JoNova

Dangerous Abbott unleashed, speaks the truth, critics froth and flounder

Finally the gloves are off

The critics called him a climate denier anyway, even when he toed the politically correct line, so there was nothing left to call him. For former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, there is no point in pandering. Now after a great speech, the EcoWorriers are left saying he is “loopy”. The new unleashed Abbott is so much stronger, more compelling, and his message is being spread far and wide. Not only will his GWPF speech fire up the footsoldier deplorables, but he is more likely to reach the undecided centre by speaking his mind freely. The ABC was pasting his message in large type all over the TV news and in article after article. That’s great for skeptics. The ABC is so blindly consumed with the dominant paradigm they can’t see how appealingly sensible Abbott looks by speaking about cold being a killer, CO2 being good for agriculture, and a bit of warming being beneficial for humans. His message of irrational electricity pain is so terribly sane. He looks at Manly beach and can see that sea levels haven’t changed much which surely everyone else with open eyes can see too. The ABC frames it as “Abbott has examined a century of photos, and he detects no rise” implying he is an amateur out of his depth (pardon the pun). But it won’t do Abbott any harm, thousands of people know Manly beach.

The 2017 Annual GWPF Lecture: DARING TO DOUBT

“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.” — Tony Abbott

In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial. — Tony Abbott

The reply: “Tony Abbott has gone from just destructive to quite loopy”. — Tanya Plibersec, Deputy Opposition Leader.

The ABC narrator, Andrew Probyn, tosses out any pretense of being impartial, just blows that facade away:

Tony Abbott – already the most destructive politician of his generation — now intends waging war on what he calls environmental theology, …

What exactly did Abbott destroy?

As Hold my beer says at #12.1: “He’s currently threatening their authority-protected, grant-dependent, welfare-sapping livelihoods.”

This is the man who led Australia to the most definitive election victory so far this century, who saved lives by stopping the boats, and who didn’t cause deaths with inept programs like rushed “pink batts” schemes. Other politicians promised to not do a major economic transformation which they then went on to exactly and specifically do. That’s a whole new league of political lie. How’s that for destroying democracy?

Probyn goes on to say that “…if [Abbotts position] tells us anything, it’s that Malcolm Turnbull can’t do anything to appease Tony Abbott on climate action which may embolden cabinet to pursue and deliver the energy policy it wants.“

Instead, the truth is that no one can do anything to appease the Climate-Masters — full obeisance, with bowing, is still not enough.

Probyn has some Christmas fantasy that this will embolden cabinet, that an outspoken Abbott is somehow less of a threat. Good luck with that theory. Are the voters likely to run from an open skeptic? Ask Donald.

Only yesterday Turnbulls team hinted they may have to drop the Renewable Energy Target. Pundits blamed “backbenchers” — which means Abbott and supporters. Abbott on the fringe, or is he ahead of the pack?

The reaction:

Tony Abbott says climate change action is like trying to ‘appease the volcano gods’ (ABC)

Louise Yaxley:

Federal Labor’s treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said the speech was spectacular evidence that Mr Abbott thinks “we can put our head in the sand” and pretend climate change is not happening.

“It is 2017 and we have got a former PM overseas denying the science of climate change and … he is calling the shots on the policy of Australia,” he said.

Tony Abbott’s climate change speech in London reveals his true self (ABC)

Andrew Probyn again:

Now freed from any belief he will be prime minister again, [so Probyn hopes] Mr Abbott claims virtue in saying it as he sees it. Even if it is from the fringe.

This is ruinous to Malcolm Turnbull’s ambition to end the climate wars, which is what he had originally hoped for the review conducted by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.

The prospect of a bipartisan peace on climate policy with Labor, however unlikely, is now impossible. Mr Abbott will not be satisfied even by orthodox expressions of environmentalism.

Tony Abbott’s climate change claims just don’t stack up (ABC again)

Andrew Street starts with “Heatwaves are better than cold snaps…”, but has to admit that “That first claim appears to be true”. The best Street can come up with is the threat that things will be worse 30 years from now because the WHO says so, and malaria might spread (he probably doesn’t know it was more of a threat in northern Europe in the cold 1800s), and besides, Himalayan Glaciers will melt. Whatever. Street — probably watches the ABC — so he doesn’t realize the WHO projections are based on models that might as well be magic spells. As for floods, 1,000 years of paleohistory shows that, if anything, floods and droughts were longer and worse. Climate change is bringing us… nicer weather. Tough eh?

“We can tell ocean levels aren’t rising by looking at Manly Beach”

Street thinks global sea levels are rising at 3mm a year (still a tiny amount) because he believes the IPCC, and probably doesn’t know that 1,000 tide gauges estimateit at 1mm a year, as do detailed studies, and as did the satellites until someone adjusted themup based on one sinking gauge in Hong Kong.

“Carbon dioxide increases agriculture yields”

Poor Street again has to admit this is a lot like what we were taught in primary school (because it’s true, eh?) But he repeats the old Nature study that claims the extra food will be less nutritious. Supposedly if rice has 3% less zinc or 5% less iron, people will die, or then again, if you think about it, no sane person eats rice for its zinc or iron content, and as I calculated, people just need to eat one extra chickpea for every 100g of rice and their nutrition problem is solved. People in abject poverty may not be able to afford that pea, but the answer is to help them get cheap reliable energy so they can get out of poverty, not to panic about small declines in minerals. Bulk carbohydrate crops grow faster in a CO2 rich world. That dilutes the other stuff. It’s just chemistry.

“People prefer clear policy to endless uncertainty”

You can’t push ..it uphill forever. We’ll have uncertainty as long as policies are levitating on a namecalling campaign instead of being based on hard data. If we want certainty we need to drop the pagan belief that our power stations can be used to control the climate.

From the transcript:

It would be wrong to underestimate the strengths of the contemporary West. By objective standards, people have never had better lives. Yet our phenomenal wealth and our scientific and technological achievements rest on values and principles that have rarely been more widely challenged.

To a greater or lesser extent, in most Western countries, we can’t keep our borders secure; we can’t keep our industries intact; and we can’t preserve a moral order once taken for granted. Eventually, something will crystalize out of this age of disruption but in the meantime we could be entering a period of national and even civilizational decline.

In Australia, we’ve had ten years of disappointing government. It’s not just the churn of prime ministers that now rivals Italy’s, the internal divisions and the policy confusion that followed a quarter century of strong government under Bob Hawke and John Howard. It’s the institutional malaise. We have the world’s most powerful upper house: a Senate where good government can almost never secure a majority. Our businesses campaign for same sex marriage but not for economic reform. Our biggest company, BHP, the world’s premier miner, lives off the coal industry that it now wants to disown. And our oldest university, Sydney, now boasts that its mission is “unlearning”.

Of course, to be an Australian is still to have won the lottery of life, and there’s yet no better place to live and work. But there’s a nagging sense that we’re letting ourselves down and failing to reach anything like our full potential.

We are not alone in this. The Trump ascendancy, however it works out, was a popular revolt against politics-as-usual. Brexit was a rejection of the British as well as of the European establishments. Yes, the centrist, Macron, won in France but only by sidelining the parties that had ruled from the start of the Fifth Republic. And while the German chancellor was re-elected, seemingly it’s at the head of an unstable coalition after losing a quarter of her vote.

— The Federal Member for Warringah

More Info:

That Fort Denison Tide Gauge shows that what minor rise there has been doesn’t fit the theory. Seas were rising fastest before World War II.
For those who can or want to pretend to be within Australia – watch the WA State news on Iview from 5 minutes on. (The Probyn declaration is at 7:17 mins).
Sea Levels
ABC (NEWS on iview)
Floods

9.2 out of 10 based on 112 ratings

Australian govt may dump renewables subsidies, testing, 1,2,3…

Minister Josh Frydenberg has just implied Australia might drop ongoing endless renewables subsidies (and thus dump the Finkel chief-“scientist” plan). He didn’t say that in so many words, but hinted at it, and will now wait to see how the idea goes down.

Soak in this reasoning — renewables are becoming so cost competitive they don’t need subsidies. He’s calling their bluff. It’s like the announcement to sack climate scientists because “the science is settled”. Let’s take them at their word and follow that propaganda to its logical end:

The key message from Josh Frydenberg is that subsidies for renewable energy are coming to an end.

There is no Clean Energy Target in sight in Frydenberg’s plan for a new policy by the end of this year. The phrase does not get a single mention in his new speech on the way ahead.

In a key argument, the Energy Minister argues that the cost of building wind and solar power has more than halved in recent years.

He does not rule out more subsidies explicitly, but the clear suggestion is that renewable energy generators are now at a point where they can stand on their own two feet. This is exactly the message from Coalition backbenchers who are sceptical about the Renewable Energy Target and any CET to continue the subsidies after 2020.

— The Australian

Frydenberg is giving the industry what it asked for: “stability”:

The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, says Australia’s electricity sector is looking for stability, “not necessarily” for handouts, in a signal the Turnbull government is poised to abandon the clean energy target.

In comments to an energy summit on Monday, Frydenberg pointed to the falling costs of renewable energy as one of the calculations in the government’s consideration of the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel. —The Guardian

I don’t think they’re going to want this sort of stability. What they really want is “subsidy”.

This is not over yet:

When Turnbull was asked if the government had abandoned the Finkel hot favourite list, he played it both ways, ambiguously waffling about meeting Paris agreements while delivering reliable affordable energy which says exactly nothing. Write to your elected rep. Write to your newspaper editor. Write, ring, holler, don’t stop now. The renewables industry will be doing it like their next ski trip to the Swiss Alps depends on it.

Bluff meet reality:

We can measure the truth of the “competitiveness” by the outcry from the renewables industry lobbyists. How loud will be the squeal? At Reneweconomy.com, David Leitch, principal of ITK (whatever that is), puts in his best effort to scare the Coalition today declaring it is Frydenberg’s election losing speech. “In our dreams”, say skeptics, this next election will be about energy policy like it was in 2013. Bring it on. We might see a 90 seat landslide again. Labor are running with their 50% renewables plan, death to Australian manufacturing.

Tellingly, Leitch’s first graph is about the cost of nasty storms in the US, because subsidies for windmills will stop droughts, floods and tornadoes. Yeah, baby. (Please keep reminding people. Please.) He then talks share prices, gas prices, trading volumes and baseload futures. What he doesn’t graph are the countries which have lots of renewables and their electricity costs. I wonder why?

His reading of the implications of Frydenberg’s speech as the same as everyone else:

Mainstream media, specifically “The Australian Financial Review” and “The Australian” have taken the Federal Minister for “The Enviroment and Energy” speech to a conference today to state that the Government is “set to dump clean energy target”.

Frydenberg reasons that the public won’t support climate change action if they have to pay too much for their bills:

Should reliability and affordability be compromised, public support for tackling climate change will quickly diminish and previous gains will be lost

How does Finkel justify more subsidies in a cost competitive industry?

Because “management”:

Finkel told the gathering a clean energy target was a framework allowing an orderly transition away from carbon-intensive power sources to low-emissions power sources.

“It remains a useful tool even if there is an extreme rate of reduction in the price of the new technologies,” Finkel said. “You need a managed transition.”

—The Guardian

So Finkel the chief scientist hath spoken on economic matters of energy policy and the answer is to manage the transition, which shows what a pointless position “Chief Scientist” is. He didn’t assess the scientific reasoning at all, and fails on economic basics. If renewables were competitive, the transition would manage itself. Who wouldn’t want solar panels and batteries if it really did cut the electricity bill in half? But solar still has subsidies, the payback time is long, uncertain, and there are horrid aftereffects making the whole grid unstable, driving out the cheapest baseload providers, and ultimately intermittent “cheap” electricity drives up the cost of electricity overall.

h/t Eric Worrall — See his take on it on WUWT.

9.7 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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9.2 out of 10 based on 33 ratings

Australian BoM forced to meet skeptics, answer questions, provide a tiny bit of data

The scandals do count. The Australian articles has got Minister Frydenbergs attention. The extensive collection of blog posts and the IPA Climate Change book show there is a deep well of material to fuel more articles. We have barely begun. Congratulations to Jennifer Marohasy. At least we will get a few more answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask.

The head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Andrew Johnson, has been asked by Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg to release extensive temperature data from a weather station in Victoria after requests from an independent scientist.

Dr Johnson has also agreed to meet with Jennifer Marohasy, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, to discuss the integrity of the bureau’s temperature measurements as she pushes ahead with calls for a parliamentary inquiry.

The story of the “one second” records is potent: How many “hottest ever records” have been created thanks to new electronic equipment?

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology appears to have put in place a measurement system guaranteed to provide new record high and low temperatures,” she said in the letter.

Instead of the older-style mercury thermometers in which temperatures changed more slowly, the bureau has since the late 1980s installed electronic probes sensitive to rapid variations. “Just last Saturday (September 22), the Bureau of Meteorology announced a September record for Mildura, in northwestern Victoria, of 37.7C.

What we need is the absolute raw data. No editing, filtering or adjusting. We need to know what the equipment recorded, and every part of the trail that leads from the instrument to the reported number in the headline.

Banks, businesses, taxpayers get audited. Time for the BOM.

h/t Pat, Dave B.

THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal

Keep reading →

9.3 out of 10 based on 113 ratings

High electricity prices in Australia blamed for sharp economic slowdown

Electricity prices jumped in July. Now, retail sales are falling as wallets run out of money. When Greens, Labor, Conservatives said we need insurance, only skeptics pointed out the price.

Commonwealth Bank economist, Gareth Aird, calls the fall a “shocker”.

Shoppers stay away as power costs bite

–Adam Creighton, The Australian

In a sign sluggish wages and higher power prices are starting to bite, the new financial year has seen the biggest fall in retail sales since 2009…

The Australian dollar fell back towards US78c yesterday after the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed retail sales had fallen 0.6 per cent between July and August, defying economists’ expectations they would rise modestly.

“Households are facing several headwinds, including record low wage growth, record levels of debt, slowing house price growth, and, importantly, sharply higher energy bills,” said ANZ economist Jo Masters. The drop in retail sales by a cumulative 0.8 percentage points over the two months to August, the biggest two-month decline since 2009, comes as consumers receive their first round of power bills after prices went up more than 20 per cent since July.”

Who would have thought? The country is forced to spend more on green electrons to change the global weather, and that means people have less to spend elsewhere.

Cafe and restaurant owners were hit particularly hard. Survey’s show people “believe” in climate change, but don’t want to spend more money on it. But no surveys ask the questions that matter — How many restaurant meals will you give up in order to cool the world by 0.0001C? Will you give up your sales job to make hurricanes slower (maybe) in ninety years?

The Australian experiment continues.

h/t Dave B

9.5 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Greens, the baseload deniers, want $2.2b for bandaid batteries to keep junk renewables alive

The Greens are now asking for another $2.2billion to pay for the battery bandaid to fix a problem they and the leeching renewables industry created.

Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:

We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.

No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.

We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:

“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”

Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.

What Adam Bandt was trying to say:

“We The freeloading renewables industry needs ~~flexible generation and~~ energy storage to make up for its unreliable supply, to ~~manage~~ keep the frivolous and expensive transition to renewables from collapsing, ~~not more coal.~~

Baseload scares the renewables industry and their lobbyists

It’s the great weakness of intermittent renewables. Solar and wind are in dire need of government funded batteries to stop their inefficient, unreliable, subsidy-dependent industry from evaporating. It’s only by paying more billions to “shift the load curve” that the normal load can be adapted to fit the new intermittent supply.

How much?

Such a system could deliver between 400 and 450-gigawatt hours of storage, which has the potential to power more than 100,000 homes for eight hours.

Or we could save $2b, get the government out of the electricity market, and let someone else spend $2b of their own money building an efficient coal plant that would supply more homes for fifty years at rates much cheaper.

h/t Dave B

9.7 out of 10 based on 130 ratings

Matt Ridley: Never experienced anything like this — the climate debate “blackening”

Matt Ridley is about as gentlemanly, polite and sane a man as you’ve ever likely to meet — which is exactly why the mob are so afraid of letting him speak. Ridley even agrees that humans have caused most of the warming in the last fifty years (I shall have to talk to him about that). But this middle position is a potent threat. He’s walking the very ground that threatens the Green Blob — there are no subsidy trains in middle land. There’s no urgency, no gravy, and yet it’s so temptingly sensible, which is why the minions work hard to silence him. He can’t be ignored as “fringe”:

The National Review — Julie Kelly

“I’ve written about many controversial issues during my career,” Ridley said. “Never, have I ever experienced anything like what happens when you write about climate, which is a systematic and organized attempt to blacken your name rather than your arguments, and to try to pressure any outlet that publishes me into not publishing me any more.” A group of activists and scientists is urging the Times (U.K.) to stop publishing a regular column authored by Ridley because his views often challenge the climate tribe’s reigning dogma. Fortunately, none of this seems to have dampened Ridley’s good humor or self-effacing manner.

In a normal scientific debate, there would be a normal distribution of opinions — with most minds walking the middle ground where Matt is. It’s only tribal politics and rampant bullying that can keep opinions split in a U-shape distribution with most “players” either completely for or completely against an idea. And this is what Ridley is experiencing.

One of those groups must be wrong. Perhaps both. But the U-shape polarized opinion state takes a lot of effort to maintain. There is high-speed-spin, and buckets of money required to centrifuge the minds out of the middle.

Skeptics are not the ones fighting to silence voices.

h/t Climate Depot

9.8 out of 10 based on 114 ratings

Canberra’s “hottest ever” September record due to thermometer changes and a wind profiler

With only a million dollars a day it’s hard for the BoM to keep up with their own stations. Luckily Bill Johnston has arrived to help out for free. The BoM announced that it was Canberra’s hottest ever day last week, but forgot to check whether the heat was due to the site moving three times, changes in thermometers and a wind profiler they installed themselves in 2010.

Normally the BoM would detect and correct for these sorts of things by using Homogenisation Magic (HM). That’s where they spot these effects by comparing a station with surrounding stations. However in this case HM missed all three site moves and the wind profiler. It looks like those might add up to 2.2°C of artificial warming. Nothing to worry about, but the hottest ever record will have to be shredded, and naturally, the BoM will need to issue a correction with at least as much fuss and coverage as the mistaken headlines. It’s only fair…

Canberra airport, Temperatures, graphed, rainfall residuals.

After the effect of rainfall is removed there are at least three site moves, a screen change, equipment change, and alterations to the surrounding area that may influence the site. These step changes align with documented moves and account for most of the warming.

Instead of using Homogenisation Magic, Johnston did things like getting site photos from national archives, and from google as well as using the BoM’s own data. He found out that most things have changed about the Canberra site since 1995. In 1995, not only did the thermometer shift to a new spot, the old liquid-in-glass style was converted to an electronic sensor (and we know they can be more sensitive and responsive to temperature changes). On top of that the screen around the thermometer shrank to about a quarter of its original volume (from 0.23m³ to 0.06m³). In the last ten years, large gravel or concrete pads were built near the sensor as well as a thingummygig called a wind profiler (which is a vertical radar array for detecting atmospheric turbulence).

Johnston uses a change in the relationship between temperature and rainfall to spot the site changes (then confirms them with documentation). If a site moves to a warmer or cooler spot the temperatures will shift up or down but the rainfall won’t. The relationship between rain and temperature will be broken — an effect that shows up during the following years of data. These changes in pattern often occur at the same time as a site change, and Johnston uses the shifting ratio’s to estimate how much effect the site change has.

Johnston has looked at a lot of sites around Australia, and estimates that many modern records wouldn’t be records at all if the BOM bothered to dig out historic photos, maps, and data and took more care to estimate the effect of site changes. The techno magical homogenization tool sounds fancy but allows site problems to be turned into misleading headlines.

— Jo

_____________________________________________________________

Welcome to Canberra airport where it’s always sometimes hotter

A sad day for meteorology but another marketing success story for Australia’s BoM.

Guest post by Dr. Bill Johnston[1]

Main points.

Canberra’s record “hottest ever September day” is a great headline but not remotely real. The BoM forgot to mention thermometers were moved at least three times, each time to a warmer site.
Homogenisation is a complete failure. Canberra temperature appears to follow model projections because homogenisation ignores site changes in 1973, 1997, 2004 and 2010.

Introduction

It’s not fair to expect meteorologists who don’t observe the weather to know much about their data.

However, its reasonable for people in Canberra gouged by ACTEW-AGL’s energy prices to expect Ashleigh Lange from the Bureau of Meteorology to have researched the BoM site at Canberra Airport so she knows what she is talking about when claiming “Canberra records its hottest ever September day” (Canberra Times, 23 September 2017).

It was cold as a toad three days before the record was allegedly “smashed”; people and businesses were forced to turn on the heat, which sent ACTEW-AGL laughing all the way to the bank. Which bank? The ones that won’t support low-cost coal-fired electricity generation of course.

Why is site history important?

Moving a Stevenson screen often results in a permanent change in background heat sources and sinks. For example buildings may shield prevailing winds; a site near a runway is likely warmed by tarmac not the weather. So for places like Canberra airport, where the site moved at least three times (See those details below) its important to know if temperature changes are due to site effects or the climate.

Canberra Airport

Figure 1. The original 1939 Canberra airport Aeradio site was near the hanger (S1) where the office was located. The site moved to S2, probably in 1973; then to an AWS south of the meteorological office at S3 (December 1995); then S4 in December 2008.

Rainfall can be used to help analyze the effect of changes in the site and equipment

Evaporation cools the environment and there is a simple relationship between average Canberra maximum temperature (Tmax) and annual rainfall. Dry years are warm years, and the drier it is, the hotter it gets [Figure 2 (a)]). [It’s not the same for minimums where things are more complicated. A wet year can have slightly warmer nights. Clouds and humidity reduce heat loss by radiation so temperature is warmer in the early morning. (Exposure of the Stevenson screen to down-slope drainage of cool air is also important.) As foggy and cloudy winter days often don’t bring rain in Canberra, relationships between Tmin and rainfall are less clear-cut.]

The variation in Tmax can be split into the portion attributable to rainfall (the component described by the linear regression line [Figure 2 (a)]) and the residual variation, which is the portion not explained by rainfall. The relationship is robust if it is statistically significant and more than 50% of Tmax variation is accounted-for (R²_adj, the coefficient of determination, is greater than 0.50). Although random in the rainfall-domain, Tmax-rainfall residuals may embed a hidden time-signal. As rainfall effects are removed the trajectory of residuals (rescaled by adding grand-mean Tmax) is unaffected by persistent weather effects and is analysed for step-changes using an independent statistical test [Figure 2 (b)].

Residual step-changes show that either the S1-site changed in 1973 (due to works nearby, for example) and it moved to S2 later (about 1975); or the move in the ACORN-SAT catalogue is miss-specified. Many things changed in 1995 [the site moved to S3, an AWS replaced thermometers, and it is likely that a small Stevenson screen (0.06m³) replaced a previous large one (0.23m³)]. In 2005, a vertical radar array for detecting atmospheric turbulence (wind profiler) was installed on a 350 m² gravel or concrete pad 30 m north of the screen and a bitumen car-park replaced a former playing field 25 m east (Figure 3). However, the site didn’t move to S4 until December 2008, afterwards, in 2010, the wind-profiler relocated 40 m north of the S4 screen.

Canberra airport temperature series, moves, sites, step changes, rainfall. Graph.

Figure 2. Tmax depends on rainfall (a); however, due to embedded site changes, variation explained (R²_adj) is only 0.36 or 36%. As the naïve regression (Tmax = 21.91 – 0.34^oC/100 mm) accounts for rainfall; rescaled residual variation (b) is due to non-rainfall factors including site and observer inconsistencies data in-filling etc.; and site changes and relocations. (Out-of-range outliers (o/r; red squares) are excluded from analysis.) Segments defined by step-changes are analysed separately in (c). Except for 2005 to 2016, relationships are significant. Differences in R²_adj reflect both the number of cases and closeness of data to respective regression lines and are not comparable. Dotted lines indicate median rainfall (vertical) and overall average Tmax (horizontal), which provides a visual reference. (A P value of 0.10 is not statistically significant.)

Factored on step-changes, simultaneous analysis[3] shows regressions [individually free-fit in Figure 2 (c)] are parallel; rainfall reduces Tmax 0.33°C/100 mm and 78.8% of Tmax variation is explained (vs. 36% for rainfall alone). Moving the site beside the runways in 1972; then to the AWS and small screen in the vicinity of the new met-office in 1995; then installation of the 2005 wind-profiler array; sealing the car-park; then in December 2008 moving 400 m south along the eastern airport boundary, where a wind-profiler array was installed in 2010 caused data to warm 1.75°C[4] (0.43°C + 0.76°C + 0.56°C [Figure 2 (b)]). With those changes and rainfall accounted-for no Tmax trend remains that is indicative of changes in the climate.

The history of Canberra airport’s moving weather station

Temperature measurements started at Canberra airport in 1939 when Aeradio was set-up to monitor aircraft and advise pilots of inclement weather. In those days planes flew through turbulence not above it like jets do and Aerado ensued aviation safety. Plans at the National Archives of Australia show the Aerado and meteorological offices were in the northwest corner of the original hanger, still standing at RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) Fairbairn. In June 1940 weather observers and radio operators were conscripted to the RAAF and after WWII, in July 1946, air traffic control merged with the Department of Civil Aviation and Weather Bureau staff transferred to Department of the Interior. As technology changed and demand for services increased facilities across Australia were up-graded in the 1950s. Radar was introduced to monitor aerosonde balloons; the busy met-office in the hanger at Canberra airport was provided with forced ventilation in 1954.

The National Library of Australia holds aerial photographs from 1956 and 1960 that show a meteorological enclosure between the north-south runway and the hanger (at about Latitude ‑35.3049, Longitude 149.2014) (S1 in Figure 1). The 2012 ACORN-SAT[2] catalogue states vaguely that the “original site (070014) was on the eastern side of the airport”; and “there are indications … of a possible move in about 1975”. The Canberra Aero Comparison (70228) (December 1995 to 1997) site summary locates the second site (S2) in the centre of the airport near intersection of the N-S and E-W runways (Lat. -35.3083, Lon. 149.1936). The site moved 800 m northeast to an automatic weather station (AWS) in December 1995 (S3); then 400 m south in December 2008 (S4). Canberra Airport Comparison (70014) metadata doesn’t mention either of the two earlier sites so perhaps the Bureau doesn’t really know what happened.

Discussion and conclusions

Daily temperature fluctuates around average site temperature. For September, average S1 Tmax from 1939 to 1972 is 15.8°C; from 1973 to 1996 (S2) it is 16.0°C; from 1997 to 2004 (S3), 17.3°C and at the current S4 site it is 18.0°C. Due to site changes and moves which have nothing to do with the climate, average September Tmax has shifted-up by 2.2°C!

World’s worst-practice compounds multiple site and instrument changes. Although the 1973 S2 site operated in parallel with S3 until December 1997; reply to an FOI request confirmed that data for thermometers observed in parallel with the AWS until March 2010 at S3 (which would enable the change to the AWS/small screen to be cross-referenced using the same instrument) are not available. Internal Bureau policy directed that manually observed data were discarded without being databased and that paper records were destroyed. In the absence of comparative data statistical inference and interpretation of site factors (Figure 3) is the only evidence that the heat signature of the MO-site (S3) is different to the runway (S2) site.

…		Canberra
Figure 3. Google Earth satellite images of the Stevenson screen (sc) and meteorological office (mo) at S3 beside a sports oval on 11 March 2004 (left); and with the wind profiler array (wp) and sealed car-park on 31 March 2008 (the site did not relocate until December 2008).

Homogenisation makes no Tmax adjustment despite the weather station moving three times to situations whose background heat signatures are different; and changes such as to the AWS and small Stevenson screen in 1995, which is documented; and installation of wind profiler arrays in the vicinity in 2005. Bureau meteorologist Ashleigh Lange who claimed 30.2°C on Saturday 23 September “smashed a 52-year record” and was the “hottest ever September day” may not have visited the site, analysed any data and may not know that Tmax is affected by background warming independent of the climate. Even if it’s an above-average anomaly, inflated by site factors it is not a valid 52-year record.

Homogenisation provably does not improve site records. Choosing not to adjust for site and instrument changes in 1973, 1997, 2004 and 2010 causes Canberra data to warm like the models claim it should. Although Canberra airport data are not used directly to calculate Australia’s warming, Bureau meteorologists use the site to stir alarm about the climate.

Furthermore, airport data spread their faults far and wide: to ACORN-SAT sites at Bathurst Agricultural Research Station (63005), Dubbo airport AWS (65070), Moruya Pilot Station (69018) and Nowra RAN (68072). Data for those, adjust others, including Sydney Observatory, whose numerous faults find their way to Alice Springs (via. Tibooburra). Homogenisation of faulty ACORN-SAT site data using other data that are faulty is flawed. Instead of being recycled into yet another version, ACORN-SAT should simply be abandoned.

Bureau marketing of record-heat that doesn’t exist is the reason for the RET; the rivers-of-cash ACTEW-AGL takes from the Canberra community and the ACT Labor-Greens government’s hard left-turn to consumer-subsidised unreliable “renewables”.

Trends don’t exist; the cost is too high; people are hurting and losing their jobs. An open public inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology and its dodgy homogenisation methods is long-overdue. In the meantime, the Bureau should cease making claims about record temperatures, which like at Canberra are provably false.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 79 ratings

Renewable energy pollutes London but what’s a bit of smog if you’re saving the world?

Managing the global climate is a tough thing. Sacrifices are required.

The last 100 years has been a success story of cleaner air in London. But air pollution is on the rise again. The fear of carbon is partly responsible for over a million people returning to burning “renewable wood” instead of clean gas and turning around a century long trend. Welcome to the “progressive” 21st century. Too bad about about the dusty lungs and razed trees.

As much as a third of small particle pollution is due to wood fires.

Wood-burning stoves are increasingly popular in middle-class homes and hotels, with 1.5 million across Britain and 200,000 sold annually. Old fireplaces have also been opened up in many houses and can cause greater pollution than stoves. Wood burning is most popular in the southeast, where it is done in 16 per cent of households compared with less than 5 per cent in northern England and Scotland.

Between a quarter and a third of all fine particle pollution in London comes from domestic wood burning. During a period of very high air pollution in January, it contributed half the toxic emissions in some areas of the city, King’s College London found.

It is alleged that air pollution causes “9,500 early deaths a year in London and 40,000 across Britain”.

h/t GWPF

The GWPF issued a press release earlier this year saying Government Support For Wood-Burning Partly To Blame For Rising Smog Threat

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9.7 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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9.1 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Scientists surprised that reef that survived the hotter holocene is already recovering from 2016 bleaching

Coral, eggs, recovery. Photo AIMS, Neal Cantin.

Coral which has produced eggs near Fitzroy Island. Photo AIMS, Neal Cantin.

The ABC reports today that the Great Barrier Reef is recovering “surprisingly” fast.

Optimism is rising among scientists that parts of the Great Barrier Reef that were severely bleached over the past two years are making a recovery.

Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science this month surveyed 14 coral reefs between Cairns and Townsville to see how they fared after being bleached.

The institute’s Neil Cantin said they were surprised to find the coral had already started to reproduce.

Who would have thought that after 5,000 years of climate change, sea level change, temperature change and super-storms every 200 years — that the Great Barrier Reef would have something left up its sleeve?

Much of the ABC reporting on the Great Barrier Reef damage uses vague terms. If I was feeling cruel, I might call them “weasel words”:

Nearly two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by bleaching in 2016 and 2017, killing up to 50 per cent of coral in those parts.

So which parts are “those parts”? Did 50% of the corals die in two-thirds of the reef? Or has two thirds of the reef been affected by a small amount of bleaching while a much smaller number of reefs were hit by the apocalyptic 50% death-rate? There must be a better way to describe the damage. As it is, it is a number mush. (If only the ABC had a dedicated science unit they would be able to make sense of difficult concepts like this.) 😉

“What it means is the corals along the entire Great Barrier Reef, are survivors that are going to reproduce earlier than expected which could help drive quicker recovery if we don’t see another heat stress this summer,” he said.

“This is a positive news story for a change for the Great Barrier Reef. We’re seeing eggs and we hope those eggs will lead to somewhat of a successful spawning season this summer.”

When climate-sameness would be remarkable…

The Barrier Reef survived the Holocene peak for hundreds of years, so we might assume that the reef has ways to deal with hotter conditions and changing temperatures. Sea levels in Queensland were 1 – 2 meters higher 5,000 years ago. (Lewis 2012) Super cyclones have been hitting the coast of Queensland for the last 5,000 years and there is no sign that storms are getting worse. (see Nott 2001 and Hayne 2001.)

Corals have survived warmer periods and worse storms

Globally it was hotter 5,000 years ago, and sea levels were a lot higher in Queensland:

Sea Levels, Queensland, Holocene. Lewis et al 2012.

Sea Levels have been falling for 4,000 years in Queensland during the Holocene. Lewis et al 2012.

From a post in 2012 on 5000 year trends in storms in Australia:

Nott and Hayne studied a 5000 year history of super-cyclones along a 1500 km stretch of North East Australia and concluded that the big nasty ones hit roughly every 200-300 years in all parts of the coastline from 13° – 24°S.

Storm damage, GBR, Great Barrier Reef, paleohistory, graph.

Fig 6: Progradation plot: normalized distances of each dated Storm Deposit from the oldest ridge crest versus the age difference between each storm deposit and the oldest ridge.

Hayne and Chappell (2001) looked at deposits left from storm surges on Curacoa Island (one of the Palm Islands of far north Queensland). They found that large cyclones have been hitting the coast at a statistically constant rate for 5000 years. This includes the earliest times when the sea surface temperature appear to have been about 1°C warmer (Gagan et al 1998). At Palm Island, sea levels were apparently 70cm higher back in that warm Holocene era (Chappell et al 1983). Somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived.

h/t Dave B. Pat.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef,
At times may get bleached, but its brief,
And for eons survived,
More than bleaching and thrived,
Which must cause alarmists some grief.

–Ruairi

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9.7 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Some South Australian farmers going fully diesel for electricity

Diesel generator. Coupole d'Helfaut in 1944,

Maybe they’ll get one like this one? 😉 Circa 1934.*

Green management of the South Australian grid scores another big success for the environment:

SURGING power prices are pushing South Australian dairy farmers such as James and Robyn Mann to go off-grid.

The Manns’ electricity costs have more than doubled in five years, from about $200,000 per annum to $500,000.

Due to the high prices, the family will this summer switch to diesel power to run their 116-stand rotary dairy and 14 irrigation centre pivots at Wye in the lower south east of South Australia.

The Manns are among Australia’s top 10 dairy producers, in terms of volume, milking up to 2300 cows and producing 19-21 million litres annually.

If only South Australia had more “cheap” solar and wind power, their electricity might be as low cost as the coal-fired Victorians:

Their move comes as South Australia’s dairy lobby has calculated the state’s dairy farmers paid about 40 per cent more for power than their Victorian neighbours last season.

The Mann’s are definitely going diesel this summer, but may set up a mixed solar-diesel-battery plan in the long run:

“Its embryonic, but information we have is saying we could get a payback within five years of (setting up a system on-farm) not connected to the grid, a combination of solar, diesel and batteries.

Imagine how expensive your electricity has to be for a small diesel generator to be cheaper than mass produced coal power? This could be the first time in 130 years that people connected to coal turbines switch off to use their own small fossil fueled generators because it’s cheaper.

Another world first for South Australia. And possibly a mark of the grid saturation point of intermittent renewables.

h/t Keith S

*Electric generator ( diesel engine and alternator ) installed in the underground worksite of the Coupole d’Helfaut in 1944. Photo Vassil

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9.6 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

Real sea level rise: a lost continent called Zealandia submerged

File this under Nasty Nature. This is the sort of thing planet Earth throws at life.

The is real “sea level rise” — where most of a continent (called Zealandia) sinks under the waves — and — as far as we know, though I could be wrong — fossil fuel use was minimal circa 50 -80 million years ago. Can Exxon be blamed?

New Zealanders may be feeling a bit cheesed that they carelessly lost something like 80% of their land. (Call that “Old Zealand” which was once as big as India.) Given that it is one kilometer underwater, it looks like it isn’t coming back soon. But think of all the national parks, reefs, etc that were destroyed?

Map, Zealandia, continent, submerged, sea level rise, climate change, Pacific.

Zealandia. | Credit: IODP

The story is that the Pacific Rim of Fire “buckled” 40-50 million years ago, and Zealandia sunk a lot deeper. There is a suggestion that it was originally submerged about 80 million years ago (or so), when this renegade land split from Australia and Antarctica.

Since 1,000 tide gauges estimate current sea level rise at around 1 mm a year, real climate change puts the current panic about sea levels into perspective. Even the next ice age, with a 125m sea level drop, is not going to uncover all this lost real-estate.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 63 ratings

Canberra man uses subsidies, “invests” $20,000, still pays $700pa in electricity. Hopes to break even in 14 years.

A fairly crappy investment in every sense — even as a “subsidy farmer”:

…renewable energy proponents say individual consumers like Mr Pulford could play an increasingly important role as citizen investors.

“I say it is a little bit gold plated,” Mr Pulford says of his $20,000 investment.

‘The new system was installed last month and he is already generating enough power to run all his home energy needs, charge his son’s hybrid SUV and sell excess back to the grid. “It ranges between $2 to about $1.90 a day for energy and that can be with the clothes dryers and bar heaters on.”

Mr Pulford said he expects to pay off the investment within 14 years.

He’s excited that his electricity bill is only $700 a year, after laying out twenty grand. After 14 years his “investment” will start to pay off, assuming the batteries are still running, the solar panels are clean, and the inverter didn’t need replacing. Those battery warranties, at best, are ten years. He might get lucky. Without subsidies, his “pay-back time” would be something like 30% longer.

In the ACT, 250 homes with Reposit technology are generating up to 1.2 megawatts, which is dwarfed by territory-wide consumption.

Reposit power gets a free advertisement from the ABC, but the ABC don’t mention that when it is forecast to be cloudy, the software Reposit uses is designed to charge the battery direct from the grid (and that will be mostly coal-fired). That way “solar users” get electricity at off peak prices and they can sell back the electricity at higher peak rates. This will help the grid deal with the intermittency of solar and wind, a problem the grid didn’t need to have.

The ACT has pledged to be 100% renewable by 2025. I say “bring it on” but they’ll only be 100% renewable when they cut the interconnectors.

Glorious solar subsidies

The ACT Government has released a third round of funding to accelerate solar battery storage and the $4 million includes subsidies for batteries with Reposit control boxes.

Mr Pulford agreed.

“We can’t continue to use fossil fuels for our energy because the future generation will pay the price,” he said.

It’s not the future generation who will pay, it’s people poorer than Mr Pulford who are already paying for the subsidy. He rationalizes his burden on the system with the superstitious belief that having solar panels on the roof will somehow make life nicer for future generations.

I’m sure he is a nice guy, but when it comes to accepting money from taxpayers, half the population is happy not-to-look-too-hard.

Isn’t it time we taught kids where taxpayer money comes from?

Solar subsidies for a 6kW system are round $3,500:

The lowest value STCs have held is $16, while their cap price is $40. Using the median price of $28 as a guide, the “rebate” you would receive for the 6.48 kW system described earlier is approximately 125 x 28 = $3500, which represents 30 to 40% of the price of a good quality system. Real-time STC market prices can be found online.

The subsidies were $1,000 bigger before July 20th 2017.

Choice Magazine looked at solar “payback times” and estimated it took 14 – 24 years.

h/t Dave B.

9.7 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Within 5 minutes a wave of hot water systems switch on in SA adding 250MW of demand to the grid

We are creatures of habit. Look at the spike caused at 11:32pm as something like 27,000 hot water tanks in South Australia suddenly switch on to use cheaper off-peak electricity. This spike is entirely due to pricing plans. It’s entirely avoidable too, but at least it’s predictable. “Scheduled”.

This peak, allegedly, is only a problem if SA is “islanded” — meaning if it can’t rely on the coal generators in Victoria.

Yesterday people were asking why the South Australian demand was peaking at 1am (and why two hours were strangely missing from that graph). “Hot water” is the answer (at least to the first part).

SA Hot water systems add sudden 250MW of demand at 11:30pm. Graph.

This graph comes from the AEMO report in Feb 2016. What follows is their electro-nitty-gritty:

Based on previous experience, and as demonstrated in a separation event on 1 November 2015, maintaining the SA power system in a secure operating state is challenging if there are large changes to the supply-demand balance during a period of islanding.

There is a risk of automatic under frequency load shedding if SA is being operated as an island during the hot water demand peak, which occurs at 11:30 pm daily.

Hot water demand peak
Currently the most concerning of these challenges is the hot water demand peak that occurs at 11:30 pm daily. This is a step change increase in demand of approximately 250 MW, shown in Figure 3. This demand peak is controlled by fixed timers and requires considerable effort to reduce the peak through the adjustment of the time clocks at individual premises. While all new meters installed in SA will have randomised time clocks, all existing meters are set to switch at 11:30 pm.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Rooftop solar destroying baseload profitability and proud of it

What other heavily subsidized industry brags about its ability to provide a product for one quarter of the time it’s needed? Vale sunny-day-solar!

Pick a day, an hour, and what are the chances solar will be there for you? A lot less than one in four, because last Monday’s peak in South Australia was an all time record. Every day in the last year was worse.

And so much for cheap… the price when solar power peaked was still close to $50/MWh. Compare that to most of the years of the national electricity market operating when average prices were $30/Mwh.

The price dip at 6am (the black-line bottomless gully), has nothing to do with solar, but was caused by wind power. Far from being useful, essential, or productive, solar and wind power are playing havoc with a normal market, destroying the chance for cheap, reliable energy to find a place. As long as we force the market to accept this non-dispatchable supply, we are actively punishing reliable power. What investor in reliable energy would look at this and head to South Australia?”

SA-Sept17-rrp copy

Giles Parkinson was excited at Reneweconomy: Rooftop solar provides 48% of South Australia power, pushing grid demand to a record low.

South Australia’s level of minimum demand hit a new record low this weekend – barely a week after the previous benchmark was set – with a fall to just 587MW on Sunday afternoon.

We can see what a wild spike this particular lunchtime peak was:

The record eclipsed the previous mark by nearly 200MW – with AEMO data showing minimum demand at 1.30pm of exactly 587.8MW, compared with the previous low mark of 786.42MW posted last Sunday. (See graph above courtesy of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College).

That is a phenomenal share of 47.8 per cent of the state’s electricity demand being met by rooftop solar (compares with 36 per cent in the previous record last week) and is clearly a record for South Australia, and for that matter in any large grid anywhere in the world.

Parkinson seems to think a slight dip in exorbitantly high prices is a good thing?

The impact of rooftop solar is being felt in prices – look at the black line that shows prices fall as rooftop solar accounts for a sizeable share of demand during the day.

Yes, let’s look at the black-line price “dip” (but don’t compare it with the long term price for electricity when renewables were a smaller part of the grid.)

The South Australians are in deep:

South Australia is the first region where rooftop solar PV has caused a shift in minimum demand from night time to the middle of the day (most states still have electric hot water being switched on at night, when it would make sense to use the “solar sponge” as Queensland has suggested).

We could reprogram all the hot water heaters to automatically switch on in the middle of the day. Bravo. When it’s not so record-breaking-sunny (which is nearly every other day), we’ll a/ pay more for hot water, or b/ have cold showers? We could use the hot water tanks to store solar energy — but isn’t that what we make solar-hot-water-heaters for, and aren’t they more efficient at it? Why not heat the water direct instead of using PV cells to generate electricity, then use the electricity to heat the water? Is this the big advance Parkinson is excited about?

How “good” is a market price of minus $44?

Note, also, the negative price of minus $44/MWh at 6am when there was abundant wind and a constraint on the connector with Victoria.

The sign of a screwed market. Let me build a plant and pay you to take my electricity…. How does that work as a ~~free market~~, nay, socialist plan — just fine. Would you like nationalized coal with that? The only company that can afford to run the cheapest generator in the market is one with shareholders who are forced to pay and never ask for a dividend.

It also questions the need for old fashioned concepts such as “baseload”, which would struggle to find a niche in a market dominated by wind and solar, where mostly “dispatchable” and flexible generation is needed to fill in the gaps. Wind energy is already producing more than 100 per cent of local demand at certain times.

Baseload is old fashioned in the same sense that cooking dinner at 6-9pm is. Ninety nine percent of Australia is still living the baseload dream.

PS: There are still subsidies for Solar Hot water systems in Australia, and according to wiki, even after the subsidy it takes nearly 7 years to “pay back” the solar hot water system even in the sunniest country on Earth. (See “costs”.)

9.8 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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9.8 out of 10 based on 32 ratings

Poor BOM: Dangerous deniers, amateurs, attacking Australian Bureau of Meteorology, debilitating it by asking questions.

Excellent news. Obviously we are getting to the BoM.

This week, Jen Marohasy and I were mentioned by Maurice Newman in The Australian.“Smoking Gun demands Grilling for the BoM”. In response, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has unleashed a double dummy-popping effort in The Guardian.

The BoM could have answered the questions in The Australian, of course, but it’s so much easier to whine, bluster, raise the conspiracy flag and avoid the questions that matter at the-ask-no-hard-questions-Guardian.

Bureau of Meteorology attacks pushed by ‘fever swamp’ of climate denial

Graham Readfearn

Former weather bureau chief says agency debilitated by climate deniers’ attacks

Michael Slezak

It really is an extraordinary rant as the former head of the BoM admits skeptics are “debilitating” the BoM with these “attacks”. The Guardian is so starved of real news, it runs the one-sided name-calling excuses and another separate story discusses it as if it was actually news. While The Australian asks the BoM for a reply and would publish it, The Guardian didn’t ask a skeptic. One of these newspapers acts like a newspaper…

How debilitating are we skeptics? Jennifer Marohasy tells me she sent the BoM questions in 2015, but hasn’t heard back yet. It doesn’t take much to debilitate the million-dollar-a-day agency. Ask a few questions and cripple them for years…

Obviously, the BoM have stopped trying to answer Marohasy, but now they also say they won’t answer our national masthead newspaper either. That’s another scandal to add to the list.

Maybe Rob Vertussy is still hurting from the time I said that Maurice Newman knew more about climate models than he did.

Vertessy spent a decade at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. He retired in April 2016 after five years as the agency’s director.

Over that time, Vertessy’s agency was under consistent attack from climate science denialists who would claim, often through the news and opinion pages of the Australian, that the weather bureau was deliberately manipulating its climate records to make recent warming seem worse than it really was.

When the Bureau makes mistakes, this is how it thanks the volunteers who want to improve the national data:

Vertessy said these sorts of attacks were dangerous. “From my perspective, people like this, running interference on the national weather agency, are unproductive and it’s actually dangerous,” Vertessy told me. “Every minute a BoM executive spends on this nonsense is a minute lost to managing risk and protecting the community. It is a real problem.”

It’s all a wicked conspiracy:

Now, the agency is under another wave of attack through the pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadsheet, which is publishing claims made by Jennifer Marohasy, of the “free market” conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs.

The recent spate of trouble for the BoM started when Lance Pidgeon and Jen Marohasy caught the BoM artificially clipping the coldest temperatures from Goulburn and Thredbo. The BoM then took weeks to do an internal review and finally answer that it was — through incredible coincidence — only these two stations, and it didn’t matter (even though it had been going on for years). The BoM admitted the hardware was clipping temps at minus 10.4, but still hasn’t explained why that was then altered to minus ten, which made the original “accidental” clipping problem worse. Maurice Newman not only mentioned this issue, but also discussed the far more serious matters of data being deliberately deleted and one-second-noise was being written into our record books. These are radioactive hot potatoes that the BoM won’t even touch:

Science writer and blogger Joanne Nova has raised scandal after scandal concerning the BOM’s record-keeping.

She refers to historic data being destroyed, and the influence of adjustments on Australia’s warming trend. She reports private auditors advising the bureau of almost a “thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes”.

When Australia’s bureau transitioned from mercury thermometers to electronic sensors more than 20 years ago, to ensure readings from these devices were comparable with the old thermometers and complied with World Meteorological Organisation guidelines, parallel studies were undertaken at multiple sites….

A key conclusion was that readings from the new electronic sensors needed to be averaged over one to 10 minutes. However, rather than implement practices consistent with their finding, the bureau records one-second extremes (or noise), which can be announced as new record highs

Vertussy answers these criticisms of missing data, inexplicable adjustments, using sub-standard noise, and terrible quality-control with nothing but hand-waving bluster. Essentially: don’t be mean, how dare you ask! We’re Experts and you are lowly scum.

So when a shock jock or a thinktank employee claims the bureau is trying to cook the books, how should the public react?

What needs to be front of mind, Vertessy says, is that there is “virtually complete consensus on the extent to which the planet has warmed and why, since the beginning of the industrial revolution”.

“The facts are just unequivocal because they have been replicated so many times, by so many teams, using multiple independent methods.”

He says if the bureau “was really making a hash of managing its climate data” then it would be documented in scientific “journals and at symposia” but “that’s clearly not happening”.

He says it “beggars belief” that these commentators “actually profess to know better”.

Obviously, if he hadn’t deleted all the data he wouldn’t need to over-react.

Vertussy continues spinning wild claims and dodging the real questions:

“Time and time again there has been one independent review by experts after another, all telling the same story. The simple, unimpeachable facts are that the BoM is doing an exemplary job at managing the nation’s climate data and multiple independent reviews have confirmed that and we are recognised by our World Meteorological Organisation peers as being amongst the best in the world; that keeps being restated and restated.

“I think the Australian play on very dangerous ground here,” he says, adding that some editors at the newspaper were guilty of “perpetuating nonsense”.

The truth is the BOM will do anything they can to avoid any independent review. Vertussy only provides one example of a so-called independent review, but that one day wonder used hand-picked people who avoided looking at the points the skeptics raised. It wasn’t independent, and it isn’t relevant, and there are no better examples because there are no independent reviews. The Guardian swallows these fantasy answers 100%. What’s the difference between The Guardian and a PR agency? A PR guys are more honest. They don’t pretend to be journalists.

Graham Readfearn launches into full strawman agitprop:

The current non-story centres on two of the bureau’s 695 automatic weather stations (AWS). As temperatures reached -10.4C in Thredbo and Goulburn in July, a hardware card in the AWS stopped working. This event, detected by the bureau, kick-started several internal quality control processes.

The bureau found four other hardware cards in areas where things can get chilly and replaced them. The cards should not have been used, as they could become faulty at low temperatures.

That’s essentially it.

“No. That’s essentially lying by omission” says Jo Nova. The Guardian is hiding all the real problems from their readers.

Here come the conspiracy theories again:

But the Australian and the IPA and the network of climate science denial blogs have once again screamed scandal.

What network? Our secret networks are called “bigpond” and “gmail”.

Vertussy even resorts to vague threats:

“But, as the costs of climate change accumulate in the years ahead, I can see that leaders of this climate change denial movement will really be seen as culpable.”

Culpable indeed. As volunteer amateurs we are only guilty of asking questions the BoM doesn’t want to answer.

Graham Lloyd, and The Australian deserve great praise. If they didn’t ask the hard questions and report both sides of the story, who would?

UPDATE: See Jennifer Marohasy’s question for the BOM below from 2015 that they won’t reply too.

_____________________________________

THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal

BOM Scandal: One second records in Australia — how “noise” creates history and a warming trend
Another BOM scandal: Australian climate data is being destroyed as routine practice
BOM scandal: “smart cards” filter out coldest temperatures. Full audit needed ASAP!
BOM scandal heats up: Kininmonth, Watts, Nova quoted in The Australian “We audit banks, why not BOM?”

Scandal: Australian Bureau of Meteorology caught erasing cold temperatures
On Sunday, Goulburn got colder than the BOM thought was possible (and a raw data record was “adjusted”).
Two-thirds of Australias warming due to “adjustments” — according to 84 historic stations
The mysterious BOM disinterest in hot historic Australian Stevenson screen temperatures
The lost climate knowledge of Deacon 1952: hot dry summers from 1880-1910
1953 Headline: Melbourne’s weather is changing! Summers getting colder and wetter
The mysterious lost hot Sunday in Bourke, did it really happen?
Wow, look at those BOM adjustments – trends up by two degrees C!
Australian BOM “neutral” adjustments increase minima trends up 50%
Was the Hottest Day Ever in Australia not in a desert, but in far south Albany?!
Hottest summer record in Australia? Not so, says UAH satellite data
Mystery black-box method used to make *all new* Australian “hottest” ever records
BOMs new data set, ACORN, so bad it should be withdrawn (954 min temps larger than the max!)
Threat of ANAO Audit means Australia’s BOM throws out temperature set, starts again, gets same results
Australian Temperatures in cities adjusted up by 70%!?
NEW (this post) The BOM calls critics names, wails, and says it won’t answer questions from The Australian any longer.

9.5 out of 10 based on 114 ratings

Advert in The Australian describes what real climate change looks like

An advert today describes the real climate change we should afraid of, discusses how past CO2 levels did not cause dangerous global warming, and extra CO2 has a smaller and smaller effect, then connects failed climate models with rising electricity bills.

Click to enlarge.

The text….

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9.3 out of 10 based on 155 ratings

Recent Posts

What a fantastic line-up of speakers at the One Nation, Cost of Living Summit on Friday 13th October, 9.30-4pm.

Finally the gloves are off

The 2017 Annual GWPF Lecture: DARING TO DOUBT

What exactly did Abbott destroy?

Tony Abbott says climate change action is like trying to ‘appease the volcano gods’ (ABC)

Tony Abbott’s climate change claims just don’t stack up (ABC again)

More Info:

This is not over yet:

Bluff meet reality:

How does Finkel justify more subsidies in a cost competitive industry?

THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal Keep reading →

Baseload scares the renewables industry and their lobbyists

How much?

Welcome to Canberra airport where it’s always sometimes hotter

Main points.

Rainfall can be used to help analyze the effect of changes in the site and equipment

The history of Canberra airport’s moving weather station

Discussion and conclusions

Managing the global climate is a tough thing. Sacrifices are required.

The GWPF issued a press release earlier this year saying Government Support For Wood-Burning Partly To Blame For Rising Smog Threat Keep reading →

The ABC reports today that the Great Barrier Reef is recovering “surprisingly” fast.

When climate-sameness would be remarkable…

Corals have survived warmer periods and worse storms

Glorious solar subsidies

Solar subsidies for a 6kW system are round $3,500:

THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal

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THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal

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The GWPF issued a press release earlier this year saying Government Support For Wood-Burning Partly To Blame For Rising Smog Threat

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