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Too late: Bureau of Met buys time with another “major revision” of data that was already “best quality” five years ago

Breaking news: Bureau of Meteorology to revamp temperature records, Graham Lloyd reports in The Australian.

Stop warming in Australia. Dump the Bureau of Meteorology and set up a scientific agency instead.We’ve seen this all three times before. As soon as skeptics expose enough scandals in The Australian the BOM has to run and hide behind a “major revision”, a panel, or a review. It’s their pass-out-of-class to not answer questions. It’s too late, I have no expectation that this will achieve anything other than being the excuse de jour for the BOM to keep operating as a PR machine rather than a scientific agency.

In the first round back in February 2011, we worked with Cory Bernardi to request a formal audit of the BOM. They had lauded their “High Quality” or HQ dataset, but suddenly it was not good enough and needed revising. In March 2012 the BOM released an entirely new version called ACORN. The formal audit request was thus “neutralized”, but the new set was as bad as the old set. By July 2012, for free, skeptics analyzed and advised the bureau of a string of pathetic flaws, including that the bureau had “created” nearly a thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes,  the “hottest day ever recorded in Australia” in their hallowed ACORN dataset now occurred in cold Albany after a seven degree shift. The trend in average summer maximums was been tripled by adjustments that the BOM imply are neutral. The adjustments follow an inexplicable monthly whip-saw square wave pattern that defies any reasoning. The independent audit team found gaps and errors, like days where 36.8C was changed to 26.8C (and so many more). The same pattern of mysterious adjustments took data recorded in modern Stevenson screens eighty years ago and “discovered” they needed to be cooled, changing trends by as much as two degrees, thus turning some raw cooling trends to warming trends and non-randomly increasing the total “averaged” warming rate.

The whole national warming trend from 1910 is supposedly about one degree. But up to two-thirds of Australia’s warming may be due to “adjustments”, not “CO2”. The most cost effective way to stop Australia warming is to dump the BOM and set up a scientific agency instead. It’s a lot cheaper than crippling our electricity grid and punishing our manufacturing base.

In a second round of scandals printed in The Australian in mid 2014, the BOM promised another internal review. It took til March of 2015 for a few hand picked statisticians to consider none of the important questions in a one day tea-n-cakes jamboree and issued a nothing-to-see-here report three months later. How convenient.

In the third mini-round, The Australian again wrote about the odd clipping of cold temperatures, and skeptics exposed that the bureau was destroying data routinely and uses one-second noise instead of properly averaged longer sampling as other international agencies do. The BOM did a short review, and told us that, by sheer coincidence the skeptics had randomly found the only two sites of 695 that weren’t perfect. Problem fixed.

Five years after the Wonderbar ACORN dataset was released, none of these errors have been fixed. The BOM never said “thanks for helping”, showed no interest in doing a better job, won’t release either methods or comparison data. Now, lo, in a fourth round, a few articles in The Australian (and total silence from Fairfax and the ABC) and wouldn’t-you-know but the bureau has suddenly discovered that majorly-revised “best quality” isn’t good enough and they need to aim for doubly-revised ultra-super-HQ. Sure.

We’re beyond excuses now. Read what I said in 2012. The HQ errors could be called unwitting then, but the ACORN revision could not:

For me, this version is so much worse than the previous one. In the HQ data set the errors could have been inadvertent, but now we’ve pointed out the flaws, there can be no excuses for getting it wrong. Instead of fixing the flaws (and thanking the volunteers), it’s almost as if they’ve gone out of their way to not solve them. Instead it’s been complexified, rushed, has many typo’s and gaps, and the point (see below) about the “adjustments having no impact” — when they obviously do — begs to be audited by the Auditor General, the ACCC, Four Corners (ha ha) and 60 Minutes.

The Australian people pay a million dollars a day for this inept and biased operation. A fourth round of “internal” revisions is a waste of money. There is no sign the BOM is any more competent or even willing to act in a scientific manner.  Give skeptics just 2% of the BOM budget and the nation would get a real revision and a totally transparent database.

I predict Minister Josh Frydenberg will be fooled and will accept the BOM excuses, thus utterly failing to stand up for the Australian people and the Australian environment. Shame.

Behind the scenes here we’re seriously discussing ways to set up better quality temperature recording stations. If you’d like to offer help, money, advice or space on your farm, please get in touch, leave a comment or send an email. Thank you.

 

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THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal


Book, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, IPA.
A lot of this information and so much more was discussed in my chapter “Mysterious Revisions to Australia’s Long Hot History” in the new book Climate Change: The Facts 2017. Co-authors include Clive James, Matt Ridley, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts. Order your copy now, the first edition has sold out.  Also available as Ebook and paperback on Amazon.

 

 

 

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