The Hockey Schtick:
A recent paper published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology finds evidence of incorrect temperature data homogenization over the 20th century in the Northern Territory of Australia, falsely creating a warming trend from the cooling trend present in the raw data. According to the author, “With the data available [in Northern Australia], the only option to produce warming trends is to overweight the cold years in the middle of the 1970s and the subsequent return to warmer temperatures,” but that with proper data homogenization, there is no warming trend.
According to the paper, “The Northern Territory of Australia has a unique situation of an extension larger than France and a population of 200,000, with only three meteorology stations open for more than 40 years, Darwin (DW), Alice Springs (AS) and Tennant Creek, and only two of them, [Darwin] DW and AS, providing data over 100 years, and from 500 to more than 1,000 km separating these stations and the stations in the neighbouring states of Australia.
This “smoking gun” of temperature data tampering in Darwin, Australia was pointed out over 4 years ago by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT, illustrated by Fig. 7 below showing a cooling trend of 0.7C per century in the raw data was up-justed to show a warming trend of 1.2C per century in the official data: