jennifer

ON Tuesday there was a Parliamentary Information Session in Canberra sponsored by the Global Change Institute and the University of Queensland at which many government-funded climate scientists told members and senators that the end is nigh. That is unless Australia signs on to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at the upcoming COP21 in Paris.

The night before the debate, on Monday, three of the alarmists (Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, John Church and Mark Howden), Bob Carter and I were invited to present information to the Coalition Environment Committee, where Craig Kelly MP facilitated some lively discussion.

It is significant that such a meeting was actually held in Parliament House at which both government-funded alarmists and credentialed independent sceptics were present; this is almost a world first and certainly an Australian first.

I emphasized the importance of distinguishing between real historical data as opposed to naively believing output from computer models that homogenize original measurements. I forcefully criticized both Hoegh-Guldberg and Church for not telling the members and senators that they had presented remodeled data, as opposed to actual measurements in their presentations, which preceded mine.

My presentation* focused on surface temperature data from Rutherglen, and how the Bureau of Meteorology has remodeled the observational temperature series, showing sustained cooling over the 20th Century, to show an apparent dramatic warming trend. This is achieved by the Bureau dropping down past temperatures and promulgating this effect backwards. In particular, the Bureau subtracts 0.57°C from all temperature minima recorded before 1974, subtracts 0.63°C from all minima before 1966, and subtracts 0.49°C from all minima before 1928. The net change back to the beginning of the record in 1912 is thus 1.69°C. This is an extraordinarily significant distortion of the record.

At the meeting, I explained how Rutherglen is one of 104 weather stations used to construct the contrived official temperature trend for Australia, and that every single temperature time series was adjusted. In general, like at Rutherglen, the adjustments have the effect of cooling the past and thus making the present appear relatively hotter.

I mentioned that it was a travesty that Minister Greg Hunt had prevented a proper inquiry into the Bureau last year, and suggested that the senators and members in the room needed to ‘wake-up’ and do something. Public policy, I suggested, needed to be based on real data/real evidence, not contrived temperature series.

After my presentation, Professor Howden began with slides indicating that because of climate change there had been a decline in crop yields. He was interrupted by one of the MPs who asked whether the charts on display represented actual real historical data, or output from a computer model. The Professor acknowledged that he was showing computer output.

At that point, I really wanted to applaud when several of the MPs promptly got up and walked out.

After the presentations there was some discussion of the satellite data at the request of the committee chair, Craig Kelly MP. Luckily, I had a supplementary slide showing the last 17 years of data for Australia to September 2015, that I had downloaded the day before from Ken Stewart’s blog, https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/the-pause-september-update/

This data, which measures radiance in the lower troposphere clearly shows that there has been no global warming for 17 years. However, Professor Howden from the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, claimed that if measurements from different altitudes were combined this data showed global warming. Perhaps he meant that that even this data could be remodeled to show global warming.

Of course, it is possible to change the trend in any time series by making specific adjustments to individual values, then combining measurement in particular ways, with arbitrarily assigned weightings. These are indeed the techniques mainstream climate science apply to data, and then justify the same on the basis it is ‘World’s Best Practice’ because it shows global warming, and any data that does not is just wrong.

Ansley Kellow in his book ‘Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science’ labels this preference for virtual data that tells the “correct” story, over real measurements, as a form of “noble cause corruption”.

At the meeting on Monday night Professor Carter stressed the need to pay attention to the scientific method, and in particular the importance of testing the null hypothesis. Meanwhile Ove Hoegh-Guldberg continually pointed to a thick tome which apparently represented the consensus of all IPCC scientists. Of course, this consensus is all about politics, not evidence or science.

You might consider sending a note of thanks to one or more the following members and senators for attending. Craig Kelly MP, in particular, should be congratulated for organizing the meeting, and facilitating the discussion.

1. Senator Eric Abetz, Liberal, TAS
2. Dr Peter Hendy MP, Liberal, NSW
3. Senator Zed Seselja, Liberal, ACT
4. Craig Kelly MP, Liberal, NSW
5. Warren Entsch, LNP, QLD
6. Dr Denis Jensen MP, Liberal, WA
7. Bert van Manen MP, LNP, QLD
8. Nola Marino MP, Liberal, WA
9. Andrew Broad, National, VIC
10. Tony Pasin, Liberal, SA
11. Brett Whitely, Liberal, SA
12. Rick Wilson, Liberal, WA
13. George Christensen, LNP, QLD
14. Eric Hutchison, Liberal, TAS
15. Sharman Stone, Liberal, VIC
16. Mark Coulton MP, National, NSW

There is more information, and a link to an interview that I did with Alan Jones, 2GB, at Jo Nova’s blog, http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/alan-jones-talks-climate-paris-mainstream-scientists-caught-out-by-marohasy-in-parliament/

Also, Brett Hogan from the Institute of Public Affairs was the sixth speaker. He gave an interesting talk about coal, and how it is helping the poor in places like India and China out of poverty.

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* My presentation included several charts of data from Rutherglen, and the nearby location of Beechworth, these charts with explanatory notes can be downloaded here: Notes-EnvironCommittee-October2015-V4

For the true believer, it is too awful to even consider that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could be exaggerating global warming by adjusting figures. This doesn’t mean though, that it’s not true.

In fact, under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a panel of eminent statisticians was formed to investigate these claims detailed in The Australian newspaper in August and September 2014. The panel did acknowledge in its first report that the Bureau homogenized the temperature data: that it adjusted figures. The same report also concluded that it was unclear whether these adjustments resulted in an overall increase or decrease in the warming trend. No conclusions could be drawn because the panel did not work through a single example of homogenization, not even for Rutherglen. Rutherglen is of course in north eastern Victoria, an agricultural research station with a continuous minimum temperature record unaffected by equipment changes or documented site-moves, but where the Bureau nevertheless adjusted the temperatures. This had the effect of turning a temperature time series without a statistically significant trend, into global warming of almost 2 degrees per Century.

According to media reports last week, a thorough investigation of the Bureau’s methodology was prevented because of intervention by Environment Minister Greg Hunt. He apparently argued in Cabinet that the credibility of the institution was paramount. That it is important the public have trust in the Bureau’s data and forecasts, so the public know to heed warning of bushfires and cyclones.

This is the type of plea repeatedly made by the Catholic Church hierarchy to prevent the truth about paedophilia, lest the congregation lose faith in the church.

Contrast this approach with that by poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen who went so far as to suggest ‘the minority is always right’ in an attempt to have his audience examine the realities of 18th Century morality. Specifically, Ibsen wanted us to consider that sometimes the individual who stands alone is making a valid point which is difficult to accept because every culture has its received wisdoms: those beliefs that cannot be questioned, until they are proven in time to have been wrong. British biologist, and contemporary of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley was trying to make a similar point when he wrote, “I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.”

Mr Hunt defends the Bureau because they have a critical role to play in providing the Australian community with reliable weather forecasts. This is indeed one of their core responsibilities. They would, however, be better able to perform this function, if they used proper techniques for quality control of temperature data, and the best available techniques for forecasting rainfall [1]. Of concern, there has been no improvement in their seasonal rainfall forecasts for two decades because they use general circulation models [2]. These are primarily tools for demonstrating global warming, with dubious, if any skill, at actually forecasting weather or climate.

Consider for example, the Millennium drought and the flooding rains that followed in 2010. Back in 2007, and 2008, David Jones, then and still the Manager of Climate Monitoring and Prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, wrote that climate change was so rampant in Australia, “We don’t need meteorological data to see it” [3], and that the drought, caused by climate change, was a sign of the “hot and dry future” that we all collectively faced [4]. Then the drought broke, as usual in Australia, with flooding rains. But the Bureau was incapable of forecasting an exceptionally wet summer, because such an event was contrary to how senior management at the Bureau perceived our climate future. So, despite warning signs evident in sea surface temperature patterns across the Pacific through 2010, Brisbane’s Wivenhoe dam, a dam originally built for flood mitigation, was allowed to fill through the spring of 2010, and kept full in advance of the torrential rains in January 2011. The resulting catastrophic flooding of Brisbane is now recognized as a “dam release flood”, and the subject of a class action lawsuit by Brisbane residents against the Queensland government.

Indeed despite an increasing investment in super computers, there is ample evidence that ideology is trumping rational decision making at the Bureau on key issues that really matter, like the prediction of drought and flood cycles. Because a majority of journalists and politicians desperately want to believe that the Bureau knows best, they turn away from the truth, and ignore the facts.

News Ltd journalist Anthony Sharwood got it completely wrong in his weekend article defending the Bureau’s homogenization of the temperature record [5]. I tried to explain to him on the phone last Thursday, how the Bureau don’t actually do what they say when they homogenize temperature time series for places like Rutherglen. Mr Sharwood kept coming back to the issue of ‘motivations’. He kept asking me why on earth the Bureau would want to mislead the Australian public. I should have kept with the methodology, but I suggested he read what David Jones had to say in the Climategate emails. Instead of considering the content of the emails that I mentioned, however, Sharwood wrote in his article that, “Climategate was blown out of proportion”, and “independent investigations cleared the researchers of any form of wrongdoing”.

Nevertheless, the content of the Climategate emails includes quite a lot about homogenization, and the scientists’ motivations. For example, there is an email thread in which Phil Jones (University of East Anglia) and Tom Wigley (University of Adelaide) discuss the need to get rid of a blip in global temperatures around 1940-1944. Specifically Wigley suggested they reduce ocean temperatures by an arbitrary 0.15 degree Celsius. These are exactly the types of arbitrary adjustments made throughout the historical temperature record for Australia: adjustments made independently of any of the purported acceptable reasons for making adjustments, including site moves, and equipment changes.

Sharwood incorrectly wrote in his article that: “Most weather stations have moved to cooler areas (i.e. areas away from the urban hear island effect). So if scientists are trying to make the data reflect warmer temperatures, they’re even dumber than the sceptics think.” In fact, many (not most) weather stations have moved from post offices to airports, which have hotter, not cooler, day time temperatures. Furthermore, the urban heat island creeps into the official temperature record for Australia, not because of site moves, but because the temperature record at places like Cape Otway lighthouse is adjusted to make it similar to the record in built-up areas like Melbourne, which are clearly affected by the urban heat island [6].

I know this sounds absurd. It is absurd, and it is also true. Indeed, a core problem with the methodology that the Bureau uses is its reliance on “comparative sites” to make adjustments to data at other places. I detail the Cape Otway lighthouse example in a recent paper published in the journal Atmospheric Research, volume 166, page 145 [6].

It is so obvious that there is an urgent need for a proper, thorough and independent review of operations at the Bureau. But it would appear our politicians and many mainstream media are set against the idea. Evidently they are too conventional in their thinking to consider that such an important Australian institution could now be ruled by ideology.

This article was first published at On Line Opinion.  A shorter versions was subsequently published at The Australian, with the wonderful cartoon of Greg Hunt by Eric Lobbecke.

References/Links

1. Marohasy, J. 2014. Letter to Simon Birmingham, Re: Corruption of the official temperature record, and increasing unreliability of official seasonal rainfall forecasts.
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Birmingham_2014_08_12.pdf

2. Abbot, J. and Marohasy J. 2014. Input selection and optimisation for monthly rainfall forecasting in Queensland, Australia, using artificial neural networks. Atmospheric Research, 138, 166-178. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169809513003141

3. Jones, D. 2007. Email to Phil Jones, Re: African stations used in HadCRU global data set. http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php

4. Jones, D. 2008. Our hot, dry future, The Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/our-hot-dry-future-20081005-4udg.html

5. Sharwood, A. 2015. Why are they messing with the data? http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-cyclone-tracy-of-ideological-battles-does-the-weather-bureau-tweak-data-or-is-our-government-paranoid/story-fnjwvztl-1227545670243?sv=a58a1574c4a196289acf208f11fc2d2b

6. Marohasy, J. and Abbot, J. 2015. Assessing the quality of eight different maximum temperature time series as inputs when using artificial neural networks to forecast monthly rainfall at Cape Otway, Australia. Atmospheric Research, 166, 141-149. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169809515002124