishes.”
Prima facie, it appears you have written and published a climate story whose nuts and bolts you did not actually understand, and that when confronted with the kind of evidence that would be considered a normal ingredient of any published paper in climate science you have not, as a climate reporter, understood that evidence either. Issues of site changes, as Luke alluded to in the Trewin 2010 paper he referenced, are well known and debated in the literature. Trewin makes the point that it is usually overnight minimum temperatures that are affected which, for reasons that are technical, are not hugely relevant to an assessment based on absolute daily maximums, but regardless there are well established workarounds.
Have you attended climate change training workshops, such as those run by Al Gore? If so when, where and who led them?
If so, have your “personal views or activities” compromised your ability to independently analyse, research and/or report on climate change issues?
When Harrington begrudgingly conceded in his sole email response that “this last several weeks in Hamilton is certainly not” comparable to some of the big historic heatwaves, and that the current Hamilton run might only be second or third (even that is false), why did you not realise at that point that the premise of your story had become untenable?
RNZ’s Accuracy policy states: “In the age of ‘fake news’, which is distributed at speed, RNZ plays an even more crucial role…our accuracy is more valuable than ever in sustaining an ongoing relationship with our audience.”
It is one thing to publish a climate scientist’s shallowly-researched “reckons” on a ten day, 28.63C average hot streak, unchallenged. But for you to fail to amend and tell your audience about the relevance of a 63-day, 32.66C average at its highest 10-day mark, genuine heatwave with bushfires across 5000 acres, ostensibly because you know it undermines the original story’s messaging around increasing intensity and duration under climate change, is a dereliction of journalistic duty, in my opinion, to follow the facts wherever they may lead.
It turned RNZ into a purveyor of poorly researched fake news (again, if you had lifted a finger on PapersPast and searched “Hamilton” “heat wave” you would have found enough to start asking Luke meaningful questions), and I put it to you that that you failed to meet this accuracy standard as well: “Accuracy is often more than a question of getting the facts right. All the relevant facts and information should be weighed to get at the truth of what is reported or described.”
Your response?
Under policy 2.15, Correcting Mistakes: “RNZ will not hesitate to correct an error, when it is established one has been made. To do otherwise would inevitably lead to loss of credibility.”
In the present case, while I have no doubt that Luke is correct that this is the warmest streak since his records began in the 1990s, you and he went much further and assured listeners and readers that it was very likely the warmest stretch ever. That claim is false, and you cannot simply correct by merely removing that gauntlet. Now that rival evidence has emerged of a heatwave that literally dwarfs anything Hamilton has experienced in your lifetime, RNZ is duty-bound to introduce that data and discuss it in context.
Harrington is already downplaying the significance of 2025 now. Your current story cannot stand.
Let me remind you: 2025 average max was 28.63C. It beat 2019, 2018 and the biggie 1998. You and Luke were excited.
Enter the inconvenient 1935, average max 32.66C, and you and Luke are definitely not excited, to the point of “nothing to see here”.
I look forward to answers, and a more considered assessment of how your current story reflects the editorial policy given the historic data you boasted would be beaten by 2025.
In conclusion
I copied RNZ Editor-in-Chief and CEO Paul Thompson into the hard questions, given the seriousness of the allegation that RNZ was hiding relevant information from the public, and Thompson’s name on the RNZ Editorial Policy. This was a test: was RNZ’s CEO willing to walk his talk?
One of the questions left unanswered is whether Eloise Gibson’s objectivity has been compromised by attending climate training workshops run by activists like Al Gore, training political, media, business and social leaders how to spread belief in climate change. Think of Amway meets The Stepford Wives.
When journalists are captured by “feels”, or become activists, they become vulnerable to “noble cause corruption” – a belief that they should use their positions to advance a cause.
In the case of climate, that manifests as a refusal to report facts that may spread uncertainty about the “broader message”.
The issue is nuanced. People who avidly lap up the work of Eloise Gibson or Luke Harrington might equally accuse me of advocating a position. However, there’s a difference: a feature of my work is that I embrace and lay out the other side’s facts and argument, then I show where the weak points are. In contrast Gibson and RNZ made no attempt in this case to engage with the inconvenient facts. Thus, one position is evidence-based and multi-sided, and the other messaging-based and one-sided.
RNZ and Gibson refused to answer any of my questions, including whether Gibson had attended propaganda training, however RNZ has itself taken part in the “Covering Climate Now” global media initiative which boasts: “Covering Climate Now supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences.
“Co-founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC, CCNow invites journalists everywhere to transform how our profession covers the defining story of our time. Unless news outlets around the world dramatically improve and expand their climate coverage, there simply will not be the public awareness and political will needed to tackle the crisis.”
RNZ also has form for adopting a position:
“There could be several reasons for the New Zealand media’s consistency in messaging aligned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and scientific consensus on climate change. For some media, such as Radio New Zealand, the country’s public service radio broadcaster, this was the result of a conscious decision. In 2010 the broadcaster developed a policy (based on concerns raised three years earlier) to not give airtime to skeptical opinions on controversial issues, such as climate change”[i]
The problem for RNZ, and other mainstream media, is they have gone well beyond not covering “skeptical opinions”: nowadays, inconvenient facts are scrubbed from coverage as well, lest they lead to people developing those “skeptical opinions”.
And that, folks, is a breach of journalistic standards.
Evidence of CEO’s involvement
Editor-in-chief Thompson didn’t reply to the 17 Feb “Hard Questions” email, so on 19 Feb I emailed him again:
“Two days ago I copied you into a series of questions I was asking Eloise about a massively inaccurate report she compiled on Hamilton heat records. I have not received an acknowledgement.”
Still no answer. So on 20 Feb I placed a phone call to his office:
“Sure, no problem,” said his receptionist, “can I say who’s calling?”
That did it. “Paul’s line is going straight to voicemail, but I can give him a message.”
Still no callback, but 90 minutes later RNZ’s final response was in my inbox:
“Kia Ora Ian
“We’ve been happy to add a line to the story linking to a news report from 1935 and referencing heat and peat fires from that time.
“Along with that initial tweak to the headline, we consider this brings the matter to an end.
“Thanks as always for your detailed responses,
“Eloise”
Had I won?
No. On checking the revised story, the now deliberate disinformation (they knew it was untenable but decided not to change it) was still all there, and the only addition were a couple of article links to stories about 1935 hot weather and fires which made no reference to how hot it actually was in comparison to 2025.
In my opinion that’s a decision by RNZ CEO and Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson to knowingly approve the publication of blatant climate disinformation and therefore mislead the New Zealand public. Heads should roll.
Ian Wishart is a multi-award winning investigative journalist and bestselling author of more than 20 books. This article was sourced HERE
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.
What was climate scientist Harrington’s broader messaging? “Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely,” he claimed in an email.
But implicit in that response was an embarrassing admission for one of the world’s leading experts in Extreme Weather Event Attribution (the attempt to link extreme weather to climate change, regarded by some climate scientists as pseudoscience): it was possible that the 2025 event, the hottest 10 day stretch since the early 90s, might indeed have been dwarfed by 1935 or other historic heatwaves buried in old records misplaced by NIWA.
Even though Harrington was now conceding the 2025 event might not be the hottest, Gibson apparently didn’t want the facts getting in the way of the “broader messaging”, and she refused to add the new data.
As for whether climate change made the 28.63C event in February 2025 “more intense” than the 32.66C event in February 1935, readers can do the math on that logic.
RNZ Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson signed off on an Editorial Policy manual last year which says, under “Accuracy”:
“Factual work must conform to reality, be in context and not in any way misleading or false…Research for all material must be thorough. Staff must be prepared to check, cross-check and seek advice…Check facts and statistics, identifying qualifying factors…Facts must be presented in a clear, not misleading, fashion…accuracy can also be compromised by the omission of relevant facts.”
Under the heading “Correcting Mistakes”, Thompson writes:
“RNZ will not hesitate to correct an error when it is established one has been made. To do otherwise would inevitably lead to loss of credibility.”
What makes the RNZ “fake news” story much more serious is that the same Editor-in-Chief, Paul Thompson, appears to have signed off on the cover-up.
How did it get to this sorry state of affairs? Let’s go back to square one and join the dots.
On Feb 13, RNZ published a story by climate reporter Eloise Gibson that began:
Hamilton’s recent run of hot days likely beats anything the city has experienced since temperature records began, says a climate scientist.
The place once dubbed the City of the Future by a marketing campaign is experiencing a taste of its own climate future with a run of hot days, which senior climate scientist Luke Harrington says is probably unprecedented.
“The last 10 days, actually now 11, have been the hottest continuous 10 or 11 days stretch certainly of the records that I have available. They go back to the early 1990s, but I think if you went further back in time they would still remain the worst on record.”
For good measure, to add insult to their credibility injury, RNZ added a line further down the story suggesting Hamilton had never experienced heatwave trauma before:
Council climate change manager Charlotte Catmur said part of the council strategy’s for climate change was being ready for future climate.
The council had been studying community flooding risks for a while, but “heat is relatively new for us,” she said.
As Spanish philosopher George Santayana remarked in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Gibson and Harrington’s pitch – that 2025 was “probably unprecedented…since temperature records began” – was throwing out an open invitation to climate researchers everywhere to prove them wrong. It didn’t take long.
Knowing where the bodies in this climate “CSI” were likely buried, yours truly, on behalf of Centrist and the wider public, grabbed a spade and started digging.
If you punch the words “Hamilton” and “heat wave” (separate, not joined in the modern style) in the PapersPast database, and choose Waikato newspapers, the trail will lead you in seconds to the summer of 1934/35.
Harrington could have done it. Gibson should have done it. But neither did.
Bedevilled by a lack of rain in late 1934, the Waikato baked in the summer sun causing peat bogs and bush to catch fire in the tinder dry conditions. Hamilton was besieged from nearly all sides by fire for weeks, and the acrid smoke choked citizens in the city where visibility frequently dropped as low as a hundred metres.
For 27 days between 15 December 1934 and 10 January 1935, the daily maximum temperature never dropped below 27C. In fact, the average maximum temperature across those 27 days was 31.88C.
Remember, the hottest that Hamilton could muster in 2025 after decades supposedly fuelled by greenhouse gas emissions was 10 days at an average of 28.63C.
But extreme climate wasn’t finished with Hamilton. From 12 January 1935 through 21 January (a 10 day stretch), maximum temperatures averaged 31.1C.
Finally, in terms of long stretches, a further 26-day streak emerged on 26 January 1935 and lasted until 20 February 1935, at an average of 31.1C again.
Buried within this 63-day heatwave, however, were numerous 10-day superhot streaks, and the hottest of these ran from 1 February 1935 to 10 February, at an average of 32.66C.
How does this fit the “broader messaging”?
You will recall that Eloise Gibson’s entire story was anchored in the premise that Hamilton’s 10 day hot streak in 2025 had likely beaten “anything the city has experienced since temperature records began” and was “probably unprecedented”.
The obvious implication, to Blind Freddy and anyone else listening, was that climate change was rolling inexorably onwards leaving heatwave records broken in its wake.
That’s why, in an email to myself and Eloise Gibson, climate scientist Luke Harrington was trying to play down the significance of 1935. Gibson swallowed it. I didn’t:
“Finally, none of the above points really change the broader messaging. Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely.”
In fact, as is probably obvious to most, 1935 suggests that if the climate 90 years ago can throw out heatwaves 4C hotter than anything under climate change, and four times longer in duration, then real doubts emerge about the credibility of claims from climate scientists and their media “repeaters”. Our most extreme heatwaves remain firmly in our past.
Harrington tried to bat away the 1935 problem with the usual “Climate for Dummies” responses.
First, he tried to cast doubt on the credibility of the Hamilton temperature readings:
“Comparing absolute temperatures, or sequences of absolute temperature exceedances, only make sense in the context of consistent data from the same weather station.”
On the face of it, this makes sense, but it turns out to be irrelevant given the challenge he threw down by saying it was probably the hottest in history.
Harrington knew that the 28.63C streak was the hottest in the modern era since his records began in 1993. But he chose to go further, claiming it was probably hotter than all the old records as well – predating the 1993 site.
By definition, fact checking that would need to involve going through records from other Hamilton sites. So having invited the comparison, the story should have been updated when the new data emerged.
NIWA relies on seven temperature stations to measure climate change in NZ, and every single one of those sites has changed locations or equipment over time. To work out just how much temperatures were being affected by this, NIWA undertook a series of studies. They found that the difference between Auckland CBD and airport temps was about 0.6C. At Masterton, a close analogy to Hamilton, being on an inland plain without cooling sea breezes, CBD temperatures were again about 0.6C warmer than the modern rural site.
So, even if you cooled the 1935 Hamilton CBD temperatures by 0.6C for comparison to modern readings at Hamilton airport, that only drops the 1935 10-day average to 32.06C, still 3.4C clear of the 2025 claimed record of 28.63.
In the late 1890s/early 1900s, Hamilton weather readings were taken at the city hospital by medical superintendent Hugh Douglas for Met Service and the Waikato Times newspaper. On his retirement, the job passed in 1917 to local optometrist, astronomer and weather equipment retailer James Bremner (described by the Times as their “weather correspondent”), until his death in 1929. One of his fellow optometrists, Ruth Budd, then took over for the next couple of decades.
Budd gave expert testimony, in a court case about sun stroke, about the weather records on a particular day and the difference between the CBD reading and the then-rural Ruakura site (on the day Ruakura was actually about 1.5C hotter than the CBD).
The point being that the 1935 Hamilton data was professionally taken on professional equipment at the same location it had been faithfully recording Hamilton’s weather every day since 1917.
Another factor that climate scientists look for to cross check between different sites is “correlation”: do the temperature trends correlate (track up and down together)? If they do, it indicates climate is the main driver at each site and they can be trusted. A site, for example, showing heat spikes that don’t correlate might be doing so because it is sited next to an aircon exhaust vent.
The Hamilton site correlated well. Proof of this is found in the reading for Hamilton’s hottest day in recorded history. If you search that up on Google, it will lead you to a NIWA news release that claims:
“Two main centres broke their maximum temperature records on 29 January [2019]. Hamilton hit 32.9C, beating the old mark of 32.6C set in March 2013, data since 1940.
“In addition, Wellington (Kelburn) reached its all time maximum the same day, soaring to 30.3C (data since 1927). This was the first time two main centres broke their all time maximum temperature records in the same day.”
Actually, that’s not true. Hamilton and Auckland broke their all-time records on 1 February 1935, when Hamilton hit 35C (95F) for the first time and Auckland reached 30.5C (86.5F), its highest temperature in 93 years of records to that date.
That’s an example of correlation: a heat dome breaking records in Auckland and Hamilton. At nearby Otorohanga the 1 Feb temp hit 36.4 (97.5F), before climbing to a record 37.8C (100F) on 2 February.
Hamilton would break its new all time record again the following week on 10 February, reaching 35.6C (96F).
Remember, according to NIWA which has no records before 1940 at Hamilton, the city’s highest temperature was 32.9C set on 29 January 2019.
And the media swallowed it.
So Luke Harrington’s siting comparison objection crumbles because the sheer scale of the 1935 event, 4C hotter than 2025, far exceeds the margin of error between the CBD and the airport sites.
It crumbles for another reason: while NIWA is quick to tell media that different sites can’t be directly compared, what NIWA does in practice is the opposite: every time you read a story about your town’s “hottest day”, NIWA has cherrypicked that morsel from whatever thermometer in your town is reading hottest on any given day.
The same is done in NIWA’s official Climate Summaries, where it includes the disclaimer:
“The rankings (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) in Tables 1 to 11 are relative to climate data from a group of nearby stations, some of which may no longer be operating. The current climate value is compared against all values from any member of the group, without any regard for homogeneity between one station’s record and another. This approach is used because of the practical limitations of performing homogeneity checks in real-time.”
If it’s good enough for NIWA to ignore the rule of only comparing exact sites, it’s good enough to ignore Harrington’s attempt to blind with science. Again, Eloise Gibson swallowed it. Arguably by failing to read the fine print in NIWA press releases she has enabled herself to be played like a Stradivarius by the climate scientists she relies on.
There are even serious questions arising from all this as to the competency of New Zealand’s climate change reporters. Odd to me, in the current case, when I first drew Gibson’s attention to the fact that 2025’s hottest streak was nowhere near the record, her immediate reaction was to ask for data that she could take to Harrington:
“Where is that data from? If you let me know what temperature record you’re talking about I can let Dr Harrington know and check it out.”
It was odd because a science journalist should be able to understand concepts and data themselves. My own automatic reaction is not to find an expert to explain what it means; I should already have those skills from reading thousands of scientific studies.
More disturbing to me was what happened next.
I sent Gibson a simple spreadsheet laying out the 63 day hot streak in the summer of 34/35, with the day’s maximum temperature expressed in Fahrenheit.
In the covering email I explained she was looking for any day or sequence of days with a temperature of 80F (26.7C rounded up to 27C) or higher, and I gave her the date range of the streak. It was paint by numbers stuff. I assumed, as an actual climate researcher myself, that Fahrenheit would be easily understood by an award-winning climate journalist who headed Stuff’s team before heading RNZ’s.
It was a foolish assumption on my part. She took one look at the simple spreadsheet and reacted like a superstitious medieval explorer reading a map marked “Here be dragons”:
“At first glance I can’t tell if this is comparable, because Luke Harrington was talking about a run of days including 28C, 29C, 30C etc. But I will pass your email on to him to take a look.”
And so, I converted all Fahrenheit readings, used in 1935, into Celsius, so that Gibson could understand it.
It was a wasted effort. Apart from changing the word “shatters” in the original headline to “breaks”, Gibson responded:
“As far as I’m concerned, Luke’s comprehensive initial reply and that small tweak has answered the questions you raised.”
On what planet, I mused, had Harrington delivered a “comprehensive” reply that solved RNZ’s misinformation problem?
I fired back an email:
“Thanks, but to be fair Eloise you didn’t seem to understand how to read or convert a Fahrenheit temperature chart so I find your assessment of “Luke’s comprehensive initial reply” less than reassuring.
“As indicated, fairness requires me to put that aspect and a couple of others to you, which will come through shortly.”
Asking the hard questions
This is what I then asked Eloise to comment on:
Having now seen the existence of much longer and hotter streaks in Hamilton’s past, how do you justify your story now?
To put the problem you now face because of your hyperbole into focus, the 10 day average for 2025 Luke was working from, assuming he was using Met Service as you did, was 28.63C. That means the 1998 average was also within cooey of that but a fraction lower, even though you forgot in your story to actually report the previous record that you claimed had been “shattered”. My follow-up questions to Luke, none of which he dared answer, pointed out that the average temp of the hottest 10 day streak in 1935 was 32.66C, more than FOUR WHOLE DEGREES higher than 2025 or 1998. Luke attempted to head this off in advance by claiming you couldn’t use different sites, but when I pointed out that NIWA does exactly that in every climate summary Luke went quiet.
When I also pointed out that if we apply NIWA site adjustments, 1935 still wins hands down. Again, senior climate scientist Luke Harrington can’t rebut.
So, when you say “As far as I am concerned, Luke’s comprehensive initial reply…has answered the questions you raised”, can you explain specifically how those questions have been answered?
In accordance with RNZ Editorial Policy on Accuracy at 2.1, you knew your source’s sweeping claims carried a caveat – that evidence like the 63 day streak in 1935 might emerge – but despite a duty to corroborate and factcheck your source’s claims you did no independent verification yourself and in fact when contrary evidence emerged of a streak so hot it set thousands of acres on fire and left Hamilton choking in smoke, you refused to run the new information or do any research yourself. As RNZ’s chief climate reporter, how exactly did you comply with the duties you had?
The RNZ Accuracy policy required you to “Check facts and statistics, identifying qualifying factors”. Your story as written made it clear that “qualifying factors” might exist, but again when handed simple to understand evidence you did not actually understand it yourself and essentially gave editorial control to your single preferred source who had made the outlandish and untrue sweeping claims in the first place in what Dr Harrington admitted was to get a story published on “the broader messaging. Even if this run of extreme days was the second- or third-ranked on record, climate change makes such events both more intense and more likely.”
Clearly the evidence actually shows 34/35 was far more intense than 1998 or 2025 in Hamilton, so that premise is questionable and should have automatically raised questions in your own mind. But again, in what way have your actions complied with RNZ editorial policy which states “Independence…is central to our integrity and credibility. It demands that staff not be influenced by pressures from political, commercial or other sectional interests or by their own personal views or activities. There must be no external interference in the presentation or content of our work…RNZ alone has the legal and editorial responsibility for what it publishes.”
Prima facie, it appears you have written and published a climate story whose nuts and bolts you did not actually understand, and that when confronted with the kind of evidence that would be considered a normal ingredient of any published paper in climate science you have not, as a climate reporter, understood that evidence either. Issues of site changes, as Luke alluded to in the Trewin 2010 paper he referenced, are well known and debated in the literature. Trewin makes the point that it is usually overnight minimum temperatures that are affected which, for reasons that are technical, are not hugely relevant to an assessment based on absolute daily maximums, but regardless there are well established workarounds.
Have you attended climate change training workshops, such as those run by Al Gore? If so when, where and who led them?
If so, have your “personal views or activities” compromised your ability to independently analyse, research and/or report on climate change issues?
When Harrington begrudgingly conceded in his sole email response that “this last several weeks in Hamilton is certainly not” comparable to some of the big historic heatwaves, and that the current Hamilton run might only be second or third (even that is false), why did you not realise at that point that the premise of your story had become untenable?
RNZ’s Accuracy policy states: “In the age of ‘fake news’, which is distributed at speed, RNZ plays an even more crucial role…our accuracy is more valuable than ever in sustaining an ongoing relationship with our audience.”
It is one thing to publish a climate scientist’s shallowly-researched “reckons” on a ten day, 28.63C average hot streak, unchallenged. But for you to fail to amend and tell your audience about the relevance of a 63-day, 32.66C average at its highest 10-day mark, genuine heatwave with bushfires across 5000 acres, ostensibly because you know it undermines the original story’s messaging around increasing intensity and duration under climate change, is a dereliction of journalistic duty, in my opinion, to follow the facts wherever they may lead.
It turned RNZ into a purveyor of poorly researched fake news (again, if you had lifted a finger on PapersPast and searched “Hamilton” “heat wave” you would have found enough to start asking Luke meaningful questions), and I put it to you that that you failed to meet this accuracy standard as well: “Accuracy is often more than a question of getting the facts right. All the relevant facts and information should be weighed to get at the truth of what is reported or described.”
Your response?
Under policy 2.15, Correcting Mistakes: “RNZ will not hesitate to correct an error, when it is established one has been made. To do otherwise would inevitably lead to loss of credibility.”
In the present case, while I have no doubt that Luke is correct that this is the warmest streak since his records began in the 1990s, you and he went much further and assured listeners and readers that it was very likely the warmest stretch ever. That claim is false, and you cannot simply correct by merely removing that gauntlet. Now that rival evidence has emerged of a heatwave that literally dwarfs anything Hamilton has experienced in your lifetime, RNZ is duty-bound to introduce that data and discuss it in context.
Harrington is already downplaying the significance of 2025 now. Your current story cannot stand.
Let me remind you: 2025 average max was 28.63C. It beat 2019, 2018 and the biggie 1998. You and Luke were excited.
Enter the inconvenient 1935, average max 32.66C, and you and Luke are definitely not excited, to the point of “nothing to see here”.
I look forward to answers, and a more considered assessment of how your current story reflects the editorial policy given the historic data you boasted would be beaten by 2025.
In conclusion
I copied RNZ Editor-in-Chief and CEO Paul Thompson into the hard questions, given the seriousness of the allegation that RNZ was hiding relevant information from the public, and Thompson’s name on the RNZ Editorial Policy. This was a test: was RNZ’s CEO willing to walk his talk?
One of the questions left unanswered is whether Eloise Gibson’s objectivity has been compromised by attending climate training workshops run by activists like Al Gore, training political, media, business and social leaders how to spread belief in climate change. Think of Amway meets The Stepford Wives.
When journalists are captured by “feels”, or become activists, they become vulnerable to “noble cause corruption” – a belief that they should use their positions to advance a cause.
In the case of climate, that manifests as a refusal to report facts that may spread uncertainty about the “broader message”.
The issue is nuanced. People who avidly lap up the work of Eloise Gibson or Luke Harrington might equally accuse me of advocating a position. However, there’s a difference: a feature of my work is that I embrace and lay out the other side’s facts and argument, then I show where the weak points are. In contrast Gibson and RNZ made no attempt in this case to engage with the inconvenient facts. Thus, one position is evidence-based and multi-sided, and the other messaging-based and one-sided.
RNZ and Gibson refused to answer any of my questions, including whether Gibson had attended propaganda training, however RNZ has itself taken part in the “Covering Climate Now” global media initiative which boasts: “Covering Climate Now supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences.
“Co-founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC, CCNow invites journalists everywhere to transform how our profession covers the defining story of our time. Unless news outlets around the world dramatically improve and expand their climate coverage, there simply will not be the public awareness and political will needed to tackle the crisis.”
RNZ also has form for adopting a position:
“There could be several reasons for the New Zealand media’s consistency in messaging aligned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and scientific consensus on climate change. For some media, such as Radio New Zealand, the country’s public service radio broadcaster, this was the result of a conscious decision. In 2010 the broadcaster developed a policy (based on concerns raised three years earlier) to not give airtime to skeptical opinions on controversial issues, such as climate change”[i]
The problem for RNZ, and other mainstream media, is they have gone well beyond not covering “skeptical opinions”: nowadays, inconvenient facts are scrubbed from coverage as well, lest they lead to people developing those “skeptical opinions”.
And that, folks, is a breach of journalistic standards.
Evidence of CEO’s involvement
Editor-in-chief Thompson didn’t reply to the 17 Feb “Hard Questions” email, so on 19 Feb I emailed him again:
“Two days ago I copied you into a series of questions I was asking Eloise about a massively inaccurate report she compiled on Hamilton heat records. I have not received an acknowledgement.”
Still no answer. So on 20 Feb I placed a phone call to his office:
“Sure, no problem,” said his receptionist, “can I say who’s calling?”
That did it. “Paul’s line is going straight to voicemail, but I can give him a message.”
Still no callback, but 90 minutes later RNZ’s final response was in my inbox:
“Kia Ora Ian
“We’ve been happy to add a line to the story linking to a news report from 1935 and referencing heat and peat fires from that time.
“Along with that initial tweak to the headline, we consider this brings the matter to an end.
“Thanks as always for your detailed responses,
“Eloise”
Had I won?
No. On checking the revised story, the now deliberate disinformation (they knew it was untenable but decided not to change it) was still all there, and the only addition were a couple of article links to stories about 1935 hot weather and fires which made no reference to how hot it actually was in comparison to 2025.
In my opinion that’s a decision by RNZ CEO and Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson to knowingly approve the publication of blatant climate disinformation and therefore mislead the New Zealand public. Heads should roll.
Ian Wishart is a multi-award winning investigative journalist and bestselling author of more than 20 books. This article was sourced HERE
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