On Jo Nova’s site, the cat is set amongst the pigeons:
A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.
The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.
Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)
The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)
Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.
Copied below is the cover note of our request.
Click on the image to download the full PDF (3.3 Mb)
Read more here
Harold Pierce Jr says:
February 15, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Harold, your link to what seems a very interesting site doesn’t work.
Please, in the first instance, it is important to regard an audit as a mathematical exercise for confirming or denying current figures; and if discrepancies are found, detailing them for action.
There is no need to go overboard about politics, people, motivations, etc. That type of blogging simply causes confusion of purpose.
The prime purpose is to see if the numbers are a proper reflection of the original records. Since, in an awkward way, increased temperatures equate to increased $ proposals, the audit should be seen as similar to a financial audit. It’s counting, it’s not about attributing motives.
Christopher Hanley says:
February 16, 2011 at 12:44 am
Paul R 11:35 pm,
Ian McPhee , b. about 1950, Bachelor of Business, Bachelor of Arts, is not former Liberal MP Ian Macphee AO, b. 13 July 1938.
Thank you, Christopher. I was about to note this but you have done it and I have added a little extra.
A few people who have blogged at various places should be apologising by now, or at least be feeling very red faced. C’mon, guys, check before you go to print.
The auditors I have met are usually quite serious about accuracy, especially their own, and such mischaracterisation is not likely to find you a friend.
Unfortunately I agree with Borgelt Above
Unfortunately after living in Australia, I do not consider it to be a democracy where people have many rights. Most likely nothing will happen. What I mean is Government in Australia is way to big and powerful to a point where individual freedoms have been eroded to point that such a request as this one will get nowhere. In many ways its a politically correct dictatorship. Sorry…
I’m sure you all know the truism “evil flourishes when good men do nothing”.
Rather than saying nothing can be done, fortunately many people make the effort.
I can assure other posters the Australian public is awakening out of it’s seeming apathy.
Whether successful or not, the herculean efforts of Jo and her associates will be further evidence to a frustrated public that they do have a voice and that people are fighting on their behalf to prevent these abuses taking place. All power to them !!
Tim ‘Ghost Metropolis’ Flannery, new job $180,000 per annum.
If you want a chuckle check out his predictions for Australian climate, made of course at the height of the drought. (search Andrew Bolt/Tim Flannery Predictions)
On a more serious note, the labour government here needs green votes to maintain its coalition but not surprisingly the Greens are not satisfied with what’s on offer. Julia Gillard is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Given the extreme long term fluctuations/cycles of the Australian Climate it is hardly surprising that this is one of the last places in the world where ordinary people still buy the AGW myth. However Aussies are extremely pragmatic people and let’s face it all you’ve got to do here is look out the window to realize that the scaremongers have played their last card. Interestingly it is mostly urban elites who are the true believers…I just love seeing Sydney Melbourne etc getting drenched on the satellite weather and imagining all those ‘greenies’ gnashing their teeth in anxiety!
Christopher Hanley says:
February 16, 2011 at 12:44 am
Paul R 11:35 pm,
Ian McPhee is not former Liberal MP Ian Macphee.
Oops sorry, I muddled my Macphee’s, pretty badly too.
I’m mystified by that map. Is the extreme SW of WA really rated as Subtropical? The last time I stayed there I was frozen; and that was in late November.
Charles Nelson says:
February 16, 2011 at 3:17 am
Tim ‘Ghost Metropolis’ Flannery, new job $180,000 per annum.
————————————————————————————–
Tim ‘Ghost Metropolis’ Flannery, new part time job $180,000 per annum.
There you go, fixed.
ATTN: cohenite
Try: http://www.wolframalpha.com
I left out the colon, “:” Wolframalpha is a computational knowledge engine and can find a lot of neat stuff.
Anthony,
Do you feel you have more freedom and wealth than in the 60’s and 70’s?
Governments are definately not working for the people anymore. I feel more enslaved to be working for survival than getting ahead for retirement the way governments want to tax us even in death.
The future cannot sustain this pace of debt to the very rich and everyone else will be in debt to live.
So, were is the freedom?
Not really sure the greens can support the carbon tax or the trading scheme.
They know the economic destruction would spell their end.
The same appears to be happening here in Tasmania. Now the state economy is sinking largely due to the collapse of forestry at the hands of the greens.
They’ve realised that without forestry or agriculture to charge against they’ll likely cease to exist.
Have these doctored data sets been included in the IPCC reports?
Further to Dave Stephens’ perceptive analogy with buying a pig in a poke – eventually the cat will be let out of the bag!
Anthony and Jo – a word of caution regarding NIWA. Last time I looked, the 7 and 11 station series were still prominent on NIWA’s website. The peer review by the BoM of the 7 station series is also available on NIWA’s website (the adjustments are plainly shown in the review, but there is no criticism of NIWA by the BoM). While there may be the ongoing court action, it has received little or no publicity in New Zealand, and NIWA appear to be just carrying on as always. They have simply hidden their wrongdoings in plain view. The NZ Minister for Climate Change (Nick Smith) is supportive of NIWA and their methods (I have corresponded with him). He represents the basket-weavers of Nelson, and claims to have been a true believer in AGW for 20 years or more.
In Oz, the matter will most likely be decided by public opinion and the vote. The Coalition (opposition) are already ahead in the polls (c. 54 to 46). Gillard and Labor are doomed if she introduces a “carbon tax”, having campaigned on a pledge of no such tax. My guess is that the Greens have overplayed their hand, and that their price for support in both houses was the introduction of a “carbon tax”. While the leader of the Greens is a wily old fox, the newly elected Green senators are young zealots, and I suspect will not understand how or when to back down. The well-publicised claims by the usual suspects that Queensland flooding was caused by AGW (after a decade of claiming that drought was caused by AGW) have not gone down well with Joe Public. I suspect Tim Flannery will have a similar effect once he is let loose.
All the best.
You people must get you act together in Australia and fire Gillard. If she wins a majority in the next election you’re screwed, you’ll have Cap&trade and who knows what else rammed down your throats. Get organized.
REPLY: Oh please, peer reviewed publications are not the pinnacle of truth. I (or anyone else) could write up a paper that would make it through peer review that could be totally wrong. It has happened lots of times. Peer review isn’t auditing, and it often doesn’t do much beyond have a conversation about the merits of the paper. Peer review is an unpaid profession. We get what we pay for.
I get so sick of people like you touting peer review as “truth”, when that peer review often doesn’t even bother with the job of replication. If the peer reviewers of Michael Mann’s paleo-trainwreck had bothered to do replication, climate science wouldn’t be so damaged today. In fact I doubt that Climate Audit or WUWT would even exist had such replication been done.
Pull your head out of your butt Mr. Adler, demand replication, demand the numbers add up. That’s what’s going on here. – Anthony
The paper I linked,
http://reg.bom.gov.au/amm/docs/2004/dellamarta.pdf
provides the rationale and details the methods by which the Australian Climate Record was processed to eliminate errors. It admits that some of the corrections are comparable in size to the real change in temperature. the people who did this work have excellent credentials as climate scientists and mathematicians:
http://www.giub.unibe.ch/~dmarta/
If the people calling for an audit are real scientists, they should be able to read the article and understand what was done. If they doubt the principles that are being used and have better ideas, they could explain what they are and why their ideas are better. From what I have read about this controversy, this hasn’t been done. I have read the blogposts complaining about the temperature adjustments, but have not seen any reference to the papers that were written about what was done and why.
It seems to me that the problem is that people are protesting because the resulting data doesn’t support their beliefs. Unable or unwilling to go to the trouble of understanding what was done, they are asking for an audit, while secretly hoping it doesn’t happen so they can say that they have an issue with the data that they don’t like.
Your complaints about the Hockey Stick paper are wrong. Most Paleo Climate reconstructions , that have been done, since the original Hockey Stick paper, still show a the existence of a Hockey Stick, even though the MWP shows up a more clearly in the subsequent papers. Some of the analysis is done using centered PCA, some of it is done without resorting to PCA at all. Some of it was done without the infamous tree rings. This shows that the criticisms of the original Hockey Stick paper by McIntyre et al were quite immaterial.
McIntyre’s complaint about non centered PCA was actually proven to be incorrect.
I am not sure that you want to continue discussing the Hockey Stick controversy here, so I have omit links which support my position. Debunking the criticisms of the Hockey Stick are like beating a dead horse.
REPLY: Yes, I’m glad you’ve finally comes to the realization that the hockey stick is garbage. You really do need to understand that science isn’t perfect, databases of numbers aren’t perfect, and the need for auditing pervades other fields of science for these reasons. Pharmacology and medicine for example are sometimes corrupted by monied interests just like Climatology which now has billions invested. Climatology should have no exception to procedural auditing. The best thing about his is that its going forward, and there’s nothing you can argue that will chnage that. Be as upset as you wish, condemn it all you want. Your opinion is of no consequence. – Anthony
REPLY: Yes, I’m glad you’ve finally comes to the realization that the hockey stick is garbage. You really do need to understand that science isn’t perfect, databases of numbers aren’t perfect, and the need for auditing pervades other fields of science for these reasons.
Anthony
I think you misread my post. I compared criticisms of the Hockey Stick to a dead horse. The scientific literature has endorsed the Hockey Stick, and McKintyre’s criticism have been proven wrong.
Scientific research is constantly being audited by other scientists. The methods used by the scientists who are developing the scientific data base are endorsed by experts throughout the world.
On the other hand, would be auditors, like Willis Eschenbach have been shown to be mistaken in their objections about certain data. The famous smoking gun at Darwin Zero, is an example.:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying.php
REPLY:Tim Lambert, really? Gosh you really will believe anything you read so long as it aligns with your world view, won’t you?
How sad for you. I used to be like you, I thought CO2 was the “only” possible cause. Open your mind, you are trapping yourself. – Anthony
What I like about the comments is the obvious number of Australians now visiting this site. In my daily conversations more people are questioning the whole carbon dioxide is a danger and I believe that more and more will come to do so. There will be a day of reckoning but not soon enough to prevent major economic damage.
Annei says:
February 16, 2011 at 4:02 am
I’m mystified by that map. Is the extreme SW of WA really rated as Subtropical? The last time I stayed there I was frozen; and that was in late November
Yes Annei I was also surprised by the map showing the south of WA to be subtropical. The prevailing winds would surely knock it out of that category.
The southwest of WA is a Mediteranean climate, I was so cold here after 15 years I moved to the tropics 2000 km north…and never regretted it…
Stephan says:
February 16, 2011 at 2:22 am
Unfortunately I agree with Borgelt Above
Unfortunately after living in Australia, I do not consider it to be a democracy where people have many rights. Most likely nothing will happen. What I mean is Government in Australia is way to big and powerful to a point where individual freedoms have been eroded to point that such a request as this one will get nowhere. In many ways its a politically correct dictatorship. Sorry…
——————————————————
You are overstating things a wee bit, methinks. We are far from perfect, but this is a functioning democracy. After the last election, a gaggle of independents, some Green, some not, held the balance of power. If they had thrown their lot in with the conservatives, they would be in exactly the same position.
I have had dealings with the Audit Office over many years. I assure you, they are completely straight and honest, which is one reason why they are chronically underfunded. They get hundreds of requests a year over and above what they are already committed to do. And, they are not an anti-corruption body – it is not in their remit.
While it would be great if they take up this request, if they don’t, it is not grounds for conspiracy theories. Probably a Parliamentary inquiry would be more appropriate anyway, given the political content of allegations against the BOM. The Senate could initiate this at any time – and the numbers are there to do it, until July.
James Loring says:
Except that it is not “at the hands of the greens” that the forestry industry is collapsing.
Rather, it is a combination of the high Australian dollar; the coming ‘online’ of huge, cheap, non-Australian eucalyptus plantations; the over-harvesting and poor management practices of the Tasmanian industry; and the desire of Gunns to move its own focus to cheaper sources of material and labour.
The last three causes were in fact predicted or otherwise pointed out by “the greens” a decade and more ago, and had there been a move to more properly manage forestry in Tasmania then, there might be a more robust industry now.
And on the matter of declining agriculture in Tasmania, where it occurs it is because of multinational companies paying third-world compensation for farmers’ produce, or because managed-investment funded forestry is purchasing prime farmland for (poorly-paying) plantations. Again, issues that the greens campaigned against in an effort to prevent – had they been listened to there’d be a healthier farm industry here today.
@eadler
Immaterial?? Funny definition of ‘immaterial’ you are using.
They showed that an ‘iconic’ paper, used by the IPCC as its poster child, that effectively catapaulted an obscure student into a primary place in climatology, and that had passed the much-lauded peer-review, used a deeply flawed statistical method.
And that the results is claimed to have obtained were actually an artefact of the method, not the data. Any old numbers put into the method produced a hockey stick.
The conspirators then out every possible obstacle in McIntyre’s way to prevent their scientific and statistical failure from being made public. Interested readers can learn the whole sorry saga – complete with documented references – in ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ by AW Montford. An excellent book – and a far better yarn than the dry subject matter would suggest.
Rather than being immaterial, McIntyre’s work showed that;
At least one climatologist failed to use the best aviailable statistical methids. Indeed a method that was so flawed as to be useless for his purpose.
Despite this fundamental flaw, the paper passed ‘peer-review’ and was published to great fanfare and acclaim.
Nobody in climatology subsequently noticed these flaws, until McIntyre tried to reproduce the results some years later
The authors refused to allow him access to their original data – contrary to the principles of openness and reproducibility that underpin good science.
I will be charitable and call their actions ‘misbehaviour’. And, along with many other factors, this misbehavior reinforced my sceptical views about climatology and climatologists.
True scientists with a solid experimental case and strong arguments would not need to behave in this shoddy way. And a good review process would have turfed the work out before publication..not ten years after it had polluted the science.
Far from being immaterial, McIntyre’s work revealed deep and fundamental problems with the ‘science’ of climatology. As a ‘science’, it stinks!
One of the truly great things about Anthony’s light touch on moderation gives most of us some real entertainment when posters such as EAdler’s attempt to justify the unjustfiable. ‘Adler’ is German for ‘eagle’, but for some reason I keep getting a mental picture of a turkey whenever I see his name above a post…
Just had a closer look at the map at the head of the article, apparently from Wikipedia. As a few PPs have commented, it is not consistent with the experience of those of us who live here. Is it meant to describe vegetation patterns (eg desert, grassland, tropical?) It doesn’t even work on that level – south western WA is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘sub-tropical’. The northern half of the NSW coast (described as temperate) probably is.
Perhaps Anthony just put it there to check if we are awake.