Who knew? The Australian Bureau of Met just made last summer hotter, and history colder (again)

The cheapest way to prevent man-made global warming is stop the BOM altering the data

First the BoM had “high quality” data. Then, with fanfare, after we asked for an audit they had the miracle of ACORN circa 2011. Then early this year ACORN 2.0 was quietly birthed with major adjustments as expert data became “more expert” but the BOM strangely didn’t want to mention that what was so good is now even better (apparently). The unofficial BOM audit team — especially Bob Fernley-Jones and Chris Gillham — have unearthed just how large the latest rewrite of history is. These men are truly independent, they have no funding, and nothing to gain either way. Please thank them for their unpaid dedication.

In this brazen latest round, even the summer of 2018 just got warmer. After all the headlines, after it was measured on supposedly modern first class equipment, even data just 18 months old is being re-fiddled. The temperatures read out on the news in January 2018? Nevermind what they said then. Those hottest ever records then were even hotter than the BoM thought, thanks to amazing new discoveries that the BOM doesn’t think are important enough to issue as […]

Maitland SA: Another expert thermometer site — and with incinerator “forcing”

Some days in Maitland are hotter than others.

The very non-compliant Maitland, SA, thermometer site #022008 | Imagery ©2019 Google, Oct 2014.

Thanks to Ken Stewart, the tour through the Great sites of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology continues.

Once again, the experts have carefully graphed, diagrammed, checked and ignored all the things that shouldn’t be within 30 meters of a thermometer. See Maitland Site Info. That fence is described as “Galvanised iron”. The ground is bitumen. The incinerator is labeled “incinerator”. And there are two tanks just out of view to the right, not to mention the tin sheds, trees, buildings and wind breaks.

In 1967 the site only had two tin sheds within a 30 meter radius, which was still not compliant, but vastly cooler than present. The incinerator is about 6 or 7 meters from the Stevenson Screen, and only appears on the maps in 2014.

As Ken says “the site is a heat sink”. It’s not an official “ACORN” star site, but records here get mentions in the media. Worse, Maitland is one of the sites used to adjust official ACORN data in Adelaide, Cape Borda, Ceduna, Kyancutta, Port Lincoln, and Snowtown.

Ken has also […]

Mt Barker — How not to measure the temperature

Thanks to Bill in Oz who sent in this photo of the Mt Barker site in South Australia.

Ken Stewart at Ken’s Kingdom writes: The Wacky World of Weather Stations: No. 1- Mount Barker

Photo: Bill in Oz.

Count the ways this site breaches the Bureau of Meteorology own rules:

Ken Stewart finds the relevant BoM guidelines. Clearly this site is on a slope, too close to buildings, too close to tall foliage, too close to heat sinks, it should not be artificially watered, or near asphalt. It should have a 30 meter buffer zone, and not be shielded from the sun, rain or wind. BillinOz points out that it is totally screened from the southerly cold winds, and the cold air will be drained from the spot down the slope.

How much do the Bureau of Meteorology care about climate change? — About 1m out of 30m or 3% of their advertised “care” factor. That’s a a 97% Junk-Science rate. The future of life on Earth is supposedly at stake and the “experts” can’t even be bothered accurately measuring the climate change they tell us we need to pay billions of dollars to solve.

Could it be […]

Earliest recorded snow event in Western Australian history

Remember when climate modelers told us fossil fuels cause longer snow seasons?

No neither do I.

Albany, snowboarding, earliest snow, WA, 2019. | ABC Facebook

It is the earliest recorded snow event in a calendar year in the state’s history. Statistically, we can tell how anomalous this is by the behaviour of the local wildlife – seen snowboarding in shorts on the driveway in Albany. (Even going across the road). It’s possible this is the longest snowboard ride in the state’s history too. Though technically it is hail-boarding.

See snowboarding in Albany Western Australia

For foreign readers, WA (Western Aust) doesn’t have a snow season. Last regular snow was probably circa 20,000BC.

The ABC reports:

BOM forecaster Matt Boterhoven said snow was an extremely rare occurrence in April.

“It’s exceptional. We’ve only recorded once, in the last 100 years, snow as early as this on top of the Stirling Ranges,” he said.

“It’s related to a very strong cold air mass moving over the south-west of the state, so when conditions get below freezing and there’s precipitation, snow can form on top of Stirling Ranges.”

Mr Boterhoven predicted further […]

History keeps getting colder — ACORN2 raises Australia’s warming rate by over 20%

More warming adjustments from ACORN2

Once again we find that the oldest thermometers were apparently reading artificially high even though many were newish in 1910 and placed in approved Stevenson screens.) This is also despite the additional urban warming effect of a population that grew 400% since then. What are the odds?!

Fortunately, gifted craftsmen, sorry scientists have uncovered the true readings from the old biased thermometers which they explain carefully in a 67 page impenetrable document.

Chris Gillham has soldiered through the new “ACORN 2” adjustments that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has o-so-quietly released and Australians are just waking up to find that our coldest mornings back in 1910 were even colder than anyone realized at the time. Graham Lloyd is reporting in The Australian how the second rewrite in six years increases the warming by 23% . (Where was the ABC announcement?)

The ACORN series of the Bureau of Meteorology includes 112 stations. Their report lists the warming trends per decade in Table 9. I converted that into the total warming since 1910 and graphed that below.

About one third of the warming of our mean temperature is due to man-made adjustments

Comparing AWAP (semi-raw) to the […]

Climate change is real because we are snowflake couch potatoes, addicted to netflix and airconditioners

Welcome to the DroneAge, where people act like robots and share dumb ideas at light speed! Episode #601: Climate change makes you lonely and fat.

Feeling friendless, floppy and like a loser? It’s not your fault. Blame a coal plant. Blame Exxon. Blame anyone but yourself. It’s your bad luck to be born into the most bountiful, benevolent era in human history. Damn!

Lonely, unfit and hooked on air-conditioning – is this the summer of the future?

Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald, uses new unorthodox indicators of “climate change”. Wait for it… test cricket attendance? It’s a smorgasbord of nonsense:

In Perth, cricket fans avoided an historic Test fixture amid predictions of 38-degree days. Sun melted a coastal highway filled with holidaymakers in northern NSW. Victoria’s coal generators shut down. Tasmania burned. And rotting fish corpses lining the Darling River at Menindee forced anglers to seriously rethink their plans.

Are we kidding? Thirty-eight degrees is just a summer’s day in Perth. It’s something that happens 19 years out of 20. As for coal generators shutting down: we’ve spent 20 years trying to drive them out of business to stop climate change, and now, if they don’t work, that […]

Forgotten history: 50 degrees everywhere, right across Australia in the 1800s

Don’t believe your lying eyes — Australian newspaper archives are full of temperatures recorded higher than 121 in the shade which is 50C. All of these temperatures in the map below are found in historic newspaper archives. Measurements done after 1910 are even done with official Stevenson screens, yet the BOM “throws them away”. It’s true that ones done in the 1800s are often recorded on non-standard equipment, or are just literally “in the shade” under cover. So some of these, perhaps many, are one or two degrees too high. But even if we take two degrees off, how scary is global warming when Australia knew many days of 48C and 49C and some at 50C 120 years ago? The BOM — supposedly so concerned about the State of Our Climate — show little interest in talking about our history or in analyzing it, or even mentioning it.

And modern temperatures are recorded on electronic equipment, sometimes in areas affected by urban heat islands (concrete and cars).

(click to enlarge)

50C temperatures have occurred all over Australia before

Australians have been recording temperatures of over 50C since 1828, right across the country. In 1896 the […]

Forget Marble Bar, Oodnadatta, doesn’t the BOM know the hottest day ever was in Albany?

It’s summer, so the BoM and ABC can’t help themselves.

Albany, Hottest Town in Australia

Last week Marble Bar “hit an all time record”. This week, it’s Alice Springs. But the Australian BOM still haven’t used their own fabulous World Class ACORN Temperature data to find the hottest day ever in Australia. They’re still telling people it was in Oodnadatta, on Jan 2nd in 1960, but even dumb deniers know that according to ACORN temperatures hit 51.2C in Albany in far south WA in 1933.

[Marble Bar Dec 28th, 2018] The high temperature occurred at 12:39 pm local time. At that stage, it appeared Marble Bar could crack 50 for the first time — and perhaps even threaten the all-time Australian record of 50.7 in Oodnadatta, South Australia.

Chris Gillham pointed this out the strange anomaly of the cool coastal town that was hotter than a million square kilometers of desert, but four years later the BOM still haven’t resolved the situation. The 51.2C temperature is still there in the data, but the Top Ten Highest Temperature Records remain exactly the same. Is Albany, or is it not, the true record holder? Or is it that the […]

Mystery solved: Rain means satellite and surface temps are different. Climate models didn’t predict this…

A funny thing happens when you line up satellite and surface temperatures over Australia. A lot of the time they are very close, but some years the surface records from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) are cooler by a full half a degree than the UAH satellite readings. Before anyone yells “adjustments”, this appears to be a real difference of instruments, but solving this mystery turns up a rather major flaw in climate models.

Bill Kininmonth wondered if those cooler-BOM years were also wetter years when more rain fell. So Tom Quirk got the rainfall data and discovered that rainfall in Australia has a large effect on the temperatures recorded by the sensors five feet off the ground. This is what Bill Johnston has shown at individual stations. Damp soil around the Stevenson screens takes more heat to evaporate and keeps maximums lower. In this new work Quirk has looked at the effect right across the country and the years when the satellite estimates diverge from the ground thermometers are indeed the wetter years. Furthermore, it can take up to six months to dry out the ground after a major wet period and for the […]

Bourke: How 1km of land clearing can warm a million square miles

Yet again, we have to ask: does the Bureau of Meteorology care about Australia’s long term climate trend? Are they even trying?

Bourke could be one of the top ten most influential temperature sites in the world, mostly by virtue of being miles from anywhere, and used to homogenize a large slab of the land mass of Australia. Bill Johnston documents how changes to the site create most of the temperature trend.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s fancy magical and secret homogenization protocol does not detect changes that obviously affect the temperature (like the clearing in the photo below). But sometimes the BoM make “corrections” because of site changes that don’t appear to have mattered. Is it conveniently selective or just inept?

The BoM don’t even document major site changes a lot of the time. Even iconic sites that affect huge areas are badly managed. Someone got the tractor and plough and cleared the vegetation. As usual, a citizen scientist, a volunteer, documents it (along with a suite of other site changes).

In the last ten years land was cleared around the thermometer. This denuded area has a lower humidity, and higher volatility of temperatures. The data from this thermometer […]

Scandal: BoM ignores major site changes at iconic, historic, Sydney Observatory. Sloppy or deliberate?

Australia’s oldest and most iconic site has changed dramatically, but major site changes are not even being recorded.

The way the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) treat this site says a lot about the unscientific, shoddy, biased standards it uses at sites everywhere. This was their headquarters. Experts walked past new walls, construction and highways, yet they didn’t record them? Beggars belief.

Just as Peter Ridd warns us that we can’t trust some marine and reef institutes, Bill Johnston is the whistle-blower warning us about the Bureau of Met. There is no law of science that says human institutes are infallible. When they run off the rails, how do we find out? Ridd issued a warning from the inside and ended up in the Federal Court. When people, like Bill write from the outside, the BoM waves the peer-review gatekeeper, and anonymous reviewers can easily shut that gate, and without any penalty.

The louvered thermometer house in front of the Observatory in 1864. (Courtesy of the State Library of NSW.)

Sydney Observatory is one of the longest running stations in the Southern Hemisphere, starting in 1859. It was Australia’s premier meteorology site and in the 1800’s it was known […]

Sydney before “climate change” — over 50C, 122F recorded at Windsor Observatory, 1939

This was Sydney before “Climate Change” hit — fifty degrees:

Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star

Penrith may have recorded 47.3C for at least one-second this week, but Windsor is only 23 km north-east of Penrith, and on January 13th, 1939, it recorded 122F or 50.5C with an old fashioned liquid thermometer, not a modern noisy electronic one.

Apparently, climate change makes our extreme heat less extreme.

Furthermore, this was not measured on a beer crate in someones back-yard, but on the historic Windsor Observatory which was built in 1863 by John Tebbutt F.R.A.S who had discovered The 1861 comet, and published many scientific reports in Astronomical Journals. His meteorological observations are published at Harvard in 1899 (among others). Tebbutt died in 1916, so it’s not clear what instrument the 122 F was recorded on in 1939, but a Stevenson Screen had been installed around 40 years earlier, and the measurement was made by Mr Keith Tebbutt, presumably his son.

Tebbutt’s portrait graced the back of our 100 dollar note from 1984 -1996.

See, Many Collapse in the Heat: Thursday Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star

Windsor Observatory | Photo: Winston M. Yang Wyp

All part of Greater […]

BOM Scandal: One second records in Australia — how “noise” creates history and a warming trend

Instrument errors, noise, may account for a quarter to one half of our national warming trend in the last century.

When the newspapers run a headline with Sydney hits, say, 44.4 degrees and that number gets engraved in history, who realizes that the extreme heat may have only lasted one second? You might think the maximum temperatures were above 44 for at least ten minutes, but the BOM will write it into the record books even if that heat lasts one second, and if the temperature a minute before was more than a whole degree cooler. We’re writing puffs of jet emissions, car exhaust, or random packets of hot (or cold) air into history books, and comparing these new records with old ones done in slow reacting liquid in glass thermometers. No wonder we are setting records!

In the last twenty years, electronic sensors have replaced most of the old fashioned thermometers. It’s for exactly this reason that we need the side-by-side comparison data that Bill Johnston asked for and which the BOM can’t supply because it is deleting the data – as a matter of routine practice.

Back in 1910, or even 1990, thermometers were not able to […]

Scandal: Australian Bureau of Meteorology caught erasing cold temperatures

Front page scandal today in Australia: BoM opens cold case on temperature data

Jennifer Marohasy, Lance Pidgeon, at the Stevenson screen, Goulburn Airport.

Amazing, the power of the media. Suddenly, the Bureau of Meteorology needs to replace equipment and answer questions and set up an internal inquiry. But they’ve had weeks of warning. Lance Pidgeon and Jennifer Marohasy have been watching the automatic weather stations record very cold temperatures, and then astonished when those same readings either got entered into our national raw database as warmer, or simply disappeared. The BOM apparently has a filter set so that super cold temperatures need to be manually checked. Yet the filter is set so high, in Thredbo’s case, nearly five whole degrees warmer than temperatures already recorded.

Wow. Just wow. What does raw data mean anymore?

The lack of respect for real observations is profoundly unscientific. How much does the BOM even care about understanding our climate if they are so flagrantly uninterested in the data? As I have said, the Bureau of Meteorology behaves more like PR agency than an institute of science. Based on past practice their internal inquiry will find excuses, not answer the questions, and will not […]

On Sunday, Goulburn got colder than the BOM thought was possible (and a raw data record was “adjusted”).

The BOM got caught this week auto-adjusting cold extremes to be less cold. Lance Pidgeon of the unofficial BOM audit team noticed that the thermometer at Goulburn airport recorded – 10.4°C at 6.17am on Sunday morning, but the official BOM climate records said it was -10.0°C. (What’s the point of that decimal place?) Either way this was a new record for Goulburn in July. (The previous coldest ever July morning was -9.1°C. The oldest day in Goulburn was in August 1994 when it reached -10.9°C).

Apparently this was an automated event where the thermometer recorded something beyond a set limit, and the value put into the official database was the artificial limit. Since colder temperatures have already been recorded in Goulburn, who thought it was a good idea to trim all future minus-ten-point-somethings as if they were automatically “spurious”?

Yesterday, the BOM have acknowledged the error and at first deleted the -10.0 figure, replacing it with a blank space. Then today, after Jennifer Marohasy’s post, they’ve corrected it.

You might think a half degree between friends is not that significant, but this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply […]

Sydney Observatory where warming is created by site moves, buildings, freeways

The iconic Sydney Observatory is Australia’s longest running weather station. But everything around the site has changed. Bill Johnston has spent months researching, photographing, and hunting through historic files to document those changes. He wasn’t paid for this work, but what he found was that the BOM has missed that the area around the thermometers has changed dramatically over the last century, so much so, that he claims it’s scientifically meaningless to try to construct climate trends from this data. Aerial photographs show exposure of the instruments changed in 1950, when Stevenson screens were moved, and after a brick wall was built metres from the screen in about 1972. It is suspicious that the changes are undocumented in Bureau reports, especially given they are responsible for much of the “unprecedented warming” in Sydney’s temperature data. The BOM may counter that this site is not used to calculate warming trends across Australia, but as Bill points out, Sydney Observatory is used to homogenize other sites that are. So site changes and the urban heat island effect infects many country sites, and the traffic in Sydney “warms the nation”. — Jo

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Its fake news week! Guest post by Dr. Bill Johnston[1]. […]

BOM September failure — but who can predict the climate a whole month ahead?

The World’s Best Practice climate models predicted Australia would be hotter than normal in September, instead the maximum temperature anomaly was 1 to 5 degrees below average across most of Australia.

That long range prediction was made all the way back on August 21. Four weeks later it was obvious it was wrong.

Prediction of a hot September versus actual outcome. (Click to enlarge).

Thanks to Warwick Hughes who saw this failure coming and The Marcus Review who points out the mismatch and goes on to log how much the BOM predictions for October have transformed from hotter than average to cold cold cold.

The BOM bravely predicted Tasmania would have an 80% chance of having hotter than average maximums. Temperatures ended up being spot on average. What’s 80% certainty worth? About the same as 95%.

Thanks to Chris Gillham who pointed out the big cold blob of ocean surrounding Australia on the south and west that gave Perth its coldest ever September nights. Wasn’t that cold blob present on August 21 when those models were run? On August 25th, the BOM predicted Perth’s chances of being cooler than average at 50:50. Toss a coin, or use a climate […]

Coldest Perth September recorded in 120 years of records (must be climate change)

In the last 120 years in Perth there has never been a September as cold as this one. We know that thanks to Chris Gillham, who has been tracking Western Australian weather in detail for years at WAClimate.net.

The headline in The West Australian today was Perth shivers through it’s coldest ever September. For some reason (I can’t think why) the extreme weather journalists did not mention climate change (has that ever happened on a hottest ever record story?). It’s so unusually cold here that wheat farmers, only weeks away from harvest*, are struggling with frost damage on crops. They are making snowmen from the frosts. It is supposed to be rapidly heating up but it is three degrees below normal.

Given the freak weather, Will Steffen immediately announced that “This is a prelude to a disturbing future. And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change.” No. Wait. Scratch that. That was South Australia, where one bad storm was caused by coal fired electrons. A record cold month is just weather.

Curiously, The Bureau of Meteorology(BOM) announced it was the coldest ever September for Perth since 1994 when records started at Mt Lawley, and […]

Australian temperatures unchanged for 20 years: Plus Malcolm Roberts first Senate speech is tomorrow

Malcolm Roberts will give his maiden Senate speech tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5pm at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra. To reserve seating contact Leon Ashby leon.ashby AT aph.gov.au or phone (02) 6277 3151. He has asked for updated graphs of the UAH data for Australia. His speech may be available via the APH website. (h/t Jim S)

Luckily for us the UAH satellite database can be filtered to track temperatures in the lower troposphere over the Australian land mass. Thanks to John Christy for providing an Australian specific dataset.

We’ve put out a third of all the CO2 homosapiens has ever made in the last 20 years, and it apparently has made no meaningful difference to temperatures here. We’ve put out 60% of all our CO2 since the satellite record began.

Here is the full Australian monthly data from 1979 – now for all seasons graphed below. There are breathless news articles hyping every hot month, every hot week, for records in every little region, and even for a single record hot nights, but no press release to say that temperatures in Australia have not really changed in a meaningful way since 1995.

Thanks to KensKingdom […]

Met Bureau Bingo: warm autumn nights sold as “Hottest Ever” March extreme

It’s another month of BOM Bingo. The ABC and BOM are trumpeting a “hottest” ever headline yet again, and Warwick Hughes is onto them already.

Conveniently the ABC forgets to mention that March Maximum Temps have been hotter before many times and with a pattern that has nothing to do with CO2. How many in the ABC audience would know that?

March temperatures sets record as hottest ever, Bureau of Meteorology says

“You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one.” says Sara Phillips. But actually, if you are human, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just another hot March like so many before. For SE Australia where most humans live, the hottest March, and wildly so, was in 1940. Across the whole of Australia these kinds of maximum temperatures in March have been occurring for decades and 1986 was much much hotter. See the BOM graph below.

Hands up who can spot the horrid effect of CO2 in this graph?

Stick with the logic. Must be CO2 that caused the cold spike in 2011 (and 1967, 1942 and 1913). This is witchcraft.

You could be forgiven […]