Jennifer Marohasy
Back in 2014, when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia, and after a series of damning articles in The Australian newspaper showing the extent to which the Bureau of Meteorology remodel historic temperature series exaggerating warming, there was opportunity for a review.
There was real opportunity for an overhaul of how the Bureau not only change recorded temperatures, but also forecasts the weather.
The plan went to Cabinet, and it was ‘shut down’ by then Environment Minister Greg Hunt. He is on the public record proudly explaining that he ‘killed’ the idea.
Greg Hunt wanted everyone to know that he stepped in and squashed the idea, and Tony Abbott has never ever been asked to explain how and why he let that happen.
Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the articles that precipitated the calls for a review of the Bureau was sent to South America for a stint, and I lost my adjunct position at Central Queensland University. That was in 2015.
In the eight years since, the Bureau has further exaggerated historic warming trends, while also rolling out a new series of resistance probes in electronic weather stations that can record even warmer for the same weather.
It is not as though this has been without consequence. The Bureau’s hyping has provided justification for far reaching economic interventions, so there is no longer a functioning energy market in Australia. Instead, governments from both sides of politics have provided hundreds of billions of more taxpayer funding, and faster and faster with whatever legislation and regulation is needed, to enforce the transition to renewable energy and the closing down of coalfired power stations.
Meanwhile the Bureau has been working towards faster and faster resistance probes, designed to be ever thinner and thinner, thus even more responsive to fluctuations in air temperature – and political pressures for ever more hot days. Without the inertia of market forces, or a mercury thermometer, which will take a minute or two to adjust to a change in air temperature depending on the wind speed, the probes can record higher daily temperatures for the same weather.
This allows the Bureau to keep calling new record hot days, and claiming they are a consequence of human-caused global warming. For example, the Bureau claimed a record new hottest-ever September on 22nd September 2017 for Mildura, and then extended this to the entire state of Victoria, claiming the hottest back to 1889, because of carbon emissions, without explaining you can get the same effect from more sensitive equipment. Temperatures back in 1889 were measured with mercury thermometers, not resistance probes.
It was the calling of that new record for Mildura that caused me to complain to John Abbot, a scientist and a lawyer, about the need for the parallel data. These are the temperature measurements taken by mercury thermometers at the same time and place as the measurements from the resistance probes, thus potentially providing a check on the excesses of the Bureau.
It took more than three years, and an appearance at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, before John Abbot was able to extract even a small amount of the parallel data from the Bureau for the one location of Brisbane Airport under Freedom of Information legislation.
After I analysed the three years of data provided as over 1,000 scanned reports and showed that the measurements from the probe and the mercury at Brisbane airport are different, with the probe sometimes recording up to 0.7C warmer than the mercury and that this difference is statistically significant, and after Graham Lloyd wrote up the story that was published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday 15th April, I was invited onto Chris Kenny’s program on Sky TV.
It wasn’t the lead story, on Monday 17th April.
Chris Kenny introduced the topic of catastrophic human-caused global warming as ‘a debate’. He then proceeded to introduce me as a biologist in an ‘argument’ with the Bureau of Meteorology over measurements from new instrumentation that overstates current temperatures. Except the bureau won’t argue with me, they are ignoring me – to the extent possible, at least publicly.
Chris Kenny, nevertheless, introduced the topic thus, and only after a long segment in which he lamented that the Princess of Wales Catherine was reportedly denied access to the Queen’s bedside before her death, for concerns it would offend the Duchess of Sussex Meghan.
I thought that was old news. And certainly, of no economic consequence – while our entire economy is restructured at great expense to stop global warming because the measurements show it is getting hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, the two royal commentators that he had on before me, discussing Meghan, where allowed to go on and on, and on, and they were allowed to engage in some ‘debate’, specifically about politics within families and how Meghan has been a disruptive influence.
Of course, if Chris Kenny could have two conservative commentators on the segment before me debating Meghan, he could have at least theoretically found a conservative commentator to debate me on the topic of the resistance probes and the Bureau hyping warming. Not to mention how this provides reason for more government funding for the cartels that make so much money out of renewable energy at taxpayers’ expense.
Except Chris Kenny didn’t, and he won’t have anyone debate me, or the topic. Not the details of the topic of how temperatures are measured, or the history of Conservatives, beginning with Margaret Thatcher, making a hash of it. The Conservative media only ever present this issue as the fault of others, and they elevate the same others to positions of reverence the minute they change sides be it Patrick Moore or Michael Shellenberger.
As Tucker Carson has been explaining since he was removed as the most popular anchor from Fox News, for getting into the detail on an unpopular issues – even showing footage of the QAnon Shaman being escorted peacefully by Capitol police on 6th January
– if you want a job in the mainstream media, you need to self-censor.
And if you want a job in politics and you can’t self-censor yourself, then get someone like Greg Hunt to do it for your entire team, the entire Cabinet – for you and Scotty and also Peter Dutton.
I have observed that over the last decade Conservatives have shown more groupthink than the Greens and Labor combined on this and most other issues, while claiming they would welcome debate. If only the Australian Broadcasting Corporation allowed it. Nevermind that they were the government for most of the last decade.
As Timothy Crouse wrote in his famous analysis of mainstream pack journalism:
“In the world of straight, objective journalism, the more freedom you gave the reporter, the more he censored himself. Freedom scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all.
Freedom simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man on a battlefield. [ends]
And so, Chris Kenny devalued my segment, that potentially provided just the ammunition the Conservatives need to argue against Net Zero, by placing it at the very end of the evening and after amusing gossip concerning the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
I have read former Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex’s, memoire Spare, towards the end he laments the royal family’s relationship with the British media. He goes into some detail about how both Charles and the late Queen have/had PR teams in constant negotiation with the media. He explains how what is reported is less to do with the news, and more about what both sides determine to be convenient and acceptable within their own bizarre rules of this game, for any moment in time. No wonder there has never been any proper ‘debate’ about human-caused global warming in the UK, with the former Prince, now King Charles III, known to have this issue as his pet project that the media will respect given their rules of engagement.
I would be grateful to Chris Kenny for having me last on his program on Monday 17th April after the front page article by Graham Lloyd in The Weekend Australia, except there was no debate, and there is no debate. That is the most destructive and worst of all the lies.
Moreover, most Conservatives consistently repeat the Bureau’s claims of imminent catastrophe. There is Tim Wilson, the former member for Goldstein and a former IPA employee, and a great champion of the official line on all of this. Then there is the former deputy PM Josh Frydenberg. He is right across the issue of the Bureau fudging the historical record and could have at least tried to do something about it when he was the former Minister for the Environment. Why doesn’t Chris Kenny, or one of the other Sky News commentators, get some debate going by having one of these champions of catastrophic warming, and therefore presumably the Bureau’s faux historical temperature reconstructions also on his program for a debate?
Then, of course, there is Greg Hunt. Back in 2014 he apparently ‘killed’ Tony Abbott’s attempt to force an enquiry into the industrial scale remodelling of Australia’s temperature history through the process of homogenisation that underpins the narrative that gives us more and more expensive, while less and less reliable, electricity.
Most Conservatives politicians in Australia already know that there are major problems with the Bureau’s characterisation of our temperature history, and maybe even that the new record hot days that the Bureau are constantly calling are a consequence of custom-designed resistance probes rather than global warming. But they pretend otherwise and look the other way.
No one really wants to have the debate – on either side of Australian politics.
I will continue this story as part of a series I’m calling ‘Jokers, Off-Topic Reviews and Drinking from the Alcohol Thermometer’.
You can read my previous comment here: https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/05/jokers-and-temperature-as-radio-chatter
Soldier on, Jenn. You are having an impact, just not in the MSM or BOM.
Oh, they’re willing to debate.
(As long as they control the switch to cut off your mike.)
Yep- that is called “free media speech”.
Why doesn’t Chris Kenny, or one of the other Sky News commentators, get some debate going by having one of these champions of catastrophic warming, … on his program for a debate?
Because they would lose.*
*They are gaining money and or power from the “renewables” scam. Gotta keep it going. Cui bono.
In case you haven’t noticed, alarmists along with a complicit MSM refuse to even listen to dissenting views about anything. When confronted with questions that counter their narrative they either obfuscate, change the subject, or ignore. Ignore is their preferred response.
Just like elections democrats can’t win without cheating
Jennifer, I fear you have expectations of higher-profile media, academia and political operatives (tautology?) that are never going to support any positions that might in any way draw criticism of them from strident sections of the left.
No matter what the merits of any alternative perspectives you or others may espouse.
The media, academia and political cohort live in abject terror of “negative tweets / press” from left-of-center commentators.
See, for the media / academia / political establishment it’s all about “going along to get along”.
Alternatively, much as I hold no respect for Donald Trump as a person, he garners quite a respectable share of support from all quarters of the ordinary populace, because of the policy positions he espouses, and because he is not beholden to –
a political party
the media
bureaucrats
unions
business
academia
religions
environmentalists
the UN
the WEF
the EU
and so on . . .
So while there is always hope that a ‘Champion of Rationality’ might take center stage soon and initiate “The Enlightenment 2.0”, I don’t think such a saviour is going to emerge from the ranks of the Chris Kennys, the Tony Abbotts, the Greg Hunts, and other such wishy-washy “conservatives-in-claim-only”.
Much as it disturbs me to admit it, Trump offers the only real hope of a western re-set towards general rationality at the moment.
Trump was asked by an audience member in his recent CNN town hall – what he would do to make the cost of living better for Americans? – His answer “drill, baby drill” — for oil.
The context is different, whilst Trumps “personal style” is grating and offensive, his absolute no non-sense approach to issues is exactly what conservatives need. He calls it, no matter what.
Australia needs a nuanced “Trump” style conservative leader. In terms of energy policy we need a true leader that will say this –
Abort net-zero
Review all renewable energy subsidies and EV schemes with a view to eliminate them within 1 year
No new taxpayer subsidies, or tax incentives, or “schemes” of any sort for all types of “green energy”
Approve coal and gas projects.
Overturn all bans on fracking.
Extend the life of viable coal fired power stations.
Abolish “hydrogen head start”
Stop the build out of grid scale renewable infrastructure – no more solar or on-shore or off-shore wind
Start a meaningful debate, table the discussion in parliament relating to building a nuclear energy infrastructure across Australia
Then after you’ve done all that you can —
Gut the BoM – Re model it and get it right
Gut the ABC –
About Trump’s “grating and offensive” style.” I am reminded of President Truman’s quote. ” I never gave anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
I am offended by the namby-pamby demeanor of our politicians. Making nice may work on the playground but never in politics. These fools were elected to do a job for the people. Not their party or the people stuffing their pockets with money.
Some deeper thought would reveal that you live in a fantasy world.
And don’t forget to have the church refund all the payments it scammed for indulgences.
Daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations far exceed any long-term trend in average maximum temperatures.
A very hot day in 1910 was perceived the same as now viz. very hot.
Highly publicized maximum temperatures recorded on platinum resistance probes put out by the BOM are of little significance for overall long-term imperceptible climate change except as a propaganda tool.
ANY day in 1910 (hot or cold) is colder now than it was in 1910, and it will continue getting colder.
Identify a need and create a solution. Marketing pure and simple. Anthropogenic C02 was being widely touted as the cause of climate change back in the1990’s, and the only way to stop it was to transition to ‘clean’ energy. Enter wind, solar and backup batteries, the ‘product’. The top salesmen like Al Gore were bought in early with bought and paid for scientists to back up the sales pitch and make it seem plausible. The MSM became the advertising campaign and they have never let the team down.
The advertising has gained in momentum due to big money and the growing number of billionaires is in large part due to renewables. Politicians have bought into the scheme and by mandating the transition have increased the fervour to make as much money as possible before the scam is exposed.
Greed will be their downfall. They were forced to export manufacturing, including that of renewables to China. Apart from the fact that wind and solar has driven up the cost of electricity in any nation that has pushed it hard, they had signed up to reduce C02 so they couldn’t make renewables cheaply without creating large quantities of it. The fools don’t even realise that they haven’t saved C02, they’ve simply exported it to China. There will come a point where China will be unable or unwilling to provide the ‘product’. No need to fire a shot, simply flick a switch.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. — Groucho Marx
“…the Bureau has further exaggerated historic warming trends, while also rolling out a new series of resistance probes in electronic weather stations that can record even warmer for the same weather.”
Ask yourself: Why would they do all this to exaggerate warming if they were really convinced that global warming was actually occurring and would soon become undeniable? Obviously, they wouldn’t. So even they are not convinced. But they need to convince the public that dangerous warming is occurring to accomplish their real objectives. Climate change is the means to an end. And they are not going to let go of it until the public wakes up, cuts off their funding, and drags them away kicking and screaming. It all depends on how long they can convince us and our politicians that dangerous warming is just around the corner. And they will do anything, honest or dishonest, to maintain the ruse.
If people don’t get off this “Trumps not my favorite guy or I really don’t like Trump but I have to admit…. or pick your phrase” Your not going to have a country much longer any where in the western democracy’s ( yes I know they are republics! You know what I mean.)
Get out of this cult of personality mode and start supporting people on the basis of policy. Could any of you honestly say you could put up with the abuse , the persecution, the attack on your family that that man has had to endure? If you had his money would you voluntarily subject your self to the crap he has to put up with? Or would you just retire and hope someone else would step up and fight this tyranny and I do mean Tyranny, it’s obvious as hell that we are already in a full blown soft tyranny .
I could handle simply not liking the guy, but he had four years to make an impact and all he did was complain about the media. He’s preventing anyone else from grabbing oxygen. He will lose. Again. And people will complain about the voting, but nothing will come from that, either. Someone else needs to step up.
I like Trump but, I have to painfully admit you are probably right.
If he wins the next election it will be better than Biden, or a stooge winning, but he’s too divisive and not aware enough of what’s really going on.
He should have done what Putin did, on day one, and kicked Soros out the country, followed rapidly be Gates and numerous other American oligarchs we all know are running the show these days.
We condemn Russia for their oligarchs, but Google was co-founded by a guy born in the USSR, and we’re all surprised when we’re told our Android phones are spying on us……
That entire backbone of the internet, propped up by Section 230, is financed because all those companies spy on us. And they pay lawmakers not to touch it. There’s a reason even the dumbest congressman can retire a multi-millionaire after a few years in office. Even self-proclaimed communists like AOC.
So we have to accept that anything and everything about us is recorded somewhere and is available to anyone’s marketing department.
The only thing that saves us from a 24/7 barrage of ads is that even when the ads cost .000001 cents to deliver, they’re not worth it to most advertisers.
Yeah, I’d rather have Trump than Biden. It’s like cutting off a foot rather than removing your heart and lungs. By far the lesser of two evils. But even if he somehow wins (and he won’t), he’s only going to do one-tenth of what he should be doing, and he’ll ensure someone even worse than Biden in 2028.
soft if you only tentatively step out of line.
Your thoughts are as complete as your handle…
Jen, you say:
On at least this level Conservative politicians are much worse than Labour or Green politicians – the party comes first, before any other consideration.
Conservative politicians will never do anything to jeopardise the party even if it means engaging in groupthink or colluding with the media. If it meant a coalition with the Labour party to defeat an up coming political entity, they would do it.
Having said that, the wheels of politics grind slowly and are consequently apt to responding in a knee jerk manner. That’s what will happen when the lights begin to go out, especially in London, Sydney, New York and Paris. Nowhere else matters to ‘the elite’.
Our politicians know what’s going on but they have steered their massive political tankers in the wrong direction and are now figuring out where the wheelhouse is.
There is one solution to all this and it’s Ukraine. Bear with me on this, I’ll try to keep it short.
Why would Russia, the largest country in the world and a significant proportion of the worlds land mass, want to invade Ukraine, one of the most impoverished and certainly the most corrupt countries in Europe?
There is nothing there for Russia other than perhaps some wheat.
We can debate Russia’s motives but it’s certainly not greed for land or minerals, and as it continues to systematically destroy Ukraines energy and industrial base, it’s not for that reason either.
Russia is confronting the west and NATO head on. Unintentionally, but that’s another discussion.
The point is that the globalisation we all fear is a western initiative. It’s not coming from Russia or China. It’s the west that’s marching eastwards and climate change is the vehicle.
We want to democratise the world and clean it up for our children. Bullshit! We want the land, minerals and labour that Russia and China control and Ukraine is the gateway.
Russia and China are nation states, and proud of it. Meanwhile, western politicians welcome the globalist idyll of a borderless melting pot of co-mingling cultures that’s already proving a disaster.
How does this affect the crushing march of climate change politics?
Well, if Russia can’t be kicked out of Ukraine by the massed ranks of NATO nations then NATO is a busted flush along with it the United Nations.
Globalism Lite doesn’t work and if we insist on pursuing this utter madness then we run up against against a nation that sacrificed 26 million people to defeat Nazisim, and China, backing them with the largest manufacturing base mankind has ever known, turned over to making bombs.
The defeat and breakup of Russia is the globalist objective. Manage that and the phenomenon sweeps up to the Chinese border and then it’s only a matter of time before the NetZero, globalist concept is imposed on the only nations prepared to confront it.
The faster we wake up to the idea that Russia and China are, for the moment, on the side of anti-globalism and anti-climate hysteria the better.
What will follow? No one knows, but it’s unlikely to be Communism as Russia abandoned it in 1989 and no one there wants to return to it; and China, whilst politically Communist, operates on a capitalist system of wealth generation. Allegedly (because Rolls Royce won’t reveal their numbers) there are more Rolls Royces sold in China than any other country in the world.
Is Russia a crap democracy? Of course it is, it’s less than 40 years old. How bad was American democracy 40 years after it was first formed? I won’t mention the UK as one of their questionable solutions to only one of their problems was to ship ‘criminals’ to Australia.
Actually, belay the question of American democracy. It’s probably worse now than it was when the country was first formed.
HotScot
Thanks for all of this. I basically agree with your analysis. Adding, that according to Phillip Short’s biography of Vladimir Putin*, the Biden and Clinton families have a particular and personal hatred of Putin. Hilary, in particular, sees Putin as having cost her the election, so she wants him gone.
The defeat and break up of Russia would also achieve that.
(*The book is long, and so worth the read: https://www.amazon.com.au/Putin-definitive-biography-Philip-Short/dp/1847923372 )
And it should have been obvious to me back in August 2011, when John Abbot and I went to visit with Oscar Alves who heads up long range weather forecasting at the Bureau’s headquarters in Melbourne, that they cared nothing about the science of climate and weather and being able to forecast it.
Abbot and I explained how AI could be used to mine historical data, construct statistical models explaining the pattern, and use these for forecasting. Alves wanted none of.
We wrote the first of our rainfall forecasting nevertheless, and Abbot sent it back to the Bureau hoping they might publish it. The editor of their journal replied that he didn’t understand the purpose of our work: better rainfall forecasts. (They truly are Jokers.)
Abbot next sent the manuscript to journals in the US and UK, hoping for a better response. Same reply: we don’t understand the purpose of your work, what is the value of a better rainfall forecast? (Jokers running met bureaus across the English speaking world.)
Then Abbot sent our manuscript to the editor of the Elsevier journal sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Science. They were most interested. It was soon published:
Abbot J., & J. Marohasy, 2012. Application of artificial neural networks to rainfall forecasting in Queensland, Australia. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 29, Number 4, Pages 717-730. doi: 10.1007/s00376-012-1259-9 .
So, a paper about rainfall forecasting in Queensland, was liked and supported by a Chinese scientist in Beijing. That got us started.
Subsequently, I taught our technique to some Chinese-sponsored PhD students in Jakarta.
The Chinese are still interested in science, and curious about the weather.
I don’t understand why as her election organization and the DNC was complicit in the fake “Russia Russia Russia” Dossier put together by the ex-spook from MI5 … and maintained the fraudulent rage for 4 years with the support of the MSM.
Dear Dr. Marohasy,
Thank you. So much. How grateful we skeptics (and sceptics 😊 ) are for your persevering, excellent, intelligent, pursuit of accurate, complete, meaningful, data, without which there can be no science at all.
May the beauty and peace of “The Swan” by Saint-Saens (performed by Bruno Freitas in the below video) give you a bit of relief and calm in the storm you are weathering these days. Grace and strength — a lot like you…..
Gratefully,
Janice Moore
Just don’t eat sugar Jen, or Janice will be all over you. 🤣
Thank you. :-).
🙂
Isn’t a change of instruments a regular part of a temperature record, and isn’t “homogenization” supposed to compensate for any differences?
I dare you put that into simple English.
Especially, I would love to learn more about: “homogenization supposed to compensate for any differences”.
Can you draw me pictures, maybe? But don’t colour them, that may confuse me…
Instrument changes happen. No different to a person upgrading a car every couple of years.
But to use homogenisation to fix things is a problem Imagine if every day I drove the kids to school in the old car. Just like my homogeneous neighbours.
So when I buy a new car and go for a lovely drive in the country on the weekend am I meant to assume it never happened because my homogeneous neighbours didn’t go? Should I wind back the clock?
Data is data, never change it never delete it. It all has value. Even an error signal will tell you something, (possibly when to buy the next replacement).
[ Enter “Answer questions literally” mode … ]
While many older records do not always include instrument changes, more recent changes are usually included in the “metadata” file for a weather station.
The claim is that homogenisation compensates for those differences … with the reader left to infer that there are no other side effects.
– – – – –
The ACORN-SAT V2 dataset was described in the Trewin et al (2020) paper titled “An updated long-term homogenized daily temperature data set for Australia”.
Direct URL to journal website : https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3.95
They calculated the differences between a “raw / unhomogenised” dataset (AWAP), the “old, with a rounding bias” ACORN V1 dataset and the “new and improved” ACORN V2 dataset.
Their description of the AWAP dataset :
The end result for the trends in the various datasets is given in their Table 4, a screenshot of which is attached to the end of this post.
Notes
1) The trends for the period 1910-1960 were basically flat for both versions of the ACORN dataset. The “warming” mostly happened during the 1960-2016 period.
2) The trends for the “full” period, 1910-2016, increased as a result of the homogenisation process by 25% (from 0.8 to 1°C/decade) from AWAP to ACORN V1, and by just over 50% (from 0.8 to 0.123) for ACORN V2.
3) The trends for the “warming period”, 1960-2016, barely changed for ACORN V1 (from 0.159 to 0.165) but increased as a result of the “error corrected” homogenisation process by ~25% (from 0.159 to 0.2) for ACORN V2.
As Richard P. Feynman summarised the correct attitude to have towards “Trust me, I’m a (climate) scientist” claims :
What I find so utterly bizarre about the torment Dr Marohasy is put through on this topic in particular is that even a cursory assessment of possible poor data quality and built in systemic bias is plainly apparent.
Over say the last century or so the human population has about quadrupled and its consumption or materials, energy and land increases similarly, the number and size of buildings and other infrastructure has commensurately increased in a compound fashion driven by population and ‘standard of living’ factors. Much of the population growth has tended to be near coastlines or waterways which increases the overall risk from extreme weather events, even if the intensity and frequency said events were unaffected by ‘global warming’. Similarly there has been a massive increase in heat island effect in urban areas and around newer infrastructure, as Anthony Watts has pointed out with similar frustration to Dr Marohasy’s.
On that basis Dr M’s request for some sort of explanation for how these potential background biases in the raw data are properly accounted for is perfectly rerasonable. The lack thereof is accordingly quite bizarre behaviour on the part of the so called scientific community. It remids me of the comparably bizarre evolution of the ‘Robodebt’ regime in Australia recently exposed as utterly without technical or even any rational basis other than for Government to screw over citizens seemingly least able to fight back.
Non Oz readers, just Google ‘Robodebt’. Its basically the cult of managerialism cross breeding with political insider interests to piss in the pockets of poltical interests at the expense of vulnerable citizens on welfare. Callous to the point of vicious. Calculated and deliberate, all to an end of mutual self interest. Eisenhowere after WW2 warned of the military-industrial complex forming to advance their mutial ends. Same same here with a political-scentific complex. i.e. follow the money.
Leftists find it impossible to believe that they could ever be wrong, therefore debate is a waste of time.
This is bizarre,
Is there anyone you have not gotten off-side?
Please take a break.Go fishing.
Yours sincerely.
Dr Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Your crusade/vendetta against JM is not at all convincing and comes off as irrational. You whine about her choice of statistics (a lot) while giving a free pass to paid IPCC shills and trolls like Nitpick Nick Stokes and his trendology ilk. At this point I have to ask myself: “why?”
Perhaps you should heed your own advice.
Dear karlomonte,
The word significant is the most important word in what has turned-out to be a highly acrimonious and emotionally charged debate. It is true that Australia’s political system is riddled across the spectrum by corruption and vested interests and that we are being manipulated by people claiming the climate has warmed significantly, that if we wear masks the chance of transmitting COVID will be significantly reduced, you get the picture.
Using techniques explained in numerous http://www.bomwatch.com.au reports, I have found no warming in any of Australia’s long and medium-term temperature records. It is also not the change to electronic instruments that has caused record-hot days, but the staged replacement of 230-litre Stevenson screens with 60-litre ones, the relocation of sites to more exposed positions, and changes in the vicinity of where screens are located. Reduced maintenance and spraying-out of local groundcover is also a factor at many sites. Such issues can only be resolved on a site-by-site basis, which takes a considerable amount of time.
It is not as though you can take a dataset, run a trend line through it, look at the R-square value and claim that to be evidence of anything. Likewise, paste a daily dataset into a stats-package and be excited at the output, when all the assumptions on which the test depends are invalid. Having demonstrated this using data for sites where parallel data is available, it is misleading to claim significance for small differences, when they are too small to be significant, and too small to matter even if they were.
Irrespective of who makes the claim, this is pointing out an error, a statistical fallacy that needs to be addressed. If the Bureau of Meteorology was claiming differences are significant when they are not, then many of these words would be directed at them, not me. In fact, the BoM is very careful to avoid using the word significant for that reason. They repeatedly claimed the 22nd September 2017 was a record at Mildura was a record, but I’m not aware that they said it was significantly warmer. Even a cursory glance at the succession of satellite images for Mildura airport show why the site has warmed and it has nothing to do with the weather, and probably nothing to do with the change in instruments.
There are ways of analysing for such effects that don’t involve thousands of photocopied or scanned pages and months of entering data. After coming up against the wall of attempting to get data for Canberra airport, years before John Abbott, I worked through and developed protocols for undertaking such analysis. Examples of that can be viewed at http://www.bomwatch.com.au and for factcheckers, and blokes with chooks like Graham Readfearn, datasets are also provided. My careful uncovering of hard-evidence that shows unequivocal cheating by scientists and others we should be able to trust, has no peer.
And of course, I have given up trying to get things published. As JM has pointed-out, the peer-review process is as corrupted as the money-machine that funds much of Australia’s climate industrial complex.
Your name-calling of Nick Stokes sounds very much like the kettle calling the pot black and be assured that I have copped plenty of flack over the years too. I met with Chris Kenny twice in Canberra when he was in the parliamentary press gallery. He was not moved then and he seems to be unmoved now. I guess he runs his programs as he sees fit, and anyway I seriously don’t think it is wise to continue with the significance line if there is a shadow hanging over it.
Do you think the BoM has no statisticians and the capacity to respond to doubtful claims? And if they do, where would that leave us in the eyes of The Australian and Chris Kenny, and Graham Readfearn and his chooks? Does JM not understand the gravity of the situation, how it could end-up, and the effect it could have on others?
To be clear, I am no fan of the Bureau, and certainly not as you absurdly imply, an admirer of CSIRO and the IPCC. However, all this muddying of the water by unrealistic claims of significance and exaggerating the impact of a few positive (and negative) outliers in data for Brisbane airport, invites a tribal response rather than a reasoned one.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Even if it comes to nothing, it still seems useful to have the parallel-run figures available.
Both your approach and Jennifer’s have merit, and it seems quite a shame that some historical disagreements preclude closer cooperation.
Thanks Old Cocky,
More parallel data would be available, which I don’t have a problem with, but analysis of some paired datasets that are available shows nothing remarkable.
But wait, evidence can be found in long overlaps, that while means may be the same, tails of data distributions (extremes) may be different. However, this requires a different approach than using un-paired or paired t-tests of means and mean differences.
I have a test for that anyway that does not require overlapping data (see Section 1.3 in http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Meekatharra-December12.FINAL_.pdf)
Aside from stirring arguments, what will more parallel data show?
All the best,
Bill
Blair Trewin’s Report on ACORN-SAT 2 noted a discrepancy at low humidy / high temperature sites.
The sites which have been analysed to date have covered a small subset of Australia’s range of environmental conditions.
One of the golden rules of software testing is to cover the full range of allowed inputs (and a few out-of-range), especially the corner cases.
And so? Even if it is true, who lives there? Is there evidence that “the full range of allowed inputs” is not covered by available datasets? I don’t know, but there are many parallel datasets to choose from. You could start with those and we could debate the finer points from there.
All the best,
Bill
Aa attributed to Isaac Asimov:
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny…'”
Isn’t that the essence of scientific inquiry?
Why don’t you know?
Isn’t it called rigorous scientific investigation?
Surely studying alternative data and finding nothing is better than not studying it and missing something?
It seems significant that this was coincident with the introduction of electronic probes, is it not?
That’s surely not the question.
The question is, why was that data sent to Jen in that format? Does it mean the BoM has never digitised it themselves to analyse? Or if they have digitised it (which surely any responsible and transparent government agency would) then they are simply being obstructive.
These “conservatives” seem to be much like American Democrats.
Conservatives in the US seem to be more conservative than conservatives in Australia or most of Europe.
Our Liberal Party (centre right here) is probably much of a muchness with the US Democrats of a decade ago (centre left there). Much of what we read of the current Democrats puts them more in line with our Greens.