The BOM: Homogenizing the heck out of Australian temperature records

There are adjustments on top of adjustments. Homogenised records are being used to correct raw records. Some man-made adjustments can infect data for miles around…

Rutherglen is a long running station in central Victoria. There are no documented site moves, but the long raw trend of slow cooling was adjusted up to a warming trend. What was cooling of 0.35C per century became a 1.7C warming trend.

Jennifer Marohasy, and others, have spent months trying to get answers from the BOM explaining why these massive adjustments were made. Excuses flowed. In the latest round, the BOM claim the changes are necessary to make the Rutherglen record match the trends in the neighboring stations. What the BOM doesn’t say is that there was no warming in the neighbours either,  not until after they were homogenized. The order in which stations are homogenized matters, which rather says something important about the arbitrary nature of the adjustments. Anomalous trends from far distant and poor locations can spread through waves of homogenization until better, longer stations succumb to political correctness and show the “correct” result. Small choices about which stations to to use first in the process can make a huge difference to the end result. Another reason the BOM needs auditing.

A poor Australian citizen might think after seeing this graph, below, from the BOM, that Rutherglen is out of step with its neighbours.  Instead the taxpayer would need to go to Jennifer Marohasy’s site to get the full story. She has added the red notes to the chart to point out what the BOM don’t say: Wagga, Deniliquin and Kerang series were homogenized first. These trends were not what was recorded by thermometers. [UPDATE: Note that many raw records are patchy and not well documented. They often do need adjustment, but the reasons need to be transparent, exact, justified, and Australians need to know how influential these adjustments are.]

Australia, temperatures, graph, Victoria, Rutherglen, Deniliquin

….

Marohasy also plotted the raw data from Deniliquin and Rutherglen, and explains that at the long running station in Wilkinson St Deniliquin there was a statistically significant cooling trend of 0.6C per century from 1910 to 2000 1913 – 2003. Actual raw data is available for Wilkinson St from February 1867 to June 2003, a remarkably long series.

Graph, temperatures, raw data, Rutherglen, Deniliquin, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

She has written an open letter to the Chief Operating Officer, Vicki Middleton, pointing out the misleading nature of the Bureau of Meteorology graph, and asking that they correct their “Fact Sheet”.

This is not just about Rutherglen. If we look at historic records from 84 sites, two thirds of Australia’s warming trend comes from the adjustments.

What’s the answer? Replicate the BOM’s work

If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science. The Bureau of Meteorology admits its methods are secret. [UPDATE: See the link — the Bureau specifically admits no one outside the BoM can replicate their work because it would require detailed instructions, “operator training” and it’s too “onerous”.]

The BOM needs a full independent audit, staffed by people outside climate studies — we need physicists, statisticians, engineers, people with proven track records in areas of science or technology that work.

The only thing we know for sure about the BOM is that time and again, they’ve had the opportunity to explain their decisions and methods, and they choose not too. It’s an unscientific, “trust us” approach. If they were honest, and sincerely believed in their work, they would welcome the interest in the details of the historic Australian climate.

Would you buy shares in a company on the Australia Stock Exchange (ASX) that refused to allow audits of its finances? You couldn’t even if you wanted too — the ASX doesn’t allow them to list. Public companies welcome audits, to show everyone they are legit.

When the ABC misinforms Australians, the BOM don’t care. That says a lot about their priorities. Not serving the public, just serving “big-government”…

We need to get individual stations in order before we start blending bad data

The concept motivating homogenization is that errors in one station can be detected and corrected by comparing it to surrounding stations — if all the neighbors say one things and one station says something else, then the one station is probably wrong.

But how close need a neighbor be?  Is a temperature record 500 km away to be relied upon to correct measurements taken at a site? Somehow the BOM has got itself in a real mess. Bad data, unrecorded site changes, and anomalous results abound, along with wacky square-wave monthly adjustments that defy explanation. Homogenisation should start with the best stations, but no one at the BOM has even figured out which stations are the best. There’s been no proper detailed historic analysis of each station. Someone needs to go back to photos, letters and newspapers. Lets start with data, dammit.

The only thing we know for sure is that we are not getting good answers

The history of the BOM’s explanations is that the adjustments to Rutherglen are major, and that explanations could be provided in days — but more than three years after ACORN was established there are still no good explanations, just a litany of weak excuses and the fog of evasion. The BOM ignored independent scientists until The Australian started writing up their questions. Only then did they bother to respond, and in the end, they admit they can’t explain something as simple as the reasons for their adjustments in something as scientifically banal as a single temperature sequence. This is not rocket science.

Nothing has changed from when I wrote this nearly a year ago:

Under pressure, Australian BOM puts up facade of “transparency” — too little, too late

Bottom line: The BOM has added a page listing “Adjustments”. It’s two years late, inadequate and incomplete. Skeptics shouldn’t have had to ask for it in the first place, and we still don’t have the algorithms and codes, or rational answers to most questions.  No one can replicate the mystery black box homogenisation methods of the BOM — and without replication, it isn’t science. There is still no explanation of why an excellent station like Rutherglen should change from cooling to warming, except for vague “statistics”, or why any station should be adjusted without documentary evidence, based on thermometers that might be 300 km away*.

The adjustments page is just a glorified rehash of the same old excuses

Effectively the bureau is saying “we need large mysterious transformations of data to make Australian trends look like international trends”. What serious climate scientist thinks Australia is supposed to get hotter, colder, wetter, drier, or cloudier with the exact same timing and patterns to the rest of the world?

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation means that Australian trends are not going to be same as US trends. When it’s rainy here, it’s drier there. Dry soil heats up fast; wet soil keeps temperatures more stable (h/t to Bill for reminding us of the importance of rainfall).

The new gee-wizz data set called ACORN contains thousands of new mistakes that did not exist before, as discussed nearly a year ago. Nothing has changed.

Three years ago the independent audit team, with Senator Cory Bernardi, asked for an ANAO audit of the BOM’s “High Quality” HQ data set. The BOM was not enthused. They dumped the HQ set that they had previously lauded and set up a new one called “ACORN”. We listed some of the errors in June 2012. Two Three years on, nothing much appears to have changed. They still haven’t released the algorithms used in the homogenization process. They are still using stations more than 100km away, some 600 km away, to “adjust” temperatures.  The mystery black box adjustments are still producing inexplicable nonsense, and the BOM still can’t explain why — on individual stations like Rutherglen and Bourke — anyone should find their adjustments necessary and scientifically justified.

The BOM’s active silence on the long hot records of the late 1880s and 1890s suggests they are more interested in promoting one message — “it’s warming” — rather than being custodians of the real and more complicated history of the Australian climate.

When will  our elected representatives get the balls to do the right thing for the environment and demand the highest, most rigorous research on the Australian climate? For the sake of our farmers, national policy and land management, how can we predict the future climate if we don’t even know the history of how it has changed? (How Orwellian is that?) If the Greens cared about the climate, they would demand an independent review.

The bottom line on Rutherglen:

I don’t pretend to know what the end point answer should be. Rutherglen is not a perfect station, but we can’t even have a polite and rational conversation about it. The real dishonesty is in pretending that there is a meaningful trend to be found there or anywhere in the smoothed, blurred, and blended ACORN data.  The BOM is not honest with the Australian public about the transformative but mysterious adjustments and the dismal state of our temperature records.

CONCLUSION:  The egregious thing here is the way the trends, and the record events get reported as if they are unquestionable when so much manipulation is going on behind the scenes. That message is used as PR to sell policies, and is marketed as “science” when it is so flagrantly not.

Read the details at Jennifer Marohasy’s.

9.5 out of 10 based on 118 ratings

215 comments to The BOM: Homogenizing the heck out of Australian temperature records

  • #
    Jennifer Marohasy

    Hey Jo,

    Great summary! And thanks for putting this all in the big picture context both in terms of explaining that this is not an isolated example, and explaining that part of the solution could be found in an audit.

    Being a stickler for detail, just a minor correction is need. Where you write:
    “Marohasy also plotted the raw data from Deniliquin and Rutherglen, and explains that at the long running station in Wilkinson St Deniliquin there was a statistically significant cooling trend of 0.6C per century from 1910 to 2000.”

    In fact, I plotted all the available data from Wilkinson Street, Deniliquin,for the period of the available record for Rutherglen. So, from 1913 (when the Rutherglen record starts) to 2014 (when the Deniliquin record ends).

    Cheers, Jen

    PS. I encourage readers to fling Jo some donations. She has been working to expose this farce for a few years longer than me.

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    • #
      Jennifer Marohasy

      That should be to 2003, when the Deniliquin record ends. The Rutherglen record ends in 2014.

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      • #
        redress

        What is interesting about Deniliquin is that the “new” airport site opened in 1997, and ran in tandem with the original Wilkinson St site until 2003 when they ceased recording temperature at Wilkinson St, which incidentally is still open but only records rainfall.

        So, at Deniliquin you have 7 years of temperature comparison 1997-2003…..Wilkinson st and its UHI effect and the pristine airport.

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      • #
        Bulldust

        It’s quite simple really. Golden rule: unless you have a legitimate reason to adjust observed data you are lying when you do so. The burden of proof is on BoM. Also, to adjust stations sequentially is a faux pas. That is like rounding a number one significant digit at a time. You can make 4.444444445 equal 5 if you do that enough times. That is also statistically and mathematically illegitimate.

        It’s like these guys never did an introductory course in statistics.

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    • #
      Leonard Lane

      I commend Jo and Jennifer Marohasy for the work they have done to preserve the original data and to open the BOM to the light of day on homogenization.
      Is it too late to get a restraining order or a stop work order in a court of law? Or have they corrupted or discarded the original data so that it cannot be restored?
      Official climatological data are almost always collected at taxpayers expense, therefore the data are public property.
      I live in the foothills area of a city in Arizona. Because of features such as cold air drainage (which can lower temperatures at night a few degrees and makes sitting outside on summer nights quite pleasant), official temperature records withing a few km can also have mean temperatures that vary by a degree or more.
      Conversely, if the temperature recorder is located on concrete, asphalt, or near an industrial air conditioner exhaust, then the daytime and night time temperatures can be a few to several degrees warmer than in the foothills.

      The point of all this is that the temperature stations are all with distances from about 1 to 20 km. I do not think it would be appropriate to homogenize any of these data. Raw data measure what is there–it is the metadata (detailed site descriptions, changes on observers, etc.) which add knowledge to the local station data. If data are found to be inconsistent with surrounding data because of localized influences then fine. Use a subset of the data and thoroughly document the reasons for doing so.
      But the raw data should be analyzed frequently to identify anomalies. If the station is improperly sited (in the exhaust of an air conditioner, etc.) then move it to a suitable site, note the inaccuracy of the original data, and document all your analyses and actions in the metadata file. However if the station is properly cited and no explanation for its differences from surrounding stations can be determined, then continue it and document all your analyses. The anomaly may be some of the most valuable data collected.
      The point is, not one jot or tittle of the raw data should be changed without a detailed document containing all the analyses and metadata. Fifty years from now someone could go in and re-analyze the data and make exciting discoveries. Undocumented, unjustified, secret, or arbitrary changes destroy the data forever.
      Homogenization of temperature data over several hundred kilometers distance is a crime and against all rational scientific thought and reasoning. It is an unbelievably gross and willful destruction of taxpayer owned data.

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      • #
        Annie

        That is very well put LL. I live in an area of Victoria where the temperatures can be markedly different over a very few kms. BOM forecasts are never correct for us as they relate to a different township by a large body of water.

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    • #
      JohnM

      Wilkinson Street, Deniliquin, was always a dodgy site because, if I recall correctly from my last visit there, it was very near a red brick post office.

      Someone at Melbourne University reported on the the UHI effect at Deniliquin back around year 2000 or maybe slightly earlier. Their paper or a summary thereof used to appear on a university web page but it seems to have disappeared.

      Everything pointed to Deniliquin having a rising UHI effect and therefore a rising reported temperature, so it’s very interesting that raw temperatures there actually fell over time.

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      • #
        Jennifer Marohasy

        JohnM, Please note I am reporting on minimum temperatures for Deni, as it is TMin that was disputed for Rutherglen. And TMin should be most affected by UHI. Future installments will report on TMax, and do note that at Rutherglen even though site moves were used as the excuse for homogenization (at least initially), they homogenized TMax and TMin in different years.

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      • #
        redress

        Sorry JohnM…………..you are so wrong!!!!!

        The post office is no where near Wilkinson st..Wilkinson st is a residential area, western end….gradually built up as the town developed

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      • #
        redress

        JohnM…………..you are so wrong!!!!!

        Wilkinson st is not near the post office, which is in the main street.

        Wilkinson st is a residential area, western end of town which only developed during the 1950’s when public housing was created

        10

    • #
      hunter

      Jennifer,
      Keep up the good work.
      Speaking of flinging donations, when are you going to get a fling receiving capability?

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    • #
      Rob W

      Jennifer I suggest you have a look at Beechworth, Beechworth/Woolshed . Both these sites don’t operate anymore. The BOM would still use the data “hence” colder climate for their past records.

      Rainfall is still measured at Beechworth.

      http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_082001.shtml

      10

    • #
      Bill Johnston

      Bill Johnston

      All sides in the Rutherglen debate need to do some research.

      The first segment of the data were imported from somewhere else; probably the viticulture record (BoM site 82085).

      The ACORN catalogue ignored that. The step-change around 1937 coincided with the end of the viticulture record, further indicating that so-called raw data were merged up to that time.

      The most pertinent issue is that the compiled data (to 1924) were cooler on-average than data after 1924, which could have been from Rutherglen’s ‘real’ dataset but who would know (don’t ask BoM they have probably destroyed the original data.)

      Data says there was a station move sometime between 1960 and 1965. Don’t ask BoM to look.

      Data says there was another move around 1974. BoM have just discovered it; some former people from Rutherglen Research would remember that.

      Max temps increased then and minimum temperature declined, consistent with a move to a more exposed lower-valley position. The current location is in such a position.

      The final step-change in 1999 was due to the automatic weather station, which over-reports high temperatures. (This can be verified by looking at data from hundreds of AWS sites.)

      The most important point is that within the various data segments, there are no trends.

      Temperature changes were entirely due to location/instrument changes, not the climate.

      The same is true almost everywhere.

      The statistical design for analysing long-term trends has to be analysis of trends within statistically significant step-changes.

      The Victorian Department of whatever they call themselves this week, would do Australians great service if they terminated their lease with the Bureau of Meteorology; or insisted the Bureau corrected the record and stopped using their station’s data for political purposes.

      Simply stated, ACORN is CRAP.

      Cheers,

      Dr. Bill

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  • #
    Ursus Augustus

    This matter waddles, quacks and seems to poop like a duck. I am 97% confident that it requires independent review and audit. Minister Hunt should insist on such an audit. Frankly it is worth an RC or at least some sort of review with judicial type oversight and the power to compel witnesses. A report date before Paris would be nice.

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    • #
      TFH

      The Federal govt knows what is going on but refuses to fix it,they are permitting a govt dept to deliberately lie to the Australian people.
      It must suit the Federal govt for this to go on,the same could be said of the ABC,so it must be Federal govt policy to deliberately deceive us!
      How many other Federal govt depts are deceiving us or are all of them at it?

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      • #
        Greg Cavanagh

        In the last year I’ve read a book and a couple online documentaries wherein Stalin and his work method was talk about in great detail. Stalin used war and the atrocities of war as a leverage tool. Those atrocities happened not only under his command, but also “by” his command.

        I could easily accept that the government departments and science research is being directed by the government for a predetermined purpose. Case in point, we know the CSIRO management was replaced with Labor appointments for Labor purposes.

        The EU and UN both fund research in order to find the science that is most adventitious to themselves. We also know WWF and GreenP___ (I can’t bear to write the name) create havoc, blockades, political swill, for the purpose of shit stirring and self-promotion and political power games.

        I have no doubt whatsoever that some modern governments at most, or some individuals at least, do indeed create calamity for gain.

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  • #
    ianl8888

    I trust and hope other people besides me have read the Australian segment of the Harry ReadMe text file from the 2009 Climategate emails/documents

    Jennifer Marohasy and others are doing great work in trying to unravel the mysteries of the BOM database, but the Harry file Aus segment lists a goodly number of reasons that nobody, including the BOM, can sort out even the initial raw data satisfactorily [before that comment is thrown aside, the Harry file should be read, but sitting down]

    Then we have the inexplicable and never-ending homogenisations visited upon a hopelessly managed raw database. With the best goodwill one can muster, I cannot see this ever being resolved satisfactorily

    For those who do want to red the Harry file, just google Harry ReadMe.txt – there are now many preserved caches of the 2009 Climategate emails

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    • #
      Peter C

      Thanks Ian!8888

      Could you provide a link to that?

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      • #
        Mike S.

        Peter – my own search shows the primary text copies don’t seem to exist online anymore, but the “FOIA Search” page is still up:

        http://di2.nu/foia/HARRY_READ_ME-0.html

        Click the “search tool” link to go to the search page, click the checkbox for “HARRY_READ_ME”, clear the checkboxes for “Original emails” and “2011 emails”, and search for “Australia”.

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        • #
          Peter C

          Thanks Mike,

          This comment seems quite pertinent here:

          getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been
          introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented.

          It is quite shocking that the expert review committee of the BOM found nothing wrong during their one day meeting, even after that were told by Jennifer Marohasy and other exactly where to look.

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          • #
            Greg Cavanagh

            If you’ll recall, they were to sit through a presentation of the BoM methods, and at the end of the day sign off on how good it was. They didn’t actually investigate anything.

            20

      • #
        Mike S.

        As an aside, as a software engineer of 20+ years experience, HARRY_READ_ME is still my go-to source whenever I need a good laugh and cry simultaneously. Some of the lines that do it for me every time:

        “discovered that a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative!”

        “How handy – naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location
        to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!!”

        “But what are all those monthly files? DON’T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names.”

        “I tried using the ‘stn’ option of anomdtb.for. Not completely sure what it’s supposed to do, but no matter as it didn’t work:”

        “I got MORE results when I used an elimination radius! Whaaaaaaaaat?!!!”

        “So yes, in retrospect it was not a brilliant idea to try and kill two birds with one stone – I should have realised that one of the birds was actually a pterodactyl with a temper problem.”

        (That last one I’ve shamelessly stolen for my own use)

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        • #
          ianl8888

          Yes, it’s astonishing, isn’t it 🙂 🙂

          “How handy – naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!!”

          One of my favourites. I’ve actually had experience in a (BHP) geological database where exactly that happened. Until we understood it, and that took many months since it’s not something one immediately expects, the resultant model maps had a series of “bulls eyes” that defied the best geology minds

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  • #
    David Maddison

    This is very disturbing.

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    • #
      Hugh

      Indeed it is. The idea of homogenisation would be all right if you could actually explain what you are doing and qualify and quantify the biases you remove. Claiming the adjustments are needed but too difficult for laymen to understand, and keeping them secret just gives an impression of a conspiracy. I don’t like conspiracy thinking, but the fact BoM are not transparent leads to a conclusion that their methods are not necessarily reproducible or well-grounded.

      It is time for BOM to publish their data and codebase.

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      • #
        gai

        Hugh says, “…The idea of homogenisation would be all right if you could actually explain what you are doing and qualify and quantify the biases you remove….”

        No Hugh the idea is NEVER all right. Why?

        1. Because the earth is not a featureless uniform sphere.

        2. The air and oceans are not uniform either. There is wind and rain and pressure differences.

        http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/04/06/1500Z/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=41.81,92.82,482

        http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=105.04,-17.50,360

        How many times have we seen it raining across the street or driven into or out of a rainstorm? How many times have we felt the sudden drop in temperature as a front or storm moves in? This is the reason you just can not adjust a data point at one station using the data point at another even if they are only 50 kilometers apart. I do not know about Australia but here in North Carolina we routinely get storms a few miles to fifty miles in diameter dotting the state all summer long. The weather maps look like they have a bad case of the measles. So how in heck can you tell if a data point is valid or not by comparing to a neighbor?

        Homogenisation is based on the idea of Krigging, actually the global average temperature is and that is a false statistical technique. Krigging is the name for a family of techniques used in geology for mapping using limited sample data and the estimating values at the unsampled locations.

        The Krigging Game

        …geostatistical practitioner in the 1994 Jackling Lecture referred to “ordinary kriging”, “universal kriging”, “disjunctive kriging”, “indicator kriging”, “probability kriging”, “lognormal kriging”, and “an endless list of other kriging methods”. Since a pair of measured values with different coordinates describe an infinite set of kriged estimates, selecting the least biased and most precise subset is an awesome task….

        In the real world, geostatistics cannot possibly provide unbiased estimates and 95% confidence limits for contents and grades because it violates fundamental requirements of classical statistics. Bre-X’s infamous fraud puts into perspective what the difference between classical statistics and the geostatistical practice of kriging is is all about.

        Classical statistics proved that the Busang gold resource was a salting scam several months before Bre-X’s kingpins were honored by their peers. In the meantime, kriging continued to convert bogus grades and barren rock into the largest phantom gold resource the world has ever seen

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        • #
          Bulldust

          I don’t see how one shonky operation (Bre-X) which must have “salted” cores somehow invalidates kriging as an approach for ore body estimation. At the end of the day, the type of mineralogy is going to determine the best estimation approach. There is no single approach for exactly that reason. This is not a random sample situation, it is a specific type of ore body with inherant characteristics and the estimation approach should reflect that.

          There is a huge difference between say a BIF (Banded Iron Formation) and a typical nickel sulphide deposit. It makes no sense whatsoever to use the same approach and assumed ore body characteristics to evaluate both of them. I would have thought that is self-evident. Equally it is obvious that there is a spatial relationship in ore bodies which relates to how they were first formed and subsequnetly altered by geological forces.

          Kriging is simply a method for dealing with unknowns (i.e. limited drilling samples) where there is an assumed spatial relationship, which is grounded in experience and knowledge of similar geological occurences.

          BTW it is kriging (pronounced kreeging), not krigging, named after geologist Danie Krige.

          30

          • #

            Needs emphasis:

            assumed spatial relationship

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            • #
              Bulldust

              The assumption is based on experience, but clearly it is a bit of an art. It is very difficult to know what lies beneath the ground until you have mined it all out, and even then sampling errors could prevent you from knowing with a high degree of accuracy. The only thing you know with a high degree of certainty is how much of a metal/mineral you recovered after the whole exercise is complete, and today’s tailings may be tomorrow’s resource (e.g. the Kalgoorlie Tailings “Kaltails” retreatment operation, which is now finished). But yes, ore reserve estimation is an art as much as a science and it all starts with a guesstimate of the ore body shape and size based on limited information.

              00

        • #
          Alan

          Have to agree with Bulldust here, Busang had nothing to do with kriging, at least not the proper use of the method as with any estimation method. In fact I have seen many more poor resource estimates made by misusing classical methods than those correctly using geostatistics.Also you didn’t need very advanced classical methods to show Busang was a salting exercise, just good old due diligence was how it was picked up.
          Gai I think you need to do a little more reading and understanding of geostatistics than just the website of the disgruntled Mr Merks.

          20

      • #

        Hugh, There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. If people took shortcuts, didn’t document reasons, or the job evolved in the usual multilayered committee based approach, it’s possible that no one can easily answer questions. This does not excuse the BOM. They need to be honest with the Australian people about how bad the data is and how uncertain the trends are.

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        • #

          Hugh, it’s not just about “data” and “code”. This cannot be automated– it is so much more messy.

          Here’s a quote from the post I did about the BoM admission that their dataset cannot be replicated:

          The Forum noted that the extent to which the development of the ACORN-SAT dataset from the raw data could be automated was likely to be limited, and that the process might better be described as a supervised process in which the roles of metadata and other information required some level of expertise and operator intervention. The Forum investigated the nature of the operator intervention required and the bases on which such decisions are made and concluded that very detailed instructions from the Bureau are likely to be necessary for an end-user who wishes to reproduce the ACORN-SAT findings. Some such details are provided in Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) technical reports (e.g. use of 40 best correlated sites for adjustments, thresholds for adjustment, and so on); however, the Forum concluded that it is likely to remain the case that several choices within the adjustment process remain a matter of expert judgment and appropriate disciplinary knowledge.

          Jo says: The process can’t be “automated” — which means it can’t be described by a set of rules other people, or other computers could follow. It’s a bit of a red herring: skeptics have never demanded “automation”. We just want explanations. The crux of science is replication, not automation. If ad hoc judgements were part of the process, they need to be recorded and their impact on the numbers included in the processing from raw data to final product.”

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          • #
            Greg Cavanagh

            Topography and prevailing winds play a far more significant factor in temperature than distance. Homogenising via a wire mesh distance calc is just stupid.

            Granted, if two station are trending differently you might ask why, but to use one station to adjust another is blind trust.

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            • #
              tom0mason

              Greg Cavanagh,

              Exactly!
              It is the specifics at the macro-climate level within geographical regions that will show changes (if the geography dictates).
              Homogenization smears these details across the continent of Australia, and the more they homogenize, over time, the less any change will be seen.

              Like putting a casserole in a blender.
              Start with distinct, identifiable juicy pieces of meat and vegetables, with definite flavors and aromas, all in a full-flavored, spicy stock.
              Then blend, and keep blending until it’s an anonymous tasting, pale brown-gray, homogeneous mush.
              Same ingredients, but, …er, well, just very different!

              40

            • #
              bit chilly

              i live in the uk.the front of my house faces north, the rear south.if they used the process to determine the mean temp for a given year for my front garden based on physical readings taken from the back garden,they would be so wrong it would not even be funny.

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          • #
            Bulldust

            That quote is appalling Jo (for BoM). Basically they are saying, we are the experts and therefore any change we make is justified by our experience. To say that this isn’t science is an understatement of enormous magnitude.

            It’s one thing to take out outliers in a data set where there is obvious error, eg a missed decimal point or wrong units, but it is complete bastardry to adjust otherwise clean raw data based on “expert judgement.” I am surprised they even made such a statement. My mind boggles, partly at the lack of scientific rigor and partly at the audacity that they would state it so boldly.

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        • #
          John Smith

          when a group of associated people work together to obscure information
          which causes another group to make decisions involving billions of dollars
          a decision the second group might not have made had they known all the facts
          to the benefit of the first group
          looks like a ‘conspiracy’ to me
          folk go to jail for such
          also sounds like the ‘climate change’ thing worldwide
          let’s face it, it’s a duck

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          Manfred

          the usual multilayered committee based approach

          Indeed Jo.

          No personal responsibility, not the slightest whiff. Not even a hapless railroad engineer to point the bone at. These pesky inconvenient truths just keep mounting don’t they? Little did El Gourdo realise how unwittingly prescient he was when he entitled his propaganda extravaganza, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

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          Hugh

          it’s possible that no one can easily answer questions.

          Yesterday I was thinking there are probably less than handful of persons capable of understanding what has been do to produce the adjusted temperature trends.

          However, maybe you are right and there is no-one left there. Odd corners of 25-year-old-disks contain obsolete compilers, obsolete code and obsolete data, which origin can’t be traced of. Nasty harry-read-me.txts tell what to do when someone requires an update, and old computations are stored as preprocessed series with no fn clue how to reproduce.

          But surely everyone agrees we’re good chaps doing top science? Right!

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          • #
            Hugh

            the process might better be described as a supervised process in which the roles of metadata and other information required some level of expertise and operator intervention

            Oh yes. We don’t need a conspiracy when confronted with ineptitude with pride.

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            • #
              Greg Cavanagh

              The process can’t be automated.
              The records to be adjusted can’t be identified, else it could be automated.

              So what happens if the operator with this expert knowlage goes on holiday?
              What “other” information is required?

              The output is obvious junk, so what is really going on here?

              00

      • #
        Sean McHugh

        I avoid framing religious manipulations as conspiracies. All that’s needed is a mindset and common vested interest. Everyone knows what they need to do for the sake of expediency.

        10

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    janama

    The raw Australian temperature record was obtained by dedicated Australians who every dusk and sunrise dutifully went out and recorded the data. It’s a cherished part of Australian history. The role of the BoM is to hold that record, digitize it and present it to the Australian public in all it’s glory.

    Now – if you want to play around with it, make changes to it, draw conclusions from it – fine. That’s investigative science. Present your research via the peer reviewed literature.

    Otherwise, let it stand for what it is.

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    • #
      Gary in Erko

      The raw Australian temperature record was obtained by dedicated Australians who every dusk and sunrise dutifully went out and recorded the data.

      It’s a disgraceful misuse of their ardent and responsible work. The daily task hundreds of our fellows did on our behalf has been warped into a misrepresented load of rubbish. It’s insulting. It’s abusive. It’s done for a nefarious purpose.

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    RoHa

    Since I am not a professional climate scientist (or, indeed, any other sort of scientist) my first thought would have beeen to try to find out why Rutherglen was different from the surrounding sites, rather than fudge the data to make it the same.

    Clearly I need a lot more training in climate science in order to stop having such thoughts.

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    • #

      RoHa That thought may have lead you to find that Rutherglen was infested by scientists like Bill Johnston who were involved with recording many of the temperatures. Being an argumentative type I can asure you that when asked about his numbers he can quickly show that thought and care has gone into every method and calculation. with people like that around problems with the site would have been noticed. I can assure you that the last place you need to suspect of being in serious error is there if he is a reflection of the general culture at that place! So I would be looking at why other sites were different to there and different to Deniliquin first.
      http://www.vicdofaghistory.org/documents/GregSmithRRIHistory.pdf

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      mike restin

      I believe there are training camp in the making to provide the psychological help non-scientists need to understand true CAGW.
      Let’s ask Lew and Cookie if they can provide training for we the ignorant.

      20

      • #
        RoHa

        So I’m likely to end up in a political re-education camp? I always expected that would happen sooner or later. I won’t buy the nonsense the right-wingers peddle, and I won’t toe the line of the left-wingers. I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long.

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    mmxx

    BoM has stepped on to sticky paper from which there is no way back for its credibility.

    The fable of briar rabbit comes to mind!

    A scientific body that manipulates data to suit a popular or political narrative will be damned in history once science resumes its ascendancy by its verifiably factual basis.

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    • #
      Greg Cavanagh

      I mis-read your last line. At first I thought you were saying when people put on their resume that they’d worked at BoM, it would count against them. Ah me.

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  • #
    Ceetee

    BoM has stepped on to sticky paper from which there is no way back for its credibility.

    Matters not, others are protecting their credibility for them, if they are anything like the gang we have here in NZ.

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      Leigh

      Ceetee, they are the same gang.
      They all learn their “world’s best practice of homogenisation and adjustment UP” here.
      If your not willing to learn it and practice it, you simply can not be part of the gang.
      When you click on the link, go to members.
      “Team New Zealand ” is in the gang.
      As are all the usual “suspects”.

      https://www.wmo.int/pages/about/index_en.html

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        Ceetee

        It’s the last sentence that’s the kicker:

        These activities contribute towards ensuring the sustainable development and well-being of nations

        Give me strength!.

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      Sweet Old Bob

      Lew paper ? (8>))

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    Neville

    Thankfully we’ve had the satellite data since 1978. Ken Stewart has used that data to look at the pause in temp for a number of regions and countries around the globe.
    Australia hasn’t warmed for 17 years and 8 months, the USA 18 years and 2 months and the south polar region over 35 years. Here’s the link. https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/pause-update/

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      Hugh

      Nice, but UAH wasn’t measuring the surface temperature? The troposphere temperature is of course in interesting conflict, but it is still a different thing.

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  • #
    crakar24

    I was reading Jo,s post to my wife who does not follow the climate debate. I got half way through the second paragraph and she said “I get it they make up the numbers to show its warming, I have heard enough”.

    Aside from the far left eco zealots everyone would come to the same conclusion………if they knew the truth, the powers that be work very hard to keep it from them.

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    Robert O.

    Is it that it is beyond the capacity of Mr. and Mrs. Average to understand that it isn’t getting any hotter without the need to homogenise the land based records and cool the past?

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    • #

      What I find most mystifying/disturbing is why the Australian government steadfastly refuses to have the BOM properly audited. Wouldn’t that help us find the truth, one way or the other.

      This is disturbing in the light of all the statistical analysis that has been done on the BOM’s methods by people such as Jennifer Marohasy, Ken Stewart and Bill Johnston. These people are not fools. They are motivated by a high ideal – the search for truth. But they just get stonewalled by the BOM.

      We need a deep and searching review, not just a white wash as happened with the most recent review. We need a proper audit with top rated, independent statisticians and mathematicians. Let’s find the truth.

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        Robert O.

        David, there are many people who would like to see scientific methodology followed and a honest answer, but politics has taken over the debate. A long time ago I suggested to PM Abbott that he set-up a commission to look objectively at the available evidence and get it away from the political arena, but it didn’t occur and all we seem to get is a series of failed prediction from the pundits: I suppose that eventually they will get one right due to chance alone. However, if a prediction is made and it is wrong then your hypothesis is flawed and it should be discarded, or modified, but in the field of climate science this doesn’t happen and the bandwagon rolls on.

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        • #
          handjive

          It is to Abbott’s advantage to keep 97% Global Gullible Warming bubbling along.

          It has helped him dispose of all his political opponents.

          Electricity Bill is next.

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          • #
            handjive

            Today the Conversation anticipates

            The Coalition government has revived its anti-carbon tax campaign in the wake of Labor’s commitment to bring back an emissions trading scheme and increase the contribution of renewable energy to 50% by 2030.

            In the 2000s, first New South Wales and then ACT governments introduced carbon trading schemes. The sky did not fall.
            . . .
            Roflmao!
            The extreme weather didn’t stop either!

            Peak climate stupidity @thecon.

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  • #
    David Maddison

    Does the original data, as collected, still exist or has that been destroyed?

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    • #
      Brute

      It is likely to still exist. It is in the advantage of BOM to preserve it.

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      Stupendus

      it probably (97% probability) exists…just that no one can find it.
      I know that someone tried to “dispose” of the original gazettes that were an official record of all things government (including weather data)going back to the start of the state. Failing that there are digital copies of newspapers and some photo’s of actual observation sheets on the net.

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    Bevan Dockery

    This simply confirms that Australian science has gone to the dogs.
    Another example is the Department of Environment Web site that states that the greenhouse effect is 33 degrees Celsius as described in the IPCC FAR 1990, Working Group 1. This is plain fiction as the base model used to calculate the greenhouse effect has very little resemblance to our actual Earth being of about the same diameter and the same distance from the Sun when averaged for perturbations of the orbit and little else. The same fictitious number is on the Web site for the Australian Academy of Science.
    Apparently it is now okay to proselytise your new-found climate religion via the tax-payer funded Federal Government bureaucracies with no regard for empirical data.
    Next thing we know the Australian Academy of Science will be appointing witch-doctors as Fellows.

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      Robert O.

      I like the term “Witch Doctor”, pretty descriptive of some climate scientists and better than a High Priest of the Global warming religion.

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      James Murphy

      Too late – Tim Flannery was appointed as a Fellow in 2012…

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        James Murphy

        Off topic, but I see one of my former bosses from a long, long time ago, Mike McLaughlin, was elected as a Fellow this year.

        Based on this, I haven’t lost all hope in the AAS just yet.

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    • #
      gai

      Speaking of Witch-Doctors…

      …. most of this reportage has been second-hand. Unprecedentedly, I had direct access to the meteorologists concerned….

      First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming. Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,

      “Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty.”

      Startled by this sobering analysis, I moved on to Professor Rowan Sutton, Climate Director of NCAS at the University of Reading….

      … Professor Sutton shook his head, moaned eerily unto the heavens, and stuffed his fingers into the entrails of a recently disembowelled chicken, bought fresh from Waitrose in Teignmouth.

      Hurling the still-beating heart of the chicken into a shallow copper salver, Professor Sutton inhaled the aroma of burning incense, then told the Telegraph: “The seven towers of Agamemnon tremble. Much is the discord in the latitude of Gemini. When, when cry the sirens of doom and love. Speckly showers on Tuesday.”

      It’s a pretty stark analysis, and not without merit….

      http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/

      By, Jove I think Sean Thomas is onto to something!

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    David Maddison

    Why isn’t this headline news in every lamestream media outlet?

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      Yonniestone

      Because they are now merely stenographers directed by in house PC peer group pressure that developed from years of exposure to leftist ideals that destroyed any semblance of balanced reporting, combine this with orders given by green vested shareholder, business and political interests you end up with greed plus self entitlement on a great leap forward scale.

      Frankly I’m amazed online MSM sites even deign to allow comments on stories, even heavily moderated the people commenting are…well just people.

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      Dennis

      Because the bureau chief is not Tony Abbott?

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    el gordo

    Novocastrians will be shocked to discover their city is cooling at 0.63 degrees Celsius per century.

    http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Newcastle2.png

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    PeterS

    Shocking but not surprised at the extent of the tactics used. What next?

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  • #
    Ian Bryce

    My work on Echuca, Wangaratta, and Benalla all show cooling of the minimums since around 1880. The maximums in general have neither increased nor decreased.
    Melbourne however has increased enormously since 1958 by nearly 2oC, which is probably due to UHI, rather than CO2. However when plotted against CO2, there is some agreement. I wonder whether the BOM is using the Melbourne data in their adjustments, even though Melbourne is roughly 200k south of the sites I mentioned and Rutherglen as well.

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      gai

      “…I wonder whether the BOM is using the Melbourne data in their adjustments, even though Melbourne is roughly 200k south of the sites I mentioned and Rutherglen as well….”

      Jo and Jennifer said

      “…What the BOM doesn’t say is that there was no warming in the neighbours either, not until after they were homogenized. The order in which stations are homogenized matters, which rather says something important about the arbitrary nature of the adjustments. Anomalous trends from far distant and poor locations can spread through waves of homogenization until better, longer stations succumb to political correctness and show the “correct” result….”

      So it looks like that is exactly what happened. The Melbourne data was much more to the liking of the BOM ClimAstrologists that the other data sets.

      Also if Australia was set-up like the USA, cities had ‘regular’ stations run by professionals and outlying smaller cities and towns had cooperative stations. This would add to the excuse for using urban areas instead of rural as the standard and then adjusting the rural stations to agree..

      Meteorology: A Text-book on the Weather, the Causes of Its Changes, and Weather Forecasting By Willis Isbister Milham (1918)

      The observations of temperature taken at a regular station are the real air temperature at 8am and 8pm, the highest and lowest temperatures of the preceding 12 hours, and a continuous thermograph record…. [Richard Freres thermograph] ….these instruments are located in a thermometer shelter which is ordinarily placed 6 to 10 feet above the roof of some high building in the city. At a Cooperative station the highest and lowest temperatures during a day are determined, and also the reading of the maximum thermometer just after it has been set. The purpose of taking this observation is to make sure that the maximum thermometer has been set and also to give the real air temperature at the time of observation.

      On page 68 he says a thermometer in a Stevenson screen is correct to within a half degree. It is most in error on still days, hot or cold. “In both cases the indications of the sheltered thermometers are too conservative.”

      on Page 70
      “The Ventilated thermometer which is the best instrument for determining the real air temperature, was invented by Assman at Berlin in 1887…will determine the real air temperature correctly to a tenth of a degree.”

      Willis Milham textbook (1918) also mentions the Six thermometer and says the accuracy was not good so the US weather service used two thermometers mentioned in Instructions To Voluntary Observers of the Weather Bureau (1892) One mercury for the high temperature and an alcohol thermometer for the minimum temperature.

      I am sure these scientists from 100 years ago would be appalled at what is happening to their carefully collected data.

      AThe care taken is evident in this paper in The American Meteorological Journal, Volume 8 from 1891. It mentions the Richard Freres thermograph which was used in the big cities for continuous recording of the temperature.

      An Account of the “Leste,” or hot wind of Madeira
      by H. Coupland Taylor, M. D. F. R. Met. Soc.

      Being an invalid, I must beg for the indulgence of the Society for the irregular times of observation and the other defects the Fellows may discover in the following paper.

      I must first state that my insturments are placed in a regulation Stevenson screen…. The maximum and minimum thermometers are by Casella, and duly tested at Kew….I also have had in use for some months a self-registering hair hygrometer by MM. Richard Freres of Paris, and likewise a thermograph by the same makers but no very severe Leste has occurred since I had them.

      This “Leste” is a very dry and parching wind and sometimes very hot,….

      Willis Milham says in his textbook (1918)

      If a good continuous thermograph record for at least twenty years is available, the normal hourly temperatures for the various days of the year can be computed….

      “the average temperature for a day is found by averaging the 24 values of hourly temperature observed during that day”

      If the normals are based on twenty years of observations, it will be found that there is not an even transition from day to day, but jumps of even two or three degrees occur….

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        David Maddison

        gai – Thank you for that fascinating historical insight.

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        • #
        • #
          gai

          Siliggy, Dave,

          Here is the link to the 1882 volunteer guide. The instructions are pretty exact which, given an error of 0.5F (~0.3C) makes all these adjustments questionable. Even NOAA says the new MMTS sensors used have an accuracy of “generally” +/-0.5°F so they are no better than the accuracy 100 years ago!

          Then the is the recent article by Zeke Hausefeather over at Judith Curry’s Understanding Adjustments to Temperature Data

          judithcurry(DOT)com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/

          Zeke says

          ……Nearly every single station in the network in the network has been moved at least once over the last century, with many having 3 or more distinct moves. Most of the stations have changed from using liquid in glass thermometers (LiG) in Stevenson screens to electronic Minimum Maximum Temperature Systems (MMTS) or Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS). Observation times have shifted from afternoon to morning at most stations since 1960, as part of an effort by the National Weather Service to improve precipitation measurements.

          All of these changes introduce (non-random) systemic biases into the network. For example, MMTS sensors tend to read maximum daily temperatures about 0.5 C colder than LiG thermometers at the same location. There is a very obvious cooling bias in the record associated with the conversion of most co-op stations from LiG to MMTS in the 1980s…

          ERRR, well no…
          First, for TOB, that 1882 instruction booklet says there were two thermometers, one max (mercury) and one min (alcohol).

          For the maximum thermometer they state:
          “…When a maximum thermometer is not read for several hours after the highest temperature has occurred and the air in the meantime has cooled down 15° or 20°, the highest temperature indicated by the top of the detached thread of mercury may be too low by half a degree from the contraction of the thread….”

          That would indicate the max thermometer should be read just after the heat of the day and any adjustment for reading at the wrong time of day should RAISE the maximum temperature not lower it! This is also why the temperature at the time of reading is taking. Our ancestors were careful scientists.

          Zeke is also saying “..MMTS sensors tend to read maximum daily temperatures about 0.5 C colder than LiG thermometers…”

          On the face of it that makes zero sense. You have the massive bulky mercury thermometer and the inertia that causes vs a fine wire with rapid response.

          Also that isn’t what independent verification shows.

          The last couple of days I posted on an 8.5 year side-by-side test conducted by German veteran meteorologist Klaus Hager, see here and here. The test compared traditional glass mercury thermometer measurement stations to the new electronic measurement system, whose implementation began at Germany’s approximately 2000 surface stations in 1985 and concluded around 2000.

          Hager’s test results showed that on average the new electronic measurement system produced warmer temperature readings: a whopping mean of 0.93°C warmer. The question is: Is this detectable in Germany’s temperature dataset? Do we see a temperature jump during the time the new “warmer” system was put into operation (1985 – 2000)? The answer is: absolutely!

          http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.Es2IbMZo.sAqMRsUB.dpbs

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    “All stations are homogenized but some
    stations are more homogenized than others.”
    H/ BOM Farm.

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    Gary in Erko

    I’ve often noticed a similar effect. If I stand near someone a bit taller, my height increases a little due to an effect called ‘homogenisation’. Similarly, shrinkage occurs when someone more short walks past. Why is there need to question this? It’s a phenomena known as ‘scale empathy’, measured by ‘pathetic enscalers’, respected peers in sociological sciences.

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      Yonniestone

      At COP21 there will be a similar phenomena with the size of faux moral outrage being displayed.

      Also known as ‘Paris Envy’…..

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      Greg Cavanagh

      Indeed, if you homogenised other data groups you would end up with;
      The homogenised height of all school students at a particular school is 4 foot 2 inches.
      The homogenised age of everyone on earth is 27 years old.
      The homogenised number of people who won a Nobel Peace Prize is 4,000,000.

      Homogenising a number series is just creating a junk number not related to anything in particular within the series.

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  • #
    Ruairi

    In the virtual B.O.M. world it’s hot,
    But here in the real world it’s not,
    So to show a warm trend,
    Some graph lines must bend,
    While appearing quite small,is a lot.

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    pat

    11 Aug: WaPo: Jason Samenow: Weather Service replaces ‘too high’ temperature sensor at Reagan National Airport
    Responding to concerns that Reagan National Airport’s temperature sensor was reporting erroneously warm temperature readings, the National Weather Service (NWS) installed a new sensor on Monday.
    “We have a new temperature sensor out there,” said Jim Lee, meteorologist-in-charge at the NWS forecast office in Sterling, Va., which serves the Washington and Baltimore metro regions. “We want to see if it helps anything.”
    In recent weeks, a number of local constituents — including the Capital Weather Gang, former Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels, and WUSA9 meteorologist Howard Bernstein — had voiced concerns that the airport readings were too warm compared to neighboring weather stations. For example, Reagan National had registered more days at or above 90 degrees than any location in the region through early August…
    Technicians arrived at Reagan National on Monday and discovered the temperature sensor within the airport’s Automated Surface Observation System (ASOS) was reading 1.7 degrees warmer than a reference temperature sensor, known as a psychro-dyne (an instrument roughly the size of a small suitcase)…
    After the new sensor was installed Monday, the new temperature reported at Reagan National dropped to 76.5 degrees compared to the 78.7 degrees reported prior – although Lee said some of that change was due to changing sky conditions and a later time, rather than solely the change in equipment…
    For example, May 2015 was said to be the warmest on record at Reagan National, edging out May 1991 by just 0.2 degrees. Should a correction be applied and May 1991 reclaim its spot as warmest May ever recorded?
    Lee said no — that corrections will not be applied to past data and that doing so would not be scientifically defensible…
    Take records with a grain of salt.
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/08/11/weather-service-installs-new-temperature-sensor-at-reagan-national-airport/?wpisrc=nl_buzz

    earlier:

    5 Aug: WaPo: Is D.C.’s weather station reading way too hot?
    By Jason Samenow and Ian Livingston
    (Update, 10:30 a.m. Thursday: Pat Michaels, former Virginia state climatologist and now director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, has posted a very interesting and entertaining commentary on this matter: Too Hot in Washington: A Climate Mystery?)
    But from January 2014 through July this year, Reagan National’s monthly temperature difference from normal or “anomaly” has averaged 2.2 degrees above Dulles’ – a fact pointed out to me by former Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels. That is a bit of a red flag signaling Reagan National’s temperature may be reading too warm…
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/08/05/is-washington-d-c-s-official-temperature-station-reading-way-too-hot/

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      gai

      Lee said no — that corrections will not be applied to past data and that doing so would not be scientifically defensible

      ROTFLMAO!!!!

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      David Maddison

      I wonder how long it will be before they install temperature sensors that are actually calibrated to read the temperature they expect to see?

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    pat

    more fodder for ABC’s “Big (CAGW) Ideas”???

    5-6 Sept 2015: Sydney Opera House: Festival of Dangerous Ideas
    Naomi Klein – Capitalism and The Climate
    Is Capitalism now at war with our planet?
    Paul Krugman – Bad Ideas
    Why don’t bad ideas go away? http://fodi.sydneyoperahouse.com/program/capitalism-and-the-climate/

    now, if only Krugman’s topic concerned CAGW!

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    gai

    Jo, MAJOR FIND!

    We have always known the ClimAstrologists and other university types were coordinated world wide but could never prove it. I think I found the proof!

    Sure looks like CAGW and Sustainability has been funded and coordinated, since 1991. It looks like it started as a Pilot Project of the much hated World Bank no less.

    I was doing a bit of new digging on Raymond Clémençon, facultiy member of University of California. He was one of the negotiators on the Rio Declaration and the Agenda 21. That lead me to his bio

    Since 1994, Raymond Clémençon has served as a policy consultant for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington DC, the World Bank, the “International Task Force on Global Public Goods,” and the Swiss government. He was a member of the evaluation team conducting the Second Performance Assessment of the GEF in 1997. He advised the GEF secretariat during the 5th GEF replenishment negotiations in 2009 and the Swiss government on the establishment of the Green Climate Fund, in 2011 – 2012….
    (wwwDOT)global.ucsb.edu/people/raymond-clémenç

    So what the heck is the Global Environment Facility?

    Unfortunately my computer hung when I tried to access Global Environment Facility: In Depth
    https://www.thegef.org/

    So we get the short version:

    The Global Environment Facility >was established in October 1991 as a $1 billion pilot program in the World Bank to assist in the protection of the global environment and to promote environmental sustainable development. The GEF would provide new and additional grants and concessional funding to cover the “incremental” or additional costs associated with transforming a project with national benefits into one with global environmental benefits…

    The Global Environment Facility is a partnership for international cooperation where 183 countries work together with international institutions, civil society organizations and the private sector, to address global environmental issues…

    Since 1991, the GEF has provided $13.5 billion in grants and leveraged $65 billion in co-financing for 3,900 projects in more than 165 developing countries. For 23 years, developed and developing countries alike have provided these funds to support activities related to biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, and chemicals and waste…
    The GEF serves as financial mechanism for the following conventions:

    * Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
    * United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
    * Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)
    * UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
    * Minamata Convention on Mercury

    The GEF, although not linked formally to the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (MP), supports implementation of the Protocol…

    The GEF administers the LDCF and SCCF which were established by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. The GEF also administers the Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund (NPIF) that was established by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In addition, the GEF Secretariat hosts the Adaptation Fund Board Secretariat….
    https://www.thegef.org/gef/whatisgef

    WIKI says

    The GEF Assembly is the governing body of the GEF in which representatives of all member countries participate. It meets every three to four years, and is responsible for reviewing and evaluating the GEF’s general policies, the operation of the GEF, and its membership….

    Ministers and high-level government delegations of all GEF member countries take part in the meetings… Prominent environmentalists, parliamentarians, business leaders, scientists, and NGO leaders discuss global environmental challenges within the context of sustainable development and other international development goals.

    The GEF Council is the main governing body of the GEF. It functions as an independent board of directors, with primary responsibility for developing, adopting, and evaluating GEF programs. Council members representing 32 constituencies (16 from developing countries, 14 from developed countries, and two from countries with transitional economies) meet twice each year for three days and also conduct business by mail.

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    Chuck L

    Looking in from the outside (I live in the USA), it seems to me that the current Australian government is somewhat less enthusiastic about promoting the AGW scam/alternative energy. Why hasn’t the government convened a commission to investigate the “homogenization” of Australia’s temperature record? Or am I incorrect about the present government’s inclinations in this area?

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      Graeme No.3

      Chuck L:

      The government is divided internally about the matter, so decisive action would cause public brawling and loss of office. Also they are too busy on minor matters like making sure they still get “expenses” that they rarely, if ever, think about it.
      The voting public is split also, somewhere near 50:50 depending on how the poll is rigged. Thus the government fears it will lose “the swinging vote” if it stops sitting on the fence.

      Personally I think that all those who believe in global warming a.k.a climate change etc. won’t vote for the government anyway, so they should have convened a commission, but now the election is too close to get an inquiry finished.

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    David Maddison

    If any university science student mistreated data the way the BoM does they would be failed or worse. And look what’s happened to other scientists that have presented false data in the past. For some examples look at Wikipedia “scientific misconduct”.

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      Students are “taught” to fiddle experimantal data at Uni.. Because the “correctness” of the experimental results is based on the theory being taught.

      It’s not new. Goes back to well before I did Chemistry 110 in 1977 and got an “imperfect” mark in a lab report because the experimental method and thus the errors were too large to give the “proper” result.

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    DHF

    In my professional work I would end up in jail if I adjusted measurement results without having documented that a mismeasurement had occurred, and also documented the individual corrections in a scientific manner. If I suspected a mismeasurement, without being able to document an error, I would have to live with the original measurement.

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      gai

      About all you can do is footnote it and widen the error bars.

      Interesting how the error is never ever mentioned to the public.

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  • #
    George Applegate

    It’s adjustments all the way down.

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    gai

    What is interesting is looking at the dates surrounding the development of CAGW that BOM, NOAA and the MET are frantically adjusting weather data to support.

    1972 — We know Maurice Strong was chair of the First Earth Summit in 1972 and at that time first raised ‘Global Warming’ however given the cold weather grain crisis starting in 1969 it sat on the floor for over a decade just lying there while the pilot balloon, the Montreal Protocol was flown.

    1973 — A year after two chemists at the University of California, began studying the impacts of CFCs in the Earth’s atmosphere. Their paper was published in June 1974, and they testified at a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives in December 1974. As a result, significant funding was made available. (How in heck did they get the ear of Congress????) In 1976, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (the guys who control who gets federal grant funding in the USA.) released a report that confirmed the scientific credibility of the ozone depletion hypothesis. (See rest of history at WIKI)

    1987 — The treaty was agreed to on 16 September 1987 and went into force 1 January 1989.

    1988 —Tim Wirth organized the 1988 Senate hearing at which James Hansen addressed global warming. Wirth is responsible for the dirty tricks (Pick historic hottest day, open windows, shutting off A/C the night before) used to sway Congress. Wirth led the U.S. negotiating team at the Kyoto Summit. He is now President of the United Nations Foundation drumming up money for the UN.

    1988 — It was at career diplomat and British ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Tickell, suggestion that Thatcher made her influential speech to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988.

    1990 — At Margaret Thatcher’s personal instigation the UK Met Office set up its Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which, she opened in 1990. The Hadley Centre, in turn, helped to produce the primary data set which was used by the newly founded IPCC. SEE: James Delingpole Article

    1991 — The Global Environment Facility was established in October 1991 as a $1 billion pilot program in the World Bank to assist in the protection of the global environment and to promote environmental sustainable development [and Climate Change]

    1992 — The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ratified by the USA on 21/03/94. The Clinton Administration committed the United States to a 7 percent reduction from 1990 levels and agreed that developing countries–including China, India, and Brazil–should be excluded from these targets. (It was signed by Clinton on 12/06/92)

    1997 — Chris Horner as as Director of Federal Government Relations for Enron in the spring of 1997, was at the Enron meeting with George W. Bush. It was the last time BP was in the Presidential office until the Gulf oil crisis. (George W. Bush was the one who stepped in overruling the people at the State Department, and made sure Maurice Strong was Chair at Kyoto.) The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in late 1997 however Bush refused to sign. Bush supported ” a policy approach to the issue of global climate change that is based on sound science, and he has offered to work with America’s allies and through international processes to “develop technologies, market-based incentives, and other innovative approaches” that would address the factors involved more effectively.”

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    Reed Coray

    Small choices about which stations to to[sic} use first in the process can make a huge difference to the end result.”

    Is this an example of the “butterfly effect” of chaos theory? If so, it appears that the BOM is staffed by a bunch of butterflies.

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    David S

    I think many climate sceptics have done themselves a disservice by accepting that there has been global warming but not at a rate that is alarming. They also concede the science that some of this is man made. Besides the fact that if there has been any warming the amount is so minimal that a human who travelled back in time wouldn’t realise the difference the desire of global bureaus and governments to stick to the warming narrative has not only made them believe they can change the future they also think they can also change the past. What if everything about the global warming theory was wrong? My frustration is that the average joe in the public doesn’t know any of this and is totally influence by the propagander that is put out by the media. What is needed is for Jennifer Marohasy and a BOM representative be put in the same room with cameras on and explain to the Canberra Press gallery how the process of homogenisation works.
    We need more vocal support in all the press not just the Australian where many of its readers would be sceptics anyway. I feel so exasperated that governments commit billions of dollars to perpetrate a fraud.

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    Two minor updates added just to clarify things.

    “[UPDATE: Note that many raw records are patchy and not well documented. They often do need adjustment, but the reasons need to be transparent, exact, justified, and Australians need to know how influential these adjustments are.]”

    “The Bureau of Meteorology admits its methods are secret. [UPDATE: See the link — the Bureau specifically admits no one outside the BoM can replicate their work because it would require detailed instructions, “operator training” and it’s too “onerous”.]”

    The egregious thing here is the way the trends, and the record events get reported as if they are unquestionable when so much manipulation is going on behind the scenes. That message is used as PR to sell policies, and is marketed as “science” when it is so flagrantly not.

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      Joanne,
      What seems to be missing from the critique of this trash called meteorology, is the current rush to prove something with the adjustments. Such adjustments are throwing out the baby with the bathwater! Who besides the WMO gives a rat’s x of some global temperature? It is always the rapid deviations from any average that hold the information in any measurement. The documented evidence that weather is extremely variable over very short times and distances that make such measurements valuable. Many many kudos to all those that dutifully recorded such measurements for all history.

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    Svend Ferdinandsen

    “Small choices about which stations to to[sic} use first in the process can make a huge difference to the end result.”
    It might also explain the ever changing past. When a station is homogenised it must be a gold standard, and can then be used to homognise the surrounding stations next time a compilation is done.

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    doubting dave

    Jo and Jennifer ,i and everyone else can sense your anger and frustration with BOM in your words, you two and others such as Ken have put a lot of time and trouble into exposing the shenanigans (Check out the Google definition of that word on google voice search,it fits the BOM perfectly) and it must feel like your all banging your heads against a brick wall, but look i and many others would not know about this carry on if you people had not sacrificed the time and trouble to bring this information to us,so we owe you a dept of gratitude,so i for one will be taking Jennifers advice by sending you some chocolate. Now , its my simple basic understanding from visiting your blog over the years that what the BOM are trying to do in simple terms is to prove man made global warming by drawing a linear trend line in the temperature data that shows an up slope thats in lockstep with increases in CO2 in the atmosphere since the end of the little ice age (and the beginning of the industrial revolution) up to now. They’ve largely achieved this linear trend by cooling the past temperature records whilst warming the temperature records of the recent past, but many people are now talking about a period of cooling in the near future and if they’re right then BOM in order to keep showing a linear trend would have to start cooling temperatures in the near past that they’ve previously adjusted upwards !! thats when their gravy train will hit the buffers and the likes of Ken , Jennifer and you Jo can take the credit you so richly deserve .

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      gai

      Tony Heller (Steven Goddard) has been doing the same sort of checking on the US dataset.

      Then he plotted the ADJUSTMENTS vs the ‘Official increase’ in CO2. He came up with an almost perfect correlation R^2 = 0.98667

      SEE:CO2 Drives NCDC Data Tampering

      I wish I could say the data below is a joke, but it isn’t. USHCN [US Historic Climate Network] temperature adjustments correlate almost perfectly with atmospheric CO2

      US temperatures have not warmed over the past century (blue line below) – but NCDC alters the data to create the appearance of warming (red line below)…

      I wonder if the BOM adjustments also have near perfect correlation with the Mauna Loa CO2 dataset?

      (I do not have the computer expertise to check and put up the graph. Grumble..)

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    doubting dave

    P S and please checkout the latest article on Andrews blog because maybe, if it is true, none of this fuss will matter in the near future http://bishophill.squarespace.com/

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      gai

      Also see notice at Bishophill about Steyn’s new book with Cartoons by Josh!

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    • #
      ROM

      doubting dave @ # 34

      Andrew Montfords [ the “Bishop Hill” blog ] references to small [ transportable ] nuclear reactors ie; Small Modular Reactors [ SMR’s ] is quoting some old news.

      They have been under research and early development for a couple of decades now.

      For a full run down on nuclear fission reactors of every conceivable type and conformation and you might be very surprised just how many types and configurations of fission type nuclear reactors there are plus how many types were actually built and operated experimentally in the 1950’s 60’s 70’s and into the 80’s.
      Plus a bit on potential Fusion Reactor technology.

      The information string is;

      The Information Library of the World Nuclear Association
      >> Nuclear fuel cycle
      >>Nuclear Power Reactors
      >> Small Nuclear Power Reactors >>

      Down at the bottom of the listed reactor types and a number of types of Small Modular Reactors [ SMR’s ] and developers and potential manufacturers are listed in the Further Information notes.

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      • #
        ROM

        I should have added that it is my very firm belief that we will be going Fusion for our entire planetary power needs and considering the number of large corporations now very quietly researching fusion reactor system, mankind will likely see a commercially developed fusion reactor or many such commercially developed Fusion reactors on line by the end at least of the 21st century .
        —————-
        Further information on nuclear SMR’s [ Small Modular Reactors ] that are generally transportable to the location of use can be found in an International Atomic Energy Agency [ IAEA ] publication.

        Advances in Small Modular Reactor Technology Developments

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        • #
          gai

          Those small modular reactors could also be used on ships and on railroad locomotives.

          Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

          …Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine….

          …The China Academy of Sciences in January 2011 launched a program of R&D on thorium-breeding molten-salt reactors (Th-MSR or TMSR), otherwise known as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), claiming to have the world’s largest national effort on these and hoping to obtain full intellectual property rights on the technology. A 5 MWe MSR is apparently under construction at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (under the Academy) with 2015 target operation….
          http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/china-plans-to-have-5-megawatt-liquid.html#more

          The Chinese scientists have been haunting Oak Ridge lab
          blogs(DOT)knoxnews.com/munger/2012/01/whos-that-knocking-ornls-front.html

          and also hacked their computer.
          securitywatch(DOT)pcmag.com/google/283508-oak-ridge-national-laboratory-hacked

          They want the patent.
          ……………….
          We have the ideas, we have the brain power we have the engineers. Now if our blasted governments would just get out of the way we could make life a heck of a lot nicer for everyone.

          I really dislike the Progressive Luddites who want to send us back to the 1700s.

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            ROM

            Gai @ # 34.2.1.1

            The Indians may even be ahead of the Chinese when it comes to Thorium reactors;
            And the Indians are looking at using particle beam accelerators to apply the required nuclear fission process instead of using a plutonium fission trigger to get the thorium to fission and provide the heat for steam generation.

            Interestingly Canada’s domestically designed and built and very well proven and very safe CANDU reactors can use thorium already as a fuel and apparently get a very high burn up of the fuel.
            Unfortunately the CANDU’s are very capital expensive to build although the Chinese have a couple of CANDU’s operating as a part of their nuclear power generation technology assessment as to which types they should concentrate on.

            India Turns to Thorium as Future Reactor Fuel

            Sometimes I wonder if the western worlds apparent complete stupidity in its supposed abject horror and rejection of nuclear and now fossil fuels while the under-developed world powers ahead with western developed power generation technologies in steam and nuclear, won’t be a blessing in disguise.

            If an outfit like Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works” or any of the other half dozen corporations working on small compact Fusion reactor designs achieve above break even power generation in their reactors by the end of the 2030’s then strictly from the angle that apart from the unmitigateable stupidity at any level of the so called and badly misnamed green luvvies renewable energies other than hydro, the western world will leap frog from fossil fueled steam to Fusion powered either steam or direct conversion power generation in one generation of power generators.

            Mean while every other nation who went big time into nuclear and great masses of coal and oil fired generators will be stuck with their aging nuclear and coal fired plants until towards the end of the 21st century.

            Then comes the problem of what to do with the high radiation waste products and highly radio active components of hundreds of old nuclear reactors.

            There is actually a very simple and extremely safe disposal route for any radio active waste but it would require a complete turn over of the present international treaties on the seas.

            Simply encase the radio active waste in the various “crete” type materials that have been developed to hold the waste in a permanent form for centuries.
            Design the containers in a bomb shaped form.
            Find a location in the Southern Ocean say between 90 West and 165 East and south of 40 South which is one hell of a long way from anywhere including shipping routes.
            Locate a place on the ocean floor there where there are soft sediments some tens of hundreds of metres thick and drop those bomb shaped radio active material containing “crete” bombs or torpedoes into the sediments where they will penetrate tens of metres below the sea floor.

            And thats the last anybody or even any fish or ocean species will ever see of them.

            Of course something so simple will cause a huge uproar by all the green luvvies even if it actually rendered everybody’s lives a bit safer for centuries into the future as the radio active material that we will leave behind would no longer be the problem for future generations.

            But as we know from the banning of DDT which was well on the way towards stopping malaria in its tracks in the 1960’s and 70’s and;
            The ongoing and continuing attempts by the humanity hating green luvvy bigots to stop the release of the life saving Vitamin A containing Golden Ricethat will stop suffering and save lives for millions of rice eaters around the world, all because it is a supposed GMO, and ;
            The attempts to prevent the building of Dams to provide power and water to impoverished peoples and so m,more examples from the Green Peaces, the WWF’s , the Friends of the Earth and all their innumerable front organisations that consist of a desk and a list of media telephone numbers, human lives don’t count at all with these evil and despicable western based green bigots in the misnamed environmental organisations unless it is their own lives.
            All other lives are completely expendable in the name of their mythical God, that undefined and remote and mythical chimera that begins about a few tens of kilometres outside of the verges of the large cities they live in and which must be protected at all costs regardless, THE ENVIRONMENT.

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              gai

              Thanks, ROM

              I was not aware of India’s work had progressed so far. I was aware the CANDU could use Thorium.

              As far as the mankind hating Malthusian Econuts go, that is why I use the word Conservationist to describe myself.

              I would suggest all of us who are concerned about the environment in a sane way use the term Conservationist to distinguish ourselves from the not so sane fringe groups.

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    ScotsmaninUtah

    “EPA and BoM – Agencies that need regulating”

    It seems coincidental that Australians are having to deal with BoM’s mismanagement of data, whilst here in America we dealing with the “always consistently incompetent” EPA.
    The EPA have just allowed the dumping of 3 million gallons of metallic poison into one river and which is now happily on its way to the very big Colorado river… this is after having been sued for incompetence in a previous case.

    As was once said by a famous Republican….

    “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

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    Jo says

    [UPDATE: Note that many raw records are patchy and not well documented. They often do need adjustment, but the reasons need to be transparent, exact, justified, and Australians need to know how influential these adjustments are.]

    I agree that raw data often needs adjustment. Techniques are laid out in World Meteorological Organization paper GUIDELINES ON CLIMATE METADATA AND HOMOGENIZATION. The problem is that historically the data detailed metadata is not there. You have to try to identify and eliminate the measurement biases by homogenisation algorithms. Most commonly these are pair-wise comparisons, through a long series of iterations. The WMO assumes that over the homogenisation area the only differences in trend are due to measurement biases so homogenisation will cleanse the data. This is clearly not true. Real temperature trends markedly over quite small distances and sometimes data biases – especially UHI – may be consistent across a number of nearby stations. Although homogenisation will usually be an improvement, it will create anomalies. That means the output needs to be checked by other means, such as from the site metadata, or from independent measures of biases such as UHI.
    However, there is another reason for homogenisation. As Jennifer Marohasy says in her letter to the BOM spokesperson

    Several members of the public, seeking clarification regarding adjustments to the temperature record for Rutherglen, ……. are necessary to make temperature trends at Rutherglen more consistent with neighboring sites.

    The trends are not the same for Rutherglen as surrounding stations. Leaving aside the issue of homogenizing raw Rutherglen data with homogenized data from other areas, it still leaves the issue of real differences when you are trying to create an Australian temperature anomaly, which is constructed through dividing the surface into a grid. Each data set needs to become a grid reference point, showing the estimated average for the grid, and providing smooth contours across the area. Real trends do not follow this pattern, so are deleted out. The scale of the adjustments will be greater
    – the more aggressive the homogenization method(s)
    – the sparser the data
    – the greater the natural differences in trend
    – the greater the differences in measurement biases between the stations.

    I have laid this out in greater detail in my post Defining “Temperature Homogenisation”, with link to the WMO paper. A clear example where there is a significant difference in local trend is in Paraguay in the late 1960s. Both the GHCN and the BEST data sets homogenized out real trends.

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      Kevin, I agree. We should not even consider homogenzation until we have a full documentable, historic analysis of each site used. Even after we know which stations are good ones, it’s a silly idea to think that Hillston on the hot flat plains of NSW, would be useful in diagnosing problems in Rutherglen in colder, greener wine growing territory, near the Snowy Mountains.

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        Jo,
        We cannot demand that only sites with full information are used. In particular the further back in time one goes, the less data there is and the more incomplete is the metadata. Even with complete metadata, it is only possible to estimate the impact of measurement biases (e.g. re-siting or urbanisation) on the data, and that is mostly from other local weather stations. Homogenisation is required. But, there will be instances where the real trend at a locality varies so homogenisation corrupts the data rather than makes it closer to the data free of biases. For instance, Rutherglen might be climatically different to most of Australia not because it is cooler but that mountainous areas are likely to have their own local climates with much more random variation than flattish plains. A way to identify these instances is to check the data post homogenisation. When I did this for Paraguay I found that both GHCN/GISS and Berkeley Earth had both cancelled a cooling in the data of one degree at the end of the 1960s common to at least eight temperature stations covering over 100000 km2. The key is to checking the size of the adjustments, along with comparing the results of different homogenisation algorithms.
        I would also suggest a reason why climatologists get very prickly about checking their assumptions, which is from a particularly dogmatic UK-based blogger. He wrote on temperature homogenisation:-

        What if there isn’t a full record, or you can’t find any reason why the data may have been influenced by something non-climatic? Do you just leave it as is? Well, no, that would be silly. We don’t know of any climatic influence that can suddenly cause typical temperatures at a given location to suddenly increase or decrease. It’s much more likely that something non-climatic has influenced the data and, hence, the sensible thing to do is to adjust it to make the data continuous.

        Like so many in the climate community he believes the a priori truths of climate theory, so if the data varies from our beliefs about the world then it the data that is wrong.
        Another reason is from the Wikipedia article on climatology, which begins

        Climatology or climate science is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time.

        Average surface temperature is the key figure that measures global warming. By investigating the temperature data over the past few months I have come to realize that data is often discontinuous. People who believe in the mantra “the world is warming and the humans are a cause of it” might not be able to accept that climatology is based on pretty insecure foundations.

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    cheshirered

    You’re all being too kind and BoM don’t deserve your generosity. They’re cheating the data, they’re cheating the people who recorded it all those years ago and they’re cheating the scientific process, but most of all they’re cheating your country of its national and scientific integrity, and what’s more they KNOW they’re cheating.

    [SNIP we need to stay away from legal terms. -J]

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    handjive

    Dilley has forty-two years of professional experience in the meteorology and climatology and many publications.

    He was with NOAA for twenty years.

    Not only is the government wrong with its claims of a coming warming, Dilley accuses the federal government of fiddling with global temperature data with the aim of producing a false picture of what is going on. (via notrickszone)

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    Ian George

    I always find problems with the way the BoM shade the maps in its summaries. For instance for district 40 in Qld (which takes in Brisbane) the actual max mean anomalies for individual sites show a below average range. But the map shows an above average range. The BoM does this quite regularly.
    Thus if the mean temp for a state/Australia is worked out by using some algorithm based on the shading technique and not on the individual site temps, this would give a different result (similar to adjusting temps of on site based on nearby stations).
    See here at:-
    http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/qld/summary.shtml

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    handjive

    But raw temperature measurements don’t on their own convey just how brutal this winter has been.

    Some locations in the central west of NSW have now seen five snowfalls in five weeks.

    These are places that are lucky to see one snowfall a year.
    . . .
    Raw Data? Cold?

    Release the BoM data converters …

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    Val

    “What’s the answer?”

    The answer is the same as for the ABC – what this government has failed to do: FIX the BOM.

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    David Maddison

    Please correct me if I am wrong but it was the inability for warmists (I won’t call them scientists, they are not) to demonstrate warming with actual data that lead to them fabricating data and then pretending it was “homogenised” real data. It has no relation to real data but they pretend it does to give them credibility. The data sets they have fabricated are designed to demonstrate their hypothesis of global warming.

    Can’t the whole CAGW therefore be simply demolished by demanding that the BoM, NOAA and all the other climate agencies demonstrate using rigorous scientific methods why the data needs to be “homogenised”. If they can’t, then the whole hypothesis is proved null. And they won’t be able to because as gai mentioned above, homogenisation is based on the invalid statistical technique of “Krigging”.

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      David Maddison

      A further thought – haven’t the warmist scammers made things easier for us to demonstrate the truth? If the idea of “homogenisation” can be proven invalid then the whole warmist case falls apart.

      – It has no logical basis
      – It is based on an invalid statistical technique of Krigging.
      – No one will disclose the methodology therefore the results aren’t reproducible – therefore not science.
      – There is no experimental data to prove its validity.

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      • #
        gai

        There is historical and scientific evidence that the adjustments are not needed or are in the wrong direction or as in the case of UHI ignored or only partly adjusted to compensate.

        Worse they do not bother to actually do the investigation into the historical records to see WHY there is a change in the weather. Instead they use techniques such as ‘Scalpelling’ one of the BEST’s slicing methodology.

        ”Technically the series is cut at breakpoints and every segment is treated as an individual station for the purposes of constructing the underlying temperature field. However, the general point is that it is the mean temperature of the segment, rather than its start or endpoints, that is relevant when combining it with other stations to estimate the temperature field”….

        “These records are combined by aligning the mean values of each subsegment relative to the regional expectation (e.g. based on comparisons to nearby stations) of the station record, as shown in the example above” Zeke Hausfather of BEST In posts at Climate Etc,

        In other words they are TOO DARN LAZY to do the actual scientific grunt work and instead write a computer program that masticates the data and spits out something they hope resembles science. They hope it has enough of a resemblance that with lots of dancing, they can dazzle the Useful Innocents, via the compliant MSM into believing it is ‘science’

        We are going through a classic case of temperature that would be ‘Scalpelled’ The temperatures this summer have been running a min of ~70F (21C) and a max of 95F (35C) or above we had a polar air mass come down the east coast and we are on the edge of it. The temperatures suddenly dropped to ~85F (29C) the last few days and this morning was a chilly 58F (14C). This means towns east, south and west of us can still have the high temperature weather while towns north of us do not.

        http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=-105.79,19.50,360

        So how does the temperature get ‘adjusted’ ?

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    JPM

    It is interesting that the BOM uses stations over 500 Km away when homogenizing their station records. I live on a hill in Batemans Bay NSW open to the north easterly sea breezes while the town center is down low by the river and situated such that it does not benefit form those north easterlies. On a warm summers day the temperature at our place is usually around 5 deg C. cooler than the town center and that is only 5Km away.
    It is pure nonsense contending that a station 500 Km away is going to exhibit the same temperature at a particular time and should be used to homoginise the temp records a place so remote.
    John

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      JPM, they argue that the trends would be the same. But I doubt this too. If jet streams / highs / lows etc shift slightly north or south a whole lot of towns will change in trend, and they won’t be changing in the same direction.

      Thus the homogenisation blurs out the data which may be giving us real information about natural climate change.

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        ROM

        Around a dozen or more years ago I did a paddock scale experiment.
        The paddock / field to some, is located 25 or so kilometres north of Horsham in Victorias west and is located on the Kalkee plains which are flat as in flat. Described by one Western Australian visitor as” If you tipped over a beer, it wouldn’t stop running for 40 kilometres”

        There are no hills or ranges within 50 kilometres of this area.
        It is flat.

        Nor are there any stands of timber beyond the small wind break plantations around the farm houses.
        There is only one farm house located near the field but still some hundreds of metres from the field.

        The field is square at two kilometres on a side, four square kilometres or 400 hectares in area.

        The field has been in the family’s possession since 1972 and I have always farmed it sowing cereal and pulse crops.

        For a long time I had my suspicions that about one quarter of that 400 hectare field had a lower rainfall than the other three quarters so a dozen years ago I set up thirteen rain gauges in a pattern, spread evenly right across that 400 hectares.
        The gauges were fairly crude as cost was a factor but were all identical to one another and calibrated against a master gauge.
        They were set up in about April, the start of our critical winter and spring rainfall period.

        Boots,[ that was his diet as a pup, ] my now departed old dog and I walked those thirteen rain gauges each week from April to September [ bloody hard going when it was wet and cold and a bit of mud as well ] across that 400 hectares in the planted and growing cereal crop and measured the weekly rainfall accumulated in each gauge and recorded it.

        From my recordings of the rainfall in that flat totally open field with no trees, no houses, no more than a couple of metres difference in height and that in just one corner of the field, there was a very marked rainfall deficit of well over 25 mms in a total rainfall, from memory, of around 200 mms across the rest of the field .
        This deficit in rainfall was across three or four gauges in one corner, about one fifth of the field and in the opposite corner to that where the small, lower terrain old swamp corner was located.

        Alongside this lower rainfall area in the field there was a slightly higher rainfall measured in the next and adjoining corner of the same field but far from enough to even out the consistent rainfall deficit that every weekly measurement showed in that exact same section of that field every time.

        I even switched gauges around from high recording parts of the field to the lower recording section with no difference in results.

        As a power and glider pilot since 1960 plus being a farmer plus being interested in meteorology and in airflow around and across varying terrain and the the consequent weather and climate variations across that terrain all my life, I think I can safely say that I have a fairly good grasp on the on ground, localised factors that influence weather and rainfall in our local area and on my patch.

        There was and is nothing at all anywhere in terrain, soil types, upwind features, trees , buildings or anything at all that I could put that rainfall variation down to.
        Nor could any of the more expert weather people suggest any reasons for that variation in rainfall in that very localised area in that flat, completely open and unobstructed in any way, 400 hectare field.

        A similar experiment was carried out in Western Australia on a very much smaller scale which was written up in an Ag journal I think, and they too found unexplainable differences in rainfall in only a few hundred metres.

        I attempted to repeat the experiment next season with the gauges in the same position but it was a full scale drought year and I recorded very little rainfall and lost heart after a few weeks of futile walking all those kilometres across heavy going paddocks.

        Another instance was from a friend who had a farm on the southern edge of the Victoria’s Big Desert.
        He told me that there were places on his property where he could literally walk along a few metres outside of a totally invisible line and stay dry where the showers came out of the desert scrub lands a couple of hundred metres to that line and stopped right there.

        I proposed to the well known farmer run experiment orientated Birchip Cropping Group in the Victoria’s southern Mallee region, that they set up a wide area grid of some dozens of rain gauges over some tens of square kilometres to try and get some idea on the rainfall and temperature and wind variations that exist across tens of square kilometres areas.
        It was another of those project proposals that went through the wringer as to what they could accomplish with the resources they had and so it lost out.

        The point here is that despite the appearances of a homogeneous [ bad choice of word but still in this case applicable usage ]  locality and there fore the expectations of quite small local variations in weather factors, the variations can be very significant and of an unpredicted and unexpected variety and nature over quite short distances of a couple of hundred metres and do so for no visible or explainable or obvious reason.

        So homogenising weather records between stations when a shift of a stations might incur very different conditions that are very localised even within the locality really doesn’t support even the concept let alone the implementation of a transfer of the claimed and supposed local conditions in one locality projected onto the another distant station’s records to supposedly create a common trend in the recorded climate.ie;homogenising.

        Local conditions are far, far more variable in quite short distances and time frames than is realised or accepted by the likes of the monolithic BOM and its centralised city located, theory driven “scientist bureaucrats”.

        Strangely it seems ok for the BOM to homogenise all sorts of data to ensure that a common climate trend is clear amongst a whole group of quite distant to each other stations but they haven’t yet got the cojones as yet to put out a weather forecasts that say that because Hillston is going to be 36 C today therefore Rutherglen will be 34 C and if you read something different on your thermometer you will be wrong because we at the BOM, are scientists and our weather homogenisation between stations a few hundred kilometres distant to each other is perfect therefore we are right and you don’t know what you are talking about if you think what you saw on your thermometer is completely different to our official temperature for your locality.

        Then again maybe thats what they really do!

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          KinkyKeith

          ROM

          Inquisitiveness.

          Curiosity.

          Hard work to look for an answer.

          That sound suspiciously like REAL SCIENCE!

          KK

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    ScotsmaninUtah

    The price of BOM’s dishonesty..

    The Bureau of Meteorology admits its methods are secret

    The cost to Australia’s reputation as a member of the international scientific community could be far reaching.
    However, those in the commercial world who actually use this data for other than climate studies may well choose to “blacklist” the BOM and seek alternative sources especially if their Business rely on accurate temperature data. ( investors in agricultural enterprises)

    The behavior of BOM is very similar to the British MET and the American EPA and all of these agencies (with their activists) will eventually have to submit to oversight in the future.

    It is uncertain what the outcome is going to be , but the GOP is definitely targeting the EPA with a “heavy fist”, and there will be some serious cut backs in store for this particular agency.

    Why Obama is promising money for climate change policy I still don’t know , hasn’t anyone told him he has no money to give. (see Senate and House )… he should be more concerned about China and it’s playing around with the currency markets which just wiped out 500 points.(see A rare “death cross” appeared Tuesday ).

    I wonder how well Australia is posed to handle a financial crisis in the pacific economy as it divests itself of cheap energy.

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    David Maddison

    The BoM corporate motto shold be “BoM – cooling the past and warming the future”.

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    David Maddison

    Do you think anyone at BoM reads this blog? And if they did, would they understand because there doesn’t seem to be any scientists or technical people there.

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      Stupendus

      If anyone at the BOM read this blog they would be sacked.
      All we need is one whistleblower, one public servant with the scientific integrity to step forward and tell the truth…..

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    Dennis

    One of the latest GetUp cult strategies when commenting on line against the continuing use of fossil fuels, as in coal fired power stations, is that they and coal mining are subsidised. This is usually claimed to counter discussion about taxpayer funded subsidies for wind turbines and solar systems. I have discovered that few if any leftists know anything about finance and economics, for them business tax deductions are subsidies. And infrastructure such as roads, railways, ports and coal loaders are taxpayer funded subsidies. They seem to believe that legal tax deductions are tax avoidance by “big business”, that legal tax minimisation is tax evasion. And that the cost of renewables is falling and will soon make coal too expensive. Where does this garbage come from?

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      gai

      Dennis,

      It comes from the same place as the canard that us skeptics are in the pay of Big Oil, Al Gore’s Handbook.

      (I really need those back checks from Big Oil they say are in the mail cause I need a new roof and heating system…)

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    David Maddison

    Has anyone considered a Freedom from Information request to the BoM requiring information on their homogenisation methodology?

    http://www.bom.gov.au/foi/?ref=ftr

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    Mark Schooley MD

    Consider where you live. Is it too hot for you? If so, move south (tasmania or NZ) or north (Canada). If you like it, stay where you are. If people are moving south from Sydney to Tasmania or Christchurch and Dunedin, the data will show it. Likewise in the Nothern Hemisphere, migrations fom Denver to Calgary will show it.

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    Mark Schooley MD

    How many people are moving from Dunedin to Antarctica? Lots of land out there. Or Chicago to Whitehorse, Yukon. Way lots of land out there.

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    pat

    gai –

    i posted a comment for you at jo’s previous “Australian target…” thread, in response to your Ged Davis/ShellScenarios Climategate email comment. hope you saw it.

    re The World Bank – it is ironic that the politically ideological CAGW followers are never informed by the MSM about the primary role the Bank they so despise has played & continues to play in the CAGW scam. there must be so many World Bank execs, & other CAGW architects, laughing at their gullibility & thankful to the MSM for their complicity.

    11 Aug: World Bank: Investors Welcome Newly Released World Bank Green Bond Impact Report
    The first World Bank (IBRD) Green Bond Impact Report provides an overview of the environmental and social impacts expected from eligible projects that help World Bank client countries adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change…
    The World Bank (IBRD) has issued 100 green bonds in 18 currencies, raising the equivalent of US$8.4 billion. As of June 30, 2015, these bonds have supported the funding of 77 green bond eligible projects with commitments totaling US$13.7 billion…
    (LINK) The first World Bank Green Bond Impact Report (pdf)responds to investor interest for more clarity on the environmental and social benefits of their investments in this expanding market…
    “As an investor, Zurich wants to better understand how investments translate into social and environmental outcomes. With green bonds in particular, it’s the impact that makes all the difference,” said Manuel Lewin, Head of Responsible Investment of Zurich Insurance Group. “The impact reporting pioneered by World Bank and others is setting a standard, and may just give ‘value creation’ a whole new meaning.”…
    Collaborating with investors and other issuers…
    (LINK) This report is also part of a broader effort by the World Bank to coordinate harmonization of impact measurement and reporting (pdf) in cooperation with other multilaterals, as follows a request made to the World Bank by green bond investors looking to compare reports…
    http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/08/11/investors-welcome-world-bank-green-bond-impact-report

    the complicit Guardian. read all (Guardian doesn’t even give a bio of Kyte or her title):

    10 Aug: Guardian: World Bank: clean energy is the solution to poverty, not coal
    World Bank: clean energy is the solution to poverty, not coal
    by Rachel Kyte (World Bank’s vice president and special envoy for climate change).
    For the developing world, this moment represents an opportunity. The challenge is to build economies that are competitive without carbon. Let’s keep our eyes on ***the prize.
    http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/07/world-bank-clean-energy-is-the-solution-to-poverty-not-coal

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      gai

      Pat,
      Thanks, I just read it. Looks like someone else saw Shells’, doubletalk for what it was, killing the competition.

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    Dennis

    If the universe is slowly dying, running out of energy, the question must be asked, why conserve fossil fuels on Earth and waste time and money on so called renewables?

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/the-universe-is-slowly-dying-galaxy-survey-confirms-1.3186936

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      Eddie

      Interesting exercise but is it really sufficiently advanced to be drawing such conclusions or is it just more wild, headline grabbing speculation ?
      “However he admits that not enough is known about the strange properties of dark energy to cover all possibilities, nor was the energy contribution from gamma-rays, X-rays and radio waves included in the survey.”

      Never mind the Universe. Our solar system has a lot less time left and it won’t be a lack of energy that does for us, unless the theGreens get their way & we all freeze to death waiting for useless renewables to deliver before the Sun goes SuperNovae then collapses into a ‘Black Hole’

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    thingadonta

    The adjustment and homogenization is part of government culture, that is: brutal conformity, which in this case has an added political dimension because it suits a broader and external ideological agenda.

    People within it can’t see this, partly because they are trained to conform from day one, and partly because they wouldn’t have a job if they don’t conform.

    I would just say that nothing internal will change the government’s drive to conform the data, until some kind of external reason or social dynamic forces it to do so.

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      Ceetee

      Indeed, but you have to wonder how such a broad church of ideologically diverse governments in the democratic world have managed to be so broadly aligned on an issue that is so palpably uncertain. And they know it. Why?.

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    pat

    as BoM & the Wivenhoe Dam engineers were connected to the following, would love if someone can access the Hedley Thomas article in The Australian today. i can’t even access the blog:

    Floods ravage Grantham in the Lockyer Valley region of Queensland in 2011 …
    The Australian – ‎11 hours ago‎
    Dr Macintosh’s expert hydrology report is understood to conclude that in the most likely scenario, the presence of Mr Wagner’s quarry slightly delayed the flooding of Grantham, about 3km downstream, by between one and three minutes as the pit filled …

    The Australian | Latest Australian National & Business News …
    33 mins ago – A businessman’s quarry had zero adverse impact on a flood that killed 12, according to

    The Australian (blog) – ‎11 hours ago‎
    A brief exchange between the Mayor of Grantham and lawyers from a royal commission-style inquiry dropped some big hints a week ago as to the most likely man-made structure with a role in the town’s 2011 flood. … The inquiry would have been aware its …

    the short version:

    13 Aug: 9News: AAP: Quarry ‘not to blame’ for Qld flood deaths
    A quarry owned by a prominent Queensland businessman didn’t worsen the deadly 2011 Grantham floods, a new confidential study reportedly reveals.
    Residents blame an embankment wall at Dennis Wagner’s quarry for causing a devastating wall of water to engulf the small southeast Queensland town in January 2011, resulting in 12 deaths.
    But The Australian reports a computer-simulated study, which is yet to be made public after being conducted for the Grantham Floods Commission of Inquiry, shows the quarry had no adverse impacts and actually slightly delayed flooding by one to three minutes.
    http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/08/13/09/29/quarry-not-to-blame-for-qld-flood-deaths

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    Robber

    I trust that independent committee appointed by the government is reading this and will examine the data closely.

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    janama

    A brief exchange between the Mayor of Grantham and lawyers from a royal commission-style ­inquiry dropped some big hints a week ago as to the most likely man-made structure with a role in the town’s 2011 flood.

    Mayor Steve Jones was being quizzed by inquiry head Walter Sofronoff QC and the counsel ­assisting, Michael Hodge, about the town’s elevated railway ­embankment, built in the 1800s.

    Jones was told he had “not taken enough credit” for having suggested the railway’s 2m-high embankment be scrutinised for its possible part in the flood.

    The inquiry would have been aware its expert hydrologist had ­finally determined, in an exhaustive and still-confidential new study, that this very obvious railway structure — and definitely not Denis Wagner’s quarry — had a lot to do with the channelling of a peak flow of floodwater that killed 12 people on January 10, 2011.

    There will be some reluctant to accept the quarry’s exoneration. Fairfax broadcaster Alan Jones has repeatedly campaigned about the wealthy Wagner family and its quarry, alleging they were responsible for much of the flood, deaths and destruction — and a criminal cover-up afterwards.

    Jones’s friend and former journalist Heather Brown believed ­Sofronoff’s inquiry would result in the “guilty” being led away in handcuffs for their supposed roles in this supposed cover-up.

    My colleague and friend Nick Cater, 60 Minutes reporter ­Michael Usher and freelance journalist Amanda Gearing have ­invested a lot of time and effort, pored over evidence, listened to the community and been convinced the quarry was the culprit.

    The Australian commissioned an expert review by a highly respected hydraulic engineer, now an adviser to the Sofronoff inquiry, who found defects in the original flood study that were of sufficient concern to prompt a new probe.

    When the truth is delivered in the findings by Sofronoff, the community of Grantham will have been properly heard and the Wagner family will have an unequivocal finding in their favour.

    They did not contribute to this terrible flood. They do not deserve to be unfairly associated with the tragedy for one hour more

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      ianl8888

      Fairfax broadcaster Alan Jones has repeatedly campaigned about the wealthy Wagner family and its quarry, alleging they were responsible for much of the flood, deaths and destruction — and a criminal cover-up afterwards

      Ah yes, those rich, evil miners … couldn’t possibly have been a 19th century railway embankment, not when the devil miners are obviously to blame

      Extraordinary (except I’ve seen it all before)

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    Rollo

    Of course the constant upward adjustment of present day temperatures and downward adjustment of the past will lead to problems unless homogenisation is done in an ongoing dynamic fashion. Temperatures which are “the worst evah” today will cause a problem as they slip into the past and start interfering with the nice hockey stick shape as temperatures refuse to keep rising. To keep the CAGW narrative alive, homogenised temperature needs to function something like a mexican wave, with peak catastrophy always in our near future, the present pretty awful and the ideal forever behind us.

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      el gordo

      “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

      “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

      George Orwell

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        tom0mason

        And also el gordo,

        A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

        ~Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), U.S. philosopher. Reflections on the Human Condition.

        OR

        “The future is now clear, it’s the past that keeps changing.”

        Translated from the Russian (apparently an anonymous civil service employee) В будущем является в настоящее время, он в прошлом, что меняется. — Анонимные лица.

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    pat

    janama – many thanx for the grantham text.

    ***”brief” it may have been, but it will live on in the MSM forever:

    12 Aug: BucksHerald UK: Weather Watch: A month of contrasts sees record cold nights
    by Nicholas Lee, forecaster at MetDesk in Wendover
    Generally speaking, the UK had a rather cool month, with average temperatures 0.7C below the norm…
    The start of the month saw a ***brief but intense heatwave.
    Heathrow airport recorded the highest ever July temperature in the UK, at a scorching 36.7C, the warmest temperature seen since August 2003…
    This heat became a distant memory as, towards the end of the month, we saw some record cold night-time temperatures.
    South Newington in Oxfordshire saw the mercury drop to just 1C on July 31, whilst Chesham and also Exeter Airport saw minimum temperatures of 2C.
    The Scottish mountains even saw some falling snow across the peaks…
    http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/more-news/weather-watch-a-month-of-contrasts-sees-record-cold-nights-1-6899022

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    Need to publish all the raw data from local stations as far back as they go.. Raw data is real data…

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      el gordo

      Hear Hear

      We need to start with William Dawes and the First Fleet.

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      Argumentum the Missing-Stevenson-Screen
      smoke-screen.
      http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=604

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        el gordo

        Gosh, thanks for that walk down memory lane. My old sparing partner comrade Luke completely lost it.

        If Stevenson Screens had been operating in 1878-79 it would be a different world.

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          gai

          Yes add that to the USA history I dug up for 1890 or thereabouts and all the adjustments start looking dicier and dicier.

          This in one of the comments to the Warwickhuges essay. It is in reference to a Stevenson Screen at Springsure in Queensland in a Rockhampton newspaper 1895.:

          Morning Bulletin 19 February 1895:
          As three little boys were wending their way home yesterday from school they noticed what appeared to them a rather mysterious erection in the Post Office yard. After careful scrutiny one of them sought to enlighten his companions by saying that it was a pigeonbox. ” Go on, you silly,” said boy No. 2,”it’s a beehive.” “What are you giving us ?” asked boy No. 3, ” it’s a meat safe.”Your correspondent would venture his opinion and call it a “feeling-soother” Mr.Storey, the postmaster, will tell you that it is only a Stevenson’s Screen, the orthodox floor for hanging a thermometer required to show the true shade temperature. Many people have grumbled when they saw that Springsure was “breaking the record” for the highest register of heat, and affirmed that it was on account of the position of the ther-mometer. We shall now, however, have no cause of complaint. I hope after a week’s trial with the old and new positions, to be able to show whether or not the complaints were groundless.
          Springsure, 16th February, 1895.

          So trials of the old against the new were done. Not that this surprises me. I would expect any curious person to run the old and the new together for a while to see what the changes were.

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    pat

    13 Aug: news.com.au: Anthony Sharwood: It’s snowing in Canberra, as this miserable winter just keeps getting miserabler. Um, is that even a word?
    IT’S been an absolutely brutal winter in much of eastern Australia.
    From the cities to the bush, this has been one of the coldest, snowiest, miserablest winters anyone can remember…
    …here’s a rundown of some of the key stats:
    – Melbourne’s average maximum temperature was just 13.1 in July. This was only 0.2 below the July average, but in an age of warming climate, it is many years since a southern Australian capital was below average for a whole month.
    – Brisbane’s average monthly maximum in July was 18.1, considerably cooler than the usual 18.9.
    – Adelaide’s July average maximum was also well down. It was 14.7 compared to the usual 15.3…ETC
    http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/its-snowing-in-canberra-as-this-miserable-winter-just-keeps-getting-miserabler-um-is-that-even-a-word/story-e6frflp0-1227480335028

    10 Aug: NZ Northern Advocate: Jessica Roden: Feel cold? Here’s why
    Northlanders who thought July was a bit nippier than usual were bang on, with some areas recording their coldest day in more than 40 years.
    On July 10, Kaitaia recorded a high of 9.6C, while Cape Reinga was only slightly warmer at 10.8C – both the coldest since records started in 1971…
    NIWA: “A very cold southerly airflow preceding the high pressure system contributed to numerous locations observing record or near-record low daily maximum and minimum temperatures for July.”…
    The first day of the high pressure system saw Dargaville record a high of 9.4C, the second coldest since 1951.
    Fast forward three days and Kerikeri recorded a low of -0.7C, the coldest ever recorded since records started in 1981.
    The same day, Kaitaia reached a low of 0.4C, the second coldest in 67 years…
    The latest information from Niwa shows the period August-September is likely to bring near or below average temperatures…
    http://m.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503450&objectid=11494651

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    pat

    no doubting 2015 will be declared the hottest year ever!

    5 Aug: UTV Ireland: Ireland goes through coldest summer in decades
    Some of Ireland’s weather stations have recorded this summer to be the coldest in 50 years.
    While the majority of stations in the country reported July to be at least -1.0°C below the long term average, Claremorris recorded its coldest summer month since 1965.
    Other stations at Cork Airport, Johnstown Castle, Mullingar and Shannon Airport all reported their coldest July since 1988…
    ***Dublin Airport’s lowest of 3.9°C on 15 July made it the lowest July temperature on record since the station opened in 1942…
    http://utv.ie/News/2015/08/05/Ireland-goes-through-coldest-summer-in-decades-42478

    Scotland’s weather: Coldest summer ‘for 43 years’
    Scotsman-6 Aug 2015
    SCOTLAND is on the verge of experiencing its coldest summer for 43 years and faces more rain, more gales and colder temperatures – as …

    Coldest Summer in Decades
    IcelandReview-23 Jul 2015
    The first 13 weeks of summer have not been colder in Reykjavík for around 20 years, and for around 30 years in Akureyri.

    16 July: Finland: Historically cold summer in the works
    Next, the country’s leading daily Helsingin Sanomat reports that the summer of 2015 may just go down as the second-coldest summer on record, as Finland has only had four days where the temperature has reached more than 25 degrees Celsius so far…
    Many locations in Finland haven’t even made it past the 25 degree mark yet this summer. Even Oulu, which is known for its high summer temps, has only seen a high of 23…
    http://yle.fi/uutiset/thursdays_papers_metro_delays_pori_panel_2nd_coldest_summer_and_6th_place_reputation/8159914

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    Don Gaddes

    The Solar induced (X Factor?) Orbital ‘Dry Cycles’ documented by Alex S. Gaddes in his work,’Tomorrow’s Weather'(1990), are indeed linked to the rest of the planet, as they move with the Solar Orbit of the Earth’s Magnetic Field. The United States is affected around 7 months before Australia, (depending on the Longitude.) The ‘start point’ appears to be circa 110 degrees longitude East of Prime, (Beijing.) Australia is one of the last countries affected in the orbit of these cycles.
    The so called Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a figment of the 40 year ENSO Fantasy and certainly not responsible. There are no decadal factors in these cycles, (and why should there be?)Ten Year intervals are a product of computer model base ten maths, that have no relevance to empirical data.
    At present Australia,(and the rest of the planet,) is experiencing a hierarchy of ‘Dry Cycles’ that last occurred in 1996-7 – and before that, 1978-9.This will mean a Five Year Dry Period, to 2019-20, when a Two Year Wet/Normal Period should ensue.
    An updated version of the above work,(including ‘Dry Cycle’ forecasts to 2055,) is available as a free pdf from [email protected]

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    pat

    5 pages from Reuters – it’s because the Church is conservative!

    12 Aug: Reuters: Richard Valdmanis: Insight – Pope’s climate push at odds with U.S. Catholic oil investments
    But some of the largest American Catholic organizations have millions of dollars invested in energy companies, from hydraulic fracturing firms to oil sands producers, according to their own disclosures, through many portfolios intended to fund church operations and pay clergy salaries…
    http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN0QH0ED20150812

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    pat

    attempt to divide & conquer pre-Paris:

    12 Aug: CarbonPulse: Govt advisor urges full revamp of India’s UN climate talks strategy -media
    In a note to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Arvind Subramanian – the government’s chief economic advisor – said India should change its climate change negotiation tactics, according to the paper (Business Standard India).
    Subramanian recommended that India should:
    • End its focus on getting international funding for climate change adaptation, as economically struggling developed countries are unlikely to pay up;
    • Put more emphasis on emission reductions, as India is vulnerable to climate change and worse placed to deal with it than richer nations;
    • ***Work closer with coal-rich nations such as China, Australia, Poland and even the United States, and less with groups such as BASIC, the G77 and the African Group;…
    It is unclear if the Cabinet would approve of Subramanian’s proposals…
    http://carbon-pulse.com/govt-advisor-urges-full-revamp-of-indias-un-climate-talks-strategy-media/

    from Wikipedia: Arvind Subramanian
    He served as the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, both located in Washington DC. Formerly an economist at the International Monetary Fund…
    He has also been cited in leading magazines and newspapers, including the Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and New York Review of Books. He contributes frequently to the Financial Times and is a columnist in India’s leading financial daily, Business Standard.

    some context!

    13 Aug: FinancialExpressIndia: Climate Change: Govt must pay heed to some of the recommendations of the CEA on recalibrating climate strategy
    The government will do well to pay heed to chief economic adviser (CEA) Arvind Subramanian’s advice …
    The CEA also advises that India align with coal-bearing nations like the US, Australia, instead of poor and developing nations who have been allies so far in negotiations with advanced countries. This would be a sound move because India is likely to remain largely dependent on coal-based power rather than turning to renewable power…
    Though solar power costs have fallen drastically, with the lowest price discovered still at R5.05/unit, it is still costlier than coal-fired power…
    Given coal production has been freed up in the country, the outlook on coal availability and prices are encouraging for thermal generation, too.
    This means it would be difficult for India to commit to emission cuts, one of Subramanian’s key recommendations…
    http://www.financialexpress.com/article/fe-columnist/climate-change/118494/

    business as usual from Javadekar:

    12 Aug: MicroFinanceMonitor: India Keen on Balanced Climate Change Pact: Prakash Javadekar
    He added that India has been collaborating with nations belonging in G-77 and BASIC – Brazil, India, China and South Africa besides those nations from the Like Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) to safeguard the formation of a fair, balanced and far-reaching contract in Paris…
    He further said according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), in per capita emissions in the top ten lists, India occupied the last spot with average emissions of nearly 1.92 tons of carbon dioxide compared to Canada’s 24.6 tons and U.S’s 19.6 tons…
    http://www.microfinancemonitor.com/india-keen-on-balanced-climate-change-pact-prakash-javadekar/37227

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    Sunray

    Apparently demonstrating the wisdom of the old saying that “power corrupts”, is ok if one is lying one’s head off to “save the planet”.

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    KinkyKeith

    Thanks for the reminder Jennifer.

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    Peter C

    I just got home and there was an overseas package in the mail

    My pre-ordered copy of the new Mark Steyn book “A Disgrace to the Profession” (the World’s Scientists -in their own words- on Michael Mann, His Hockey Stick, and their damage to Science. With a personal message and signed by the author himself.

    And it is not a short book 302 pages plus an index of scientists. And this is Volume 1 (more to follow)

    Excerpt ” I think you were very sloppy and unethical”. “It has never been replicated because you can’t replicate it without access to original data and algorithms. So it is Junk”. -Michael Liebrich- visiting professor to Imperial College, London

    Those same comments could be applied to the BOM and temperature record homogenisation.

    Now I wonder if Professor Scott Mandia will put on his superman outfit again and pose for the Hockey Stick team?
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/04/climate-craziness-of-the-week-300-gets-you-a-hockey-stick-signed-by-mike-mann/

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    Steve Borodin

    Great post Jo. If anyone wants to write a book in Australia, the following title is still available:

    “BOM – A Disgrace to their Profession”

    Mark Steyn is doing an excellent job on Gore.

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    David Maddison

    How can we trust any published data from BoM given that they fiddle the data? What I would like to know is how accurate the daily published temperatures are? And as someone mentioned above, to continue to demonstrate supposed global warming, today’s temperature will have to be adjusted downward, sooner or later.

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    David Maddison

    Is anyone familiar with “Earth Endogenous Theory”? I just happened to see this. What do you think?

    https://youtu.be/Zi-V1EzI_TU

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      el gordo

      Notice the ridge around Antarctica appears to be a prime mover of climate change on the planet.

      http://worldnpa.org/climate-oscillations-mjo-enso-pdo-considered-with-validation-of-earth-endogenous-energy-theory/

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      Mark Hladik

      Hi Dave,

      I watched the first few minutes of the video, then had to quit. While interesting (yes, I’m a Geologist, currently teaching Math [as is half of our Math Department]), but the video was ruined by the constant return of the four-part slide during the speaker’s presentation, so the viewer missed what was being presented. I spent a lot of time learning Gravity & Magnetics in school, but the presentation of the gravity data was completely blanked out by that one slide.

      Is there any way to get a better copy of this? I’d like to look at that gravity presentation, but it is M.I.A.

      Regards,

      Mark

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        David Maddison

        Hi Mark,

        You can search YouTube under the author’s name or look at the link posted by el gordo above. I am not saying I endorse this theory and have not studied it, I just reported it as something I accidentally came across.

        Regards,

        David

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          Mark Hladik

          Greetings, good sir:

          Thanks; I’m not sufficiently well-versed either, which is why I’d like to look at the presentation, w/o that one slide perpetually popping-up. I’ll see if I can find something very soon; if this has any validity, it would be great to be up to speed on it. If it is bunch of horse-hockey, like a particular topic our lovely hostess lets us comment upon, that will be equally valuable.

          Best regards to you and yours,

          Mark

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    Dave

    So let me get this straight

    BOM can turn this into Global Warming by Homogenizing

    Politics can turn this Global Warming into TAX

    The more you look the WORSE it gets.

    But everywhere you look – it’s getting cooler or paused?

    The public don’t know about this stuff, the MSM have never published it enough to make people actually ask questions.

    It’s almost criminal the way BOM especially refuse to explain how thermometer data has to be changed?

    Answer: MONEY & POWER

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    Steven Mosher

    ” Anomalous trends from far distant and poor locations can spread through waves of homogenization until better, longer stations succumb to political correctness and show the “correct” result. Small choices about which stations to to use first in the process can make a huge difference to the end result. Another reason the BOM needs auditing.”

    in one sense having an automated algorithm do the whole thing has its benefits

    1. Which stations to use. Use all of them
    2. Order: simultaneous.

    samples

    http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/3816

    http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/3739

    http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/3886

    http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/168884

    http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/3616

    Now this approach is blind to human motive.

    All stations are considered and some are moved up and others are moved down
    and the goal of the algorithm is to minimize the error of prediction.

    There are corner cases where this approach may not give an optimal result.
    If there is one good station and 30 bad stations and IFF the bias in the bad stations is all ALIGNED IN TIME AND DIRECTION then the algorithm would correct the good using the bad. But the biases of the bad stations all have to be aligned for this corner case.

    The ONLY way to fix this and be more sure is the following

    “Homogenisation should start with the best stations, but no one at the BOM has even figured out which stations are the best.”

    1. There is no objective definition of “best station” many people have wrongly concluded that Long = good. It doesnt.
    2. There is no comprehensive survey or site histories, AND no way to verify site histories if they do exist.

    This leads to a different kind of fudging and that is when people with self interest look though sites and declare “This is good” “That is bad” Unless and Until someone comes up with a Field tested methodology for objectively determining “best station”
    this question will remain uncertain. And even in that case your criteria has to be historically available and you have to trust the metadata.

    Without a standard you are left with just using all stations. And that approach has an assumption that at any given time slice the good outweigh the bad.
    personally I think that assumption is weak, but lacking any objective alternative it is the best one can do

    “Homogenisation should start with the best stations, but no one at the BOM has even figured out which stations are the best.

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      Just-A-Guy

      Steven Mosher,

      You wrote:

      1. Which stations to use. Use all of them
      2. Order: simultaneous.
      .
      .
      .
      Now this approach is blind to human motive.

      Youe assumption that science should be blind to human motive is misleading. It implies that human motive is always a bad thing. It’s not.

      Human motive can be directed in whatver direction one wishes. If that motive is to arrive at the best possible data set, then automation does not necessarily provide that result.

      In fact, the WMO Handbook goes to great lengths discussing this issue. If I had the time right now, I’d gladly put up the quotes. If you or others are interested in those quotes, I can put them up at a later time.

      One last thought. Science is based on observations. An algorithm in a computer, even if it’s coded by a scientist, is still and only an algorithm. It’s not an observation. Computer programs can be used as tools to analyze data. They should never be used to produce data. That should be left to the scientist.

      Abe

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      Just-A-Guy

      Steven Mosher,

      You wrote:

      This leads to a different kind of fudging and that is when people with self interest look though sites and declare “This is good” “That is bad” Unless and Until someone comes up with a Field tested methodology for objectively determining “best station”
      this question will remain uncertain. And even in that case your criteria has to be historically available and you have to trust the metadata.

      Like I said, your assumption that only people with self interest will be involved in the selection of which stations to use as a basis for comparison is misleading. This is the reason for the OP at the top of this page and many more like it. We want the data and the procedures used on that data to become publicly available so that enough eyes get a clear picture of what’s really going on.

      There are several other assumptions in your comment that don’t align with reality and not even with the pretend reality of the WMO.

      So much to do. So little time.

      Abe

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      Stephen Mosher

      1. Which stations to use. Use all of them.

      Thankyou for pointing out that our BoM is an outlier because it fails at this important first hurdle.
      Note my coments above at 6.1.1.1
      And watch this https://youtu.be/r-1MOyO3YBM
      These are just some of the many many example of old records that are missing.
      How much information can you find from the BoM website about the extremely important record due to data sparseness, from the site at Charlotte waters?
      Why is it anyone can find data on original observer sheets for multiple sites on the national archives website that does not appear at the BoM?
      For the sites that you can find on the boM website, how can a daily data set be made up out of data that has only monthly digitisation.

      All stations are considered….

      You are wrong! Now you know you are wrong what will you do about it?

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      Jennifer Marohasy

      Steve Mosher,

      1. I see from the Deniliquin link you provide that you homogenize the mean (average of max and min) back before 1860. If you look at the raw maximum and minimum data for Deniliquin (and many other locations in south eastern Australia) they often trend in different directions (i.e. during periods of drought days are hotter, nights colder). Is there any scrutiny of the max and min series independently, or are they just combined by BEST, and then homogenized?

      2. Regarding the homogenization of Deniliquin, could you provide the list of stations used to simultaneously homogenize this station and/or the URL where this information exists?

      3. It would appear Rutherglen Research (RGLN 95837 – World Meteorological Organization Number), is not part of BEST, is there any particular reason? You show homogenization of the older and shorter record from the Rutherglen PO in one of the above links.

      Cheers, Jen

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      Bill Johnston

      All nonsense of course.

      The FUNDAMENTAL question is:

      Does Australia have any data at all anywhere that are fit for estimating warming or cooling?

      The Bureau’s methods are guaranteed to find warming.

      At some stage or another (in the 1950 and 60’s in particular) most stations have been inspected and most were up-graded.

      Up-grades invariably resulted in improving the exposure of station equipment, so their data better-reflected the ambient climate, instead of the immediate surroundings. Stations were moved because trees were growing too near; to get them away from swimming pools; out of passing shadows; away from cluttered post-office yards, away from new structures.

      Rutherglen was moved several times, the data say’s so even if the metadata does not.

      In the 1950’s many former-RAAF sites at airports, such as Alice Springs, Richmond RAAF, Broome, Wagga Wagga, Amberley, Laverton (to name a few), moved away from operational areas to new sites. These moves, which are largely UNDOCUMENTED, turn-up in data as a shift (most often) from a more sheltered to less sheltered site.

      Shifts are statistically detectable in serial data.

      Some lighthouse sites were upgraded in the 1960’s (Otway and Moruya Pilot Station were moved; in Moruyas’s case a “few feet south”). These moves and upgrades have left detectable step-changes in data.

      Homogenisation smudges these effects around, creating steps and trends that don’t exist in the raw data (given that you trust it to be raw).

      Australian meteorological data was originally collected to describe the climate, and it does that well. It was never collected to monitor trends, so it does that poorly.

      I believe we have been grossly mislead by the Bureau. Data are largely inaccurate.

      Given all the changes that permeate individual datasets, they are not up to the task of monitoring trends. Also, the Bureau’s automatic weather stations are biased high. At high temperatures they are prone to over-shoot their quadratic calibrations, causing false high-range temperatures and extremes. This shows up as skewed data. There is also evidence that they pick-up fleeting extremes.

      How can it possibly be that Australia’s temperature has remained pretty-well flat since AWS became primary instruments in 1998, but extremes have allegedly increased?

      I wonder if it could be due to hyper-ventilating professors believing in hyper-active instruments?

      Answers are needed.

      Cheers,

      Dr. Bill

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    David Maddison

    Here is the latest subsidy farm. A big one by subsidy farm standards.

    http://aglsolar.com.au/nyngan-in-numbers/

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    Ken Stewart

    Jo, I just compared Rutherglen Acorn with Deniliquin, Wagga Wagga, and Kerang Acorn- the nearest Acorn sites. Rutherglen is still warming FASTER than these three by +0.45C/100 years. Rutherglen is the outlier.

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    cohenite

    Good to see Mosher here. He says without a trace of irony about Berkeley:

    Now this approach is blind to human motive.

    Berkeley’s approach is certainly blind to UHI which it thinks does not exist. As for the BOM it is blind to many things, 2 of which are the fact that on 954 days it shows a minimum greater than maximum temperature and BOM’s definition of a heatwave means Antarctic has more heatwaves than Marble Bar.

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    Reasonable Skeptic

    I find this staggeringly crazy. The adjustments are made and claimed to be correct by a sophisticated homogenization process. Essentially what they are saying is that modern thermometers can’t measure temperature correctly. If a site is of good high quality explain to me why the raw data needs corrections. If a site needs to be constantly corrected, make the site high quality by whatever means necessary.

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    Geoff Sherrington

    Hi Mo0sh,
    Your words –

    “1. Which stations to use. Use all of them
    2. Order: simultaneous”

    Some of us have worked through the best official records available to CSIR by the 1930s and then through Commonwealth Year Books of the 1940s-50s. These were the gold plated standards for their time and they include much data that does not get into Acorn.

    When we subtract these figures from a later date, sat 2000-2014, we find that Australian warming is about 0.4 deg C/century starting from 1860 in dribs and drabs.
    The BOM with Acorn does not include these figures before 1910, so far as we can tell, and might not use them 1910-end of record which varies with each official compendium. They derive warming of about 1 deg C/century.

    We continue to wonder about the importance of your statement ” … a different kind of fudging and that is when people with self interest look though sites and declare “This is good” “That is bad”

    What would you think of a suggestion to add …. declare “Leave this set out.”

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    Steve Richards

    Jo et al,

    It would seem that each developed country should develop a ‘national temperature data set’ using an handful of ‘pristine’ sites. Sites so good, that they meet all the WHO requirements and more, have full metadata and have no known problems. This may mean only one or two sites. We produce an average temperature and anomaly then compare this anomaly with the BOM anomaly. The difference should indicate how ‘bad’ the BOM manipulation has been.

    does anyone have any candidates for sensor sites that are a) long in use, b) away from habitation c) match all other criteria for a usable site?

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