Why is temperature data a national secret? BOM still hiding data

By Jo Nova

Think of the BOM as an advertising agency for big-government programs, and it all makes sense…

Apparently, after the stinging criticism about them, the Bureau of Meteorology is telling journalists and academics that “they publish all the data”. Jennifer Marohasy has been fielding calls and correcting journalists on air who are fooled by this claim. Clearly this isn’t true, or she wouldn’t have needed to spend three years on FOI applications just to get a tiny part of it, (and in the least helpful form possible , like 1,000 sheets of paper). The Bureau not only don’t publish this data, they actively work to hide it and fight FOI’s.

The BOM are not only hiding national temperature data, now they are trying to hide that they are hiding it too. There is some dynamite secret here. Why is it so important — perhaps because it shows that the BOM installed new thermometers that register artificially higher temperatures than the old glass thermometers do? Thousands of “hottest ever records” have been set by new electronic thermometers that might not have been set if we still used traditional thermometers.

If the Bureau can’t be bothered giving […]

Is Climate Change really caused by electronic thermometers? (The BOM don’t want Australians to see the data)

By Jo Nova Electronic thermometers may read up to 0.7 degrees higher than glass ones.

Sometime in the mid-1990s the Australian Bureau of Meteorology replaced many of their glass thermometers with electronic sensors. They claimed they were carefully verified to match the slow way the old glass thermometers worked — after all, we wouldn’t want to use gizmos that recorded new all-time *Hottest Ever Records* that were actually just one-second gusts of hot air, would we? Our newspapers would be full of meaningless headlines about how Climate Change made us hotter than ever in history, when really it was just a mistaken effect of a new type of thermometer. Imagine that disaster of public policy…

Of course this question is so easily solved. The BoM just needed to keep the two thermometers side by side in the same boxes and record all that data. Then they could release it, showing how well the electronic gadgets mimicked the glass thermometers, and Australians everywhere would feel confident that BoM was the sterling agency they thought it was. Instead Skeptics have been asking for comparison data for nine years and the BoM has refused, hedged, asked exorbitant fees, destroyed data and […]

Perth Event today – join Jen Marohasy and I and see the real Great Barrier Reef

STICKY POST: Thursday December 1: Meet Jen Marohasy and myself tonight at the screening of two short films, Bleached Colorful, and Finding Porites, showing the real state of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s on at 6.30pm at The Windsor Cinema, Nedlands. Tickets here.



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Film “A Coral Bleaching Tragedy” with Peter Ridd in Brisbane This Sunday

h/t to Eric Worrall

For people in Brisbane, don’t miss Peter Ridd & Jennifer Marohasy this Sunday at 2pm. They will attend a premiere viewing of their new film “A Coral Bleaching Tragedy”.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite.

Jen Marohasy and Peter Ridd

Dear All,

It is now nine months since the High Court decision (Ridd v JCU) was handed down and I thought donors to that legal action might be interested in what has happened in the meantime.

As you will recall, the HC ruled that JCU acted unlawfully in censuring me for my comments on the Quality Assurance of Great Barrier Reef (GBR) science, but was allowed to fire me for speaking about JCU’s unlawful behaviour. I have been working with Morgan Begg from the IPA on a new volume that will analyse the case in detail. Contributors include Chris Merritt, legal correspondent for The Australian, James Allan (Law Professor at the University of Queensland), and Aynsley Kellow (Emeritus Professor at U. Tasmania). The aim is to make sure as much as possible is learned and documented for future work to improve academic freedom of speech.

July 20th, 2022 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Bureau of Meteorology finds Australia is still getting colder a century later

Surprisingly, the World War I era temperatures are still changing. Mornings that seemed nippy at the time are now susceptible to frosts.

Someone should warn the farmers — except they’re all dead.

Thanks to Chris Gillham for independently and laboriously going through the new unannounced changes in another cycle of BOM’s hidden revamp of Australia’s history. ACORN 2.2 is the latest version of the Australian Climate Observation Reference Network of “the best” 112 weather stations across Australia.

Bureau of Meteorology ‘cools the past, warms present’

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

“The bureau has now remodelled the national temperature ­dataset three times in just nine years,” Dr Jennifer Marohasy said.

In the last five years the ACORN re-revisions by the BOM have discovered another quarter of a degree of warming that we didn’t know about from the last hundred years. It’s not clear why the BOM doesn’t want to tell the world how good they are at correcting thermometer records from 1913. It seems like a remarkable skill.

The minima just keep getting cooler

Chris Gillham plots the longest running stations from the ACORN 2.2 set against the old raw readings:

Who knew all those old […]

All reefs look dead from a plane — Great Barrier Reef still alive underwater

Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?

The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.

This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]

Yet more footage of Great Barrier dying reef not dying

Jen Marohasy went hunting for bleached coral:

What is the true state of the Great Barrier Reef? … In January 2020, Emmy Award winning cameraman Clint Hempsall, and IPA Senior Fellow Jennifer Marohasy decided to find out. They spent a week exploring the Ribbon Reefs 250kms to the north east of Cairns in search of coral bleaching – the process of corals turning white as a result of warmer water temperature, which climate scientists say is being caused by climate change. Some argue 60% of the coral at the Ribbon Reefs was irretrievably bleached in 2016.

Somewhere among 350,000 square kilometers of coral reef, Jen Marohasy had no trouble finding some happy corals, giant cod, and cute nemo fish.

The IPA and the B. Macfie Family Foundation supports and publishes the video:

Colorful corals of the Great Barrier Reef

Don’t believe your lying eyes. Incandescent light globes are killing the corals one by one, air conditioners cause fish to act reckless, and only more solar panels and windmills can save them. You know it makes sense.

Living coral.

..

Many of the corals grow on vertical formations which are not visible on […]

Great Barrier Reef lives, misrepresents The Guardian and Expert who said corals were dead

Stone Island is the reef that put Peter Ridd’s career on the road to the high court. Last week Jennifer Marohasy released a mini documentary showing corals around Stone Island that weren’t supposed to be there. It was a bad look for Dr Tara Clark, the expert who had said the corals were gone.

This week Graham Readfearn hit back with “Scientists say rightwing think tank misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study”. Apparently Marohasy must have used a right wing camera or something. (Those corals you saw are not really corals). If only Readfearn had not used a left wing keyboard, where the only truths it could tell were projections of his own flaws onto everything else.

Dr Clark apparently now denies she said the corals were all dead. Saying “We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.” Poor Guardian readers, as usual, get spoon-fed thin slices of technicalities and weasel words, never the whole truth.

This picture was taken with Jen Marohasy’s drone, Skido, looking south east towards the edge of Pink Plate Reefon 26th August 2019.

Are you now or have you ever been an Acropora coral?

In reply Jennifer Marohasy just […]

According to Nature these corals do not exist

Jennifer Marohasy dives on Beige Reef near Stone Island with Walter Stark, and Emmy Award winning cinematographer Clint Hempsall.

The aim was just to record what was there… don’t believe your lying eyes.

Fortunately, this science is not peer reviewed.

Jennifer’s blog and the IPA.

 

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Adjusted! Another degree shaved off Darwins history — (it’s cooling so fast, in 50 years Darwin won’t even be tropical)

Graham Lloyd and Jen Marohasy scorch through the BoMs latest revision of Darwin.

On the 1st of January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees C, then it became 33.8 C, and now it was, is, 32.8 C. (What’s the past tense of something that is now, but wasn’t then? We don’t even have grammar for this.)

Extrapolate that adjustment trend: One degree of cooling in 6 years (since the last adjustment) becomes 16 degrees cooler in a century. Darwin won’t know what hot days were!

Look what they’ve done to history Mum

The Bureau of Meteorology has no interest in the hot pre-1910 era which just gets chopped. And even if they did include it, after they’ve adjusted it — it wouldn’t be hot anymore anyway. Remember the Federation Drought? No one else does either.

Temperature is whatever you want to make it.

Mean maximum annual temperatures as measured at the Darwin Post Office and airport shown with the new remodeled ACORN-SAT Version 2, which is the new official record for Australia.

“What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin is indefensible. ” –– Marohasy

 

[…]

Innovative work: Predicting rainfall with neural nets – Jennifer Marohasy

Predicting seasonal rainfall months ahead has surely got to be the Holy Grail of weather forecasting. Imagine the billions of dollars, the man-hours, and the anguish-prevented if we can do it. What if neural nets can be trained, validated, and used to help farmers, investors, and “Oi” — even Dam Managers?

Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbott were inspired to try a whole new approach to rainfall predictions after John’s car met a sad end in the infamous Brisbane flood. After five years work they’re keen to share the results, and their predictions. Check out those graphs below. The last one has a 3000 year range.

Read about how difficult it was for them to get useful data from the BOM, and how the BOM does not do proper benchmarking of their success rates. How serious are they? As usual, it’s those outside the stagnant pond of government approved science that are testing new ground. The government talks about innovation. Independent researchers do it.

***Jennifer Marohasy is speaking in Deniliquin NSW on Friday (tomorrow 6pm — details at the bottom)***.

 

She will be sharing the results of their research on using neural nets. How about this graph? That […]

Rent-seekers reveal awful truth: Abbott wanted to investigate BOM data, Hunt opposed “due diligence”

Imagine the crime of trying to audit the BOM?

Last year, Graham Lloyd wrote in The Australian about how the BOM had made whopping two degree adjustments to data which turned cooling trends to warming trends and instead of improving the data, it created discontinuities. The BOM’s eventual explanation lamely exclaimed that the stations “might” have moved. (And they might not, too. Who knows, but remember this is what 95% certainty looks like.) Lloyd wrote about how historical records of extreme heat at Bourke had effectively been thrown in the trash. Who cares about historical records?

In response to the embarrassment and revealing questions, Tony Abbott wanted an investigation. But Greg Hunt, and The Dept of Environment opposed the investigation and opposed doing “due diligence”. What are they afraid of? Instead, Hunt helped the BOM set up a one-day-wonder investigation with hand-picked statisticians that wasted another nine months before admitting that the BOM methods would never be publicly available or able to be replicated. If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science.

The BOM’s defense is always that their mystery method is considered “best practice” by other agencies around the world — who share the same incentives to exaggerate warming, […]

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 […]

BoM Forum Panel: one-day-wonder. Rigorous as Annual Cakes and Tea Jamboree

Last August the BoM were feeling the heat — Graham Lloyd at The Australian and skeptics, particularly Jennifer Marohasy, were asking why cooling trends were being revised to warming trends at stations with no recorded moves. People were raising eyebrows at embarrassing questions about why the Bureau thought climate change was all-critical, yet they were tossing out historic Stevenson-screen data. The BoM felt so squeezed they finally answered some basic questions they’d been ignoring for years (like details on Rutherglen).

But the pressure kept growing because nobody needs a degree in Meteorology to know that there ought to be a reason for fiddling with historic thermometer data. The dumb punters were not impressed with the excuse that stations “might” have moved because tricky statistics on other stations 300km away detected an “unrecorded shift”. So the BoM and their apologist friends in The Dept of Environment dusted off a 3 year old idea called a Technical Advisory Forum, pulled out some names of respectable sounding statisticians and “voila” — created a one day wonder. The “technical forum” will spend more time releasing press releases than analyzing data.

On Jan 19th we were promised so much. The full gloss press release ticks […]

The mysterious BOM disinterest in hot historic Australian Stevenson screen temperatures

When it comes to our rare high-quality historic records, and the real long term trends of Australian weather, the silence is striking. There are some excellent historical records of long term temperature data from the late 1800s in Australia, which lie underused and largely ignored by the BOM.

For the BOM, history almost appears to start in 1910, yet the modern type of Stevenson screen thermometer was installed across Australia starting as early as 1884 in Adelaide. Most stations in Queensland were converted as long ago as 1889 and in South Australia by 1892. Though states like NSW and Victoria were delayed until 1908.

Here’s a photo of the ones in Brisbane in 1890.

Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.

The BOM don’t often mention all their older temperature data. They argue that all the recordings then were not taken with standardized equipment. The BOM prefers to start long term graphs and trends from 1910 (except when they start in 1950 or 1970, or 1993).

The BOM was set up in 1908. Before that there were Stevenson screens going in […]

Big adjustments? BOM says Rutherglen site shifted, former workers there say “No”

The hot questions for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) mount up. Rutherglen was one of the temperature recording stations that was subject to large somewhat mysterious adjustments which turned a slight cooling trend into a strongly warming one. Yet the official notes showed that the site did not move and was a continuous record. On paper, Rutherglen appeared to be ideal — a rare long rural temperature record where measurements had come from the same place since 1913.

The original cooling trend of – 0.35C was transformed into a +1.73C warming after “homogenisation” by the BOM. To justify that the BOM claims that there may have been an unrecorded shift, and it was “consistent” with the old station starting further up the slope before it moved down to the hollow.

Today retired scientist Bill Johnston got in touch with Jennifer Marohasy, with me and with Graham Lloyd of The Australian to say that he worked at times at Rutherglen and the official thermometer had not moved. It was always placed where it is now at the bottom of the hollow. That information has already made it into print in The Australian.

The original thermometer records suggest a […]

BOM finally explains! Cooling changed to warming trends because stations “might” have moved!

It’s the news you’ve been waiting years to hear! Finally we find out the exact details of why the BOM changed two of their best long term sites from cooling trends to warming trends. The massive inexplicable adjustments like these have been discussed on blogs for years. But it was only when Graham Lloyd advised the BOM he would be reporting on this that they finally found time to write three paragraphs on specific stations.

Who knew it would be so hard to get answers. We put in a Senate request for an audit of the BOM datasets in 2011. Ken Stewart, Geoff Sherrington, Des Moore, Bill Johnston, and Jennifer Marohasy have also separately been asking the BOM for details about adjustments on specific BOM sites. (I bet Warwick Hughes has too). The BOM has ignored or circumvented all these, refusing to explain why individual stations were adjusted in detail.

The two provocative articles Lloyd put together last week were Heat is on over weather bureau and Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures, which I covered here. This is the power of the press at its best. The absence of articles like these, is why I have said the media […]

The heat is on. Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures’ — The Australian

Congratulations to The Australian again for taking the hard road and reporting controversial, hot, documented problems, that few in the Australian media dare to investigate.

How accurate are our national climate datasets when some adjustments turn entire long stable records from cooling trends to warming ones (or visa versa)? Do the headlines of “hottest ever record” (reported to a tenth of a degree) mean much if thermometer data sometimes needs to be dramatically changed 60 years after being recorded?

One of the most extreme examples is a thermometer station in Amberley, Queensland where a cooling trend in minima of 1C per century has been homogenized and become a warming trend of 2.5C per century. This is a station at an airforce base that has no recorded move since 1941, nor had a change in instrumentation. It is a well-maintained site near a perimeter fence, yet the homogenisation process produces a remarkable transformation of the original records, and rather begs the question of how accurately we know Australian trends at all when the thermometers are seemingly so bad at recording the real temperature of an area. Ken Stewart was the first to notice this anomaly and many others when he compared […]

Once in a life time opportunity to be an honest climate modeller — research scholarships!

This is a first! Announcing three scholarships for research-based higher degrees in Australia. Seeking Australian or New Zealand candidates who are science and engineering grads and interested in using neural nets to build climate models that work. This really is something new. Skeptical minds encouraged to apply. Please pass this on to people you think might be interested… – Jo

Once in a Life Time Opportunity to be an Honest Climate Modeller From Jennifer Marohasy

Most critics of anthropogenic global warming, and there are many, never get the opportunity to actually have a go at contributing to climate science in a practical or tangible and constructive way. That is, they never get to pull a lever, press a button, build a model or make a forecast. At best they might throw rotten tomatoes by way of blog posts and comments. This is because the tools of modern climate science are very complex and generally run on super computers with restricted access.

But what if it was possible to build your own climate model on a gaming computer, with some help from artificial neural network (ANN) technology?

Artificial neural networks are a form of artificial intelligence and machine learning, that can […]

Don’t miss Jennifer Marohasy speaking in Sydney Wednesday

Jennifer Marohasy has been very involved in looking at Australian temperature data this year. She is speaking in Sydney on Wednesday about what she’s found. She’s talking about the new temperature dataset the BOM uses called ACORN, which they built after we asked them for an independent audit of their High Quality set.

Modelling Global Temperatures – What’s Wrong. Bourke & Amberley – as Case Studies

From Jennifer’s site: “The most extreme example that Ken found of data corruption was at Amberley, near Brisbane, Queensland, where a cooling minima trend was effectively reversed, Figure 1.” Jennifer has also raised her concerns (repeatedly) with Minister Greg Hunt.

Venue: The Gallipoli Club, 12 Loftus Street (between Bridge Street & Alfred Street), Sydney Time: 5.30 for 6pm

Additional Information: **Bookings from 11 June only ** BAR OPENS AT 5 PM – LIGHT REFRESHMENTS

Click here for info on how to book

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