Jennifer Marohasy

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Can Universities Lawfully Bully Academics into Silence?

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Dr Peter Ridd has taken James Cook University to court protesting his sacking for what he says is, primarily, speaking-out about the lack of quality assurance in Great Barrier Reef science.

Dr Ridd spoke out initially about there being no quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef science – science that is arguably misused to secure billions of dollars of tax-payer funding. When the University tried to stop Dr Ridd doing this, Dr Ridd spoke out against University management – making all the documentation public including on his new website.

I would really like the court case to be about academic freedom and the science – to lay bare the evidence. But when I went to the first day of the hearing of an application in the Federal Circuit Court last Monday (11th June – the hearing continued on 12 June 2018) for an order for reinstatement of Dr Ridd’s employment pending determination at trial, it quickly became evident that there would be no testing of the actual scientific evidence relied upon by Dr Ridd to claim that scientific institutions like AIMS and ARC Centre “can no longer be trusted” and “spin their story”.

Yesterday (19th June), Judge Jarrett gave his reasons for making orders declining to reinstate Dr Ridd but allowing him to amend his primary application to include a claim for the university taking “adverse action” against him for exercising a workplace right (i.e. his intellectual/academic freedom pursuant to the enterprise agreement). On hearing the reasons I was concerned to discover that it may all come down to poorly worded clauses in an enterprise agreement. In particular, was Dr Ridd allowed to exercise his academic freedoms free of the constraint of the university’s ‘aspirational’ (according to His Honour) code of conduct, and was he permitted to say anything publicly about what many ordinary Australians would consider a straight-forward case of the university bullying him into silence?

On the first day of the preliminary hearing Barrister Ben Kidston for the applicant (Dr Ridd) argued eloquently about how the case was about ‘academic freedom’. He went-on for over an hour moving from the big picture to the detail with respect to specific clauses in a code of conduct and the enterprise agreement, and back again. All the while His Honour and the audience listened intently – no one interrupted. Again yesterday, His Honour cited the poorly worded specific clause which the university has been relying on to silence Dr Ridd, and observed that it was open to two interpretations.

His Honour didn’t mention the Union. The National Tertiary Education Union has an interest in the enterprise agreement and like Dr Ridd, they say that the relevant clause in the agreement shouldn’t be used to silence the employee but rather, amongst other things, that the obligation of confidentiality only applies to the University’s management of the disciplinary process. Any other interpretation means that university academics would be obliged to suffer any disciplinary action by the University (legitimate or otherwise) in silence – they would never be able to publicly defend themselves in the court of public opinion, court proceedings being the only practical option. One wonders if the Union realises the implications to its members.

Yesterday, when His Honour gave his reasons for declining the application by Dr Ridd for an injunction – for his temporary reinstatement as a Professor at James Cook University pending the trial – he didn’t deal with many of the arguments advanced for Dr Ridd e.g. the effect of the clause of the enterprise agreement which states that the code of conduct is not to “detract” from the intellectual freedoms, the interaction of the express right to disagree with the University‘s decisions and processes pursuant to his intellectual freedom and the purported obligation to keep disciplinary proceedings again him confidential, whether a conflict of interest, apprehended bias or actual bias, exists by reason of the university’s commercial relationship with AIMS, GBRMPA and ARC and the effect that this has on the obligation to afford Dr Ridd procedural fairness and natural justice in the determination of the disciplinary complaint (which concerned comments he made about those bodies).

That is not intended to be critical of His Honour. His Honour took a broad brush approach and did not descend into the detail of the arguments and the evidence, as all His Honour was required to do was to ascertain whether Dr Ridd had a prima facie case, and not to decide the case itself.

Yesterday, His Honour found that Dr Ridd had an arguable prima facie case in relation to the alleged breach of the enterprise agreement by JCU and that it took adverse action against him, but that the balance of convenience did not favour his reinstatement pending trial primarily because:
1. an award of damages would be an adequate remedy if Dr Ridd was successful at trial; and
2. the university paid Dr Ridd the equivalent of six month’s pay upon his termination – so he was not presently without income to support himself and (it seems) that a trial would likely occur before the expiration of that six month period; and
3. Dr Ridd had previously turned down an offer of an undertaking by the university to suspend the disciplinary proceedings pending determination of the proceeding. It is important to note that that undertaking would have required Dr Ridd to remain silent about the disciplinary proceedings that had been taken against him by the university.

Of course, in making this determination the Judge was entirely ignoring (as he was entitled to) the very nature of Dr Ridd – a man of integrity who will not be silenced even if costs him his job, his career and results in vicious bullying.

When Christopher Murdoch QC for the respondent (JCU) argued on the first day of the hearing he explained that the University’s core issue was the breaking of confidentiality, in particular Dr Ridd was not allowed to tell anyone that he had been censured. Never mind that he had been censured for daring to speak out against a culture where scientific integrity is perhaps sacrificed for profit.

So, when I blogged about this issue of Peter Ridd being censured and the need for everyone to contribute to his GoFundMe Campaign back in May, I very deliberately emphasised the importance of being able to speak out. The most important thing, I wrote, is to not be silenced.

I was also thinking of the famous Edmund Burke quote: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Dr Ridd has done something. First, he detailed the scientific facts as an expert on these issues including in the scientific literature. For example, there is his article published in Marine Geology (Volume 346, pages 392-399) in which he explains that the only reason Glenn De’ath found an apparent decline in coral calcification rates was because he didn’t consider the age effect on coral growth. This is just one of many instances when Dr Ridd has detailed how scientists make spurious claims based on a flawed methodology. More recently Dr Ridd has explained the consequences of this in plain English on television.

None of this has made him popular with his colleagues most of whom rely on perceptions of imminent catastrophe at the Great Barrier Reef for their relevance and certainly their funding. Dr Ridd has done what the average Australian would consider to be the right thing. Most importantly he has not remained silent – surely, he will be vindicated at the final trial when all the evidence is heard and all the arguments made and considered.

John Abbot and John Nicol outside the Federal Court in Brisbane yesterday, following the preliminary hearing of Peter Vincent Ridd versus James Cook University.

University Professor Sacked for Telling-the-Truth

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BACK in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor.

Peter Ridd as a first year undergraduate science student at James Cook University back in 1978 – forty years ago.

Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one university for forty years.

Since Peter was fired on 2 May 2018, the university has attempted to remove all trace of this association: scrubbing him completely from their website.

But facts don’t cease to exist because they are removed from a website. The university has never challenged the veracity of Peter’s legitimate claims about the quality of much of the reef science: science on which billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research is being squandered. These issues are not going away.

Just yesterday (Friday 18 May), Peter lodged papers in the Federal Court. He is going to fight for his job back!

If you care about the truth, science and academic freedom, please donate to help bring this important case to court.

It doesn’t matter how little or how much you donate. Just make sure you are a part of this important effort by donating to Peter’s GoFundMe campaign.

Peter deliberately choose to frame the book chapter about the replication crisis that is sweeping through science.

In this chapter – The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Coral and Problems with Policy Science – Peter details the major problems with quality assurance when it comes to claims of the imminent demise of the reef.

Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.

Ex-professor Peter Ridd has also published extensively in the scientific literature on the Great Barrier Reef, including issues with the methodology used to measure calcification rates. In the book he explains:

Like trees, which produce rings as they grow, corals set down a clearly identifiable layer of calcium carbonate skeleton each year, as they grow. The thicknesses and density of the layers can be used to infer calcification rates and are, effectively, a measure of the growth rate. Dr Glenn De’ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science used cores from more than 300 corals, some of which were hundreds of years old, to measure the changes in calcification during the last few hundred years. They claimed there was a precipitous decline in calcification since 1990, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The LHS chart suggests a problem with coral growth rates – but the real problem is with the methodology. When corals of equivalent age are sampled, there has been no decline in growth rates at the Great Barrier Reef – as shown in the RHS chart.

However, I have two issues with their analysis. I published my concerns, and an alternative analysis, in the journal Marine Geology (Ridd et al. 2013). First, there were instrumental errors with the measurements of the coral layers. This was especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality. This forced an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s – falsely implying a recent calcification drop. Second, an ‘age effect’ was not acknowledged. When these two errors are accounted for, the drop in calcification rates disappear, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The problem with the ‘age effect’, mentioned above, arose because in the study De’ath and colleagues included data from corals sampled during two distinct periods and with a different focus; I will refer to these as two campaigns. The first campaign occurred mostly in the 1980s and focused on very large coral specimens, sometimes many metres across. The second campaign occurred in the early 2000s due to the increased interest in the effects of CO2. However, presumably due to cost cutting measures, instead of focusing on the original huge coral colonies, the second campaign measured smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter.

In summary, the first campaign focused on large old corals, while, in contrast, the second campaign focused on small young corals. The two datasets were then spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated – in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth…

Dr Juan D’Olivo Cordero from the University of Western Australia collected an entirely different dataset of coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef to determine calcification rates. This study determined that there has been a 10% increase in calcification rates since the 1940s for offshore and mid-shelf reefs, which is the location of about 99% of all the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. However, these researchers also measured a 5% decline in calcification rates of inshore corals – the approximately 1% of corals that live very close to the coast. Overall, there was an increase for most of the Great Barrier Reef, and a decrease for a small fraction of the Great Barrier Reef.

While it would seem reasonable to conclude that the results of the study by D’Olivo et al. would be reported as good news for the Great Barrier Reef, their article in the journal Coral Reefs concluded:

Our new findings nevertheless continue to raise concerns, with the inner-shelf reefs continuing to show long-term declines in calcification consistent with increased disturbance from land-based effects. In contrast, the more ‘pristine’ mid- and outer-shelf reefs appear to be undergoing a transition from increasing to decreasing rates of calcification, possibly reflecting the effects of CO2-driven climate change.

Imaginatively, this shift from ‘increasing’ to ‘decreasing’ seems to be based on an insignificant fall in the calcification rate in some of the mid-shelf reefs in the last two years of the 65-year dataset.

Why did the authors concentrate on this when their data shows that the reef is growing about 10% faster than it did in the 1940s?

James Cook university could have used the chapter as an opportunity to start a much-needed discussion about policy, funding and the critical importance of the scientific method. Instead, Peter was first censored by the University – and now he has been fired.

When I first blogged on this back in February, Peter needed to raise A$95,000 to fight the censure.

This was achieved through an extraordinary effort, backed by Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, John Roskam and so many others.

To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly. In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.

New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February. The core issue continues to be Peter’s right to keep talking – including so that he can defend himself.

In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter’s employment agreement. The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him. Peter disputes this.

Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice – to defend himself! All of the documentation is now being made public – all of this information, and more can be found at Peter’s new website.

Together, let’s fight this!

Go fund ex-professor Ridd at:

https://au.gofundme.com/peter-ridd-legal-action-fund.

The Institute of Public Affairs published Climate Change, The Facts 2017, and continues to support Peter’s right to speak the truth. For media and comment contact Evan Mulholland on 0405 140 780, or at emulholland@ipa.org.au.

Buy the book if you haven’t already: this is another way of showing your support.

Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy speaking at the Sydney Institute last year.

The most important thing is to not be silenced, shout about this! I received an email last week: “Bought Climate Change, The Facts 2017, as requested, to support Peter Ridd. I’m not making any friends at dinner parties at the moment. Stuff ’em.”

Guilty of Agreeing to Meet with Scott Pruitt

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SCOTT Pruitt heads the US Environmental Protection Agency. Last year he was planning to visit Australia, and the proposed agenda did include a two-hour roundtable with me and colleagues from three Australian universities.

Some of this is reported today in The Guardian.

Along with the inference I’m a nutter – because I have accused the Bureau of Meteorology of corrupting the temperature record.

The Australian public do have much confidence in the Bureau, as they have in the past had confidence in the Commonwealth Bank, Catholic Church – even the Australian cricket captain.

In the case of the banks and the churches, ordinary Australians were complaining for years before any action was taken. Now, the authorities are asking how could we have been so-misled for so long? Why was nothing done sooner – and why was the mounting evidence of wrong-doing ignored.

For some years I have been asking for an open, honest and independent inquiry into the operations of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. In 2015, I wrote to the Auditor-General of Australia suggesting a performance audit with terms of reference to include: consistency with its own policies, and reliability of methodology. At the time my primary concern was the remodelling of temperature data through a process known as homogenisation.

In response, it was suggested I direct my concerns to Dr Ron Sandland AM, who at that time was chairing a Technical Advisory Forum to review these same issues, that I had previously raised with then Minister for the Environment, Hon. Greg Hunt MP. It was already clear to me that Dr Sandland and his team were undertaking a most cursory review and not working through a single example of homogenisation. I nevertheless made a submission to Dr Sandland’s Forum that has never been acknowledged.

As I detailed in a letter sent just this morning to Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, my issues continue to be less with the actual policies, protocols and best practice manuals already in place, but with increasing evidence these are being systematically ignored. This is exactly the issue that the current Royal Commission is finding with the banks – because it is not believing the documentation, but actually working through examples and establishing what happens in practice.

The Guardian would do well to consider my evidence closely – to stop parroting assurances from Bureau chief, Andrew Johnson, and work through an example of how data is remodelled.

I could detail many other areas of operation in which the Bureau blatantly and systematically disregards its own specific and correct policies.

The one issue that I detailed for Alan Finkel is the way temperatures are currently measured in automatic weather stations by electronic probes. This goes to the heart of the integrity and reliability of temperature measurements recorded by the Bureau, subsequently homogenised, and incorporated into international databases – including those relied upon by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I may have raised exactly this issue with Scott Pruitt. He would have been arriving in Australia in September, at about the same time that the Bureau handed down an internal review in which it admitted to having set limits on how cold temperatures could be recorded at both Goulburn and Thredbo in south eastern Australia.

When I first detailed the evidence for this at my blog in early July – I was considered a nutter by many. But after Alan Jones interviewed me on radio 2GB, and despite the Bureau strenuously denying it was setting limits, Environment Minister The Hon. Josh Freydenberg MP did asked for a review of the operations of the Bureau’s automatic weather stations.

On 7th September, just as the report was published, the Minister phoned me to let me know that the Bureau’s internal investigations confirmed that Goulburn and Thredbo were the only sites where temperature records had been affected by the inability of some Bureau automatic weather stations to read low temperatures… limits had indeed been set.

What are the chances? Of the Bureau’s 563 weather stations, I had stumbled across the only two with problems.

Guardian reporters like Adam Morton may continue to be dismissive and suggest those who doubt, including Scott Pruitt and me, are fools. But the real fools are those who fail to see that climate science falls well short of Popperian standards, rather engaging in all manner of tactics to defend absurd practices as detailed in my letter this morning to Alan Finkel. Indeed, it very much resembles the model of scientists behaving badly as described by Paul Feyerabend.

It is unfortunate that Scott Pruitt had to cancel his visit to Australia when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas gulf coast – but the evidence against the Bureau for corrupting the temperature record remains.

Jennifer Marohasy visiting the automatic weather station at Goulburn in late July 2017.

Wine and Climate Change in Australia – Journalist Michael Brissenden Just Makes Stuff-Up

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MICHAEL Brissenden, considered one of Australia’s most experienced journalists, failed on so many counts with the Four Corners documentary ‘Weather Alert’.

Michael Brissenden is an experienced Australian journalist, this picture is from his biography page at the ABC website.

He suggested that wine grower’s Brown Brothers are relocating at least part of their business to Tasmania because it is too hot in Victoria, which is untrue. He also failed to explain to the public that climate change can be natural, and for as long as humanity has been growing wine grapes harvest dates have changed. He also failed to provide balance by getting some expert perspective of the extent of recent climate change and its likely effect on wine growing.

When the ABC ran its Four Corners program on climate change some weeks back, it had as its theme: that farmers, small businesses, government planners and major corporations have stopped waiting for politicians to decide whether climate change is real. They’re acting now.

One of the more compelling examples provided was that well-known Australian wine producer Brown Brothers was moving part of its operations to Tasmania – to a cooler climate. That is what journalist Brissenden said:

“But that’s not all – the company has now also decided to move part of its operation to cooler country.”

The inference was clear. It has become so hot on mainland Australia, due to catastrophic climate change, that this business was having to act in quite a dramatic way by relocating.

But company representative, Ross Brown, never actually said this. Correspondence* has since established that it’s actually business as usual for Brown Brothers.

“At this stage we don’t intend on selling any vineyards in Victoria. We have always had the philosophy that we grow the right varietals in the most suited climate so we have an incredible team who ensure we are planning the right grapes in the right locations.”

On camera Mr Brown did go on somewhat about how the grape harvests now are getting shorter and earlier because temperatures are rising.

It is well known that temperature is central to all aspects of viticulture (grape growing and harvest), and that records of changing harvest dates have long provided an indication of local climate change. For example, the number of days from 1 September for the wine harvest in Bordeaux, France, has long been an estimate of climate change in Western Europe. As the start date pushed into October from the late 1400s so Europe entered a period known as the Little Ice Age, which followed the Medieval Warm Period. By 1850 – the beginning of the current warm cycle – the average dates of starting vintage were back in September.

There have always been cycles of warming, followed by cooling. For the ABC to really have a story about grape growing and climate change, Brissenden would need to establish the extent to which the current warming cycle is outside the realm of what might be expected from natural climate change. But he didn’t.

Consistent with the ABC’s misguided editorial policy, natural climate change was not even mentioned in ‘Weather Alert’.

I recently published on temperature change in Southeast Australia – the region where Brown Brothers grow wine. It is chapter 5 in the book Evidence-based climate science by scientific publishers Elsevier. In the chapter, entitled Southeast Australian maximum temperature trends, 1887- 2013: an evidence-based reappraisal, I conclude – from a weighted mean of the five highest quality maximum temperature time series for southeast Australia – that the 0.3 degrees Celsius warming since 1887 is well within what might be expected from natural climate change.

Figure 1. These time series lines are derived from data also published in Chapter 5, of the book Evidence-based Climate Science. They show that rural locations, cities and lighthouses have somewhat different temperature trends. Even the most pronounced warming, evident from the cities of Hobart and Melbourne, is within what could be considered natural – though the trends shown here are likely to be artificially exaggerated by the method of measuring temperature since 1996** (electronic probes) and the urban heat island (UHI) effect.

Mr Brissenden might have also mentioned a new book on the fascinating subject of wine and climate – a book written by an agricultural scientist focused on Australian wine. Wine Terroir and Climate Change by John Gladstones (Wakefield Press 2015) concludes that viticulture in Australia is not threatened by global warming, and that much of the computer modelling that underpins the climate change hype is wrong.

If Mr Brissenden was really interested in temperature change and wine growing, and if Four Corners really was about investigative journalism, it would have interviewed Dr Gladstone. But they didn’t.

The documentary was more a propaganda piece – and altogether consistent with ABC editorial policy on the topic of climate change.

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If you want more of these stories consider subscribing, and donating just A$25: here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/subscribe/

This article was offered to various mainstream Australian media outlets, they all passed on it. But The Spectator Australia has been brave enough to republish, ’tis here: https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/04/no-four-corners-brown-brothers-is-not-moving-to-tasmania/ .

* The correspondence with Brown Brothers was initiated by Bob Fernley-Jones, a Melbourne-based retired mechanical engineer. This blog post details just one of many errors of fact in the Weather Alert documentary identified and documented by Mr Fernley-Jones, which he has included in a series of formal submissions addressed to the ABC’s Audience and Consumer Affairs. Mr Fernley-Jones was recently advised that the ABC have exercised their discretion not to investigate any of his submissions.

** In a previous blog post I have detailed the extent to which recent warming trends are likely to be exaggerated by the change from mercury thermometers to electronic probes – this is also something that could and should have been investigate by Mr Brissenden.

Complaint Lodged Against Four Corners’ Weather Alert

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JO NOVA began a recent blog post”

After years of telling skeptics that you don’t ask a plumber to do heart surgery, the ABC “Weather Alert! last Monday was 90% plumbers.

The formerly iconic FourCorners “public affairs” show crafted a 43 minute advertisement for the Renewables Industry and Carbon Trading Bankers and the Green Blob. And we taxpayers paid for it all.

This very amusing blog post by Jo continues with much more to contemplate about the extent to which politics now rules when it comes to the mainstream media and the topic of climate change.

The program was full of factual errors.

Melbourne-based, retired mechanical engineer, Bob Fernley-Jones highlights some of these factual errors in a formal complaint that he has already lodged, and it has already been assigned a case number C10545-18. With Bob’s permission I provide the text and graphics from this complaint…

Complaint summary: The programme presented various anecdotal claims associated with recent severe weather events that prima facie seemed to be far-fetched. When those claims were subjected to the simplest of validity checks they were found to be false and very misleading. Also, important information that is available from various authoritative sources but that was opposite to the dramatically orchestrated programme agenda was excluded.

Example 1)

1.1) From the transcript:

“MARTIN ROYDS, Jillamatong Beef, Braidwood NSW: The temperatures are more erratic, we seem to get frosts in the middle of summer, we’ve had frosts nearly on Christmas day. We’re getting hot, dry weather in the middle of winter. so the climates got a lot more erratic.”

A simple Google search for ‘Summer frost NSW Australia’ yielded 428,000 hits, but nothing of relevance was found. A similar search for ‘hot winter day NSW Australia’ yielded only a report of a single warm day of 26 0C in Sydney in July 2017. However, Sydney is incomparable climatically because Braidwood is located at an altitude of about 690m (2,250 feet), in The Tablelands east of Canberra.

So, what does the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have to say? Quite a lot actually. They opened a weather station at Braidwood Racecourse in 1985, and:

There was a solitary rather cold overnight Summer minimum of 2.3 0C on the 17/Feb/2017, but it was consistently colder in past decades (figure 1).

Figure 1.

There was a solitary warm winter day maximum of 20.9 0C on 22/August/2015, but again, it was consistently warmer in the past, with a notable cluster of up to 22.3 0C in 1995 (figure 2).

Figure 2

1.2) From the Transcript:

MARTIN ROYDS: Yes we have 130 years of rainfall and temperature graphs. Since 1985 to now, the temperatures have been increasing .8 of a degree per decade. So, in that thirty year period, it’s gone up 2.4 degrees, maximum temperature.

However, that would be an eight-degree rise per century, or implausibly about eight times greater than the Australian average as stated by the BoM’s Dr Braganza at 5 video-minutes. Also, the BoM data show no discernible warming trend in the summertime maxima at the racecourse (figure 2).

1.3) From the Transcript (summarising Mr Royds’ views):

“MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: All around the district the dams have been drying up… Braidwood slipped into drought once again and it’s taking a heavy toll on the local farmers.”

However, the available BoM rainfall data for the Racecourse reveals no discernible rainfall reduction trend since 1985 and nothing unusual in annual variability apart from a drier period in the 1990’s (figure 3).

Figure 3

1.4) From Mr Royds’ website:

He runs a business which provides accommodation for up to 52 people to “Live, Learn, Relax at Tombarra” to engage in conferences and workshops etcetera focussing on land and environmental matters. The possibility that he might gain financial benefits from the claims made above should have caught the notice of any nonaligned investigative reporter.

Example 2)

The opening narrative sets-up the programme agenda with several sensational TV news grabs:

2.1) Sydney newsreader:

“Tonight fires break out across the state as Sydney sizzles and the mercury soars, with Penrith recording its hottest day ever at 47.3 degrees.

This claim became rapidly obsolete in the media with widespread correction of a mistaken early tweet from the BoM. Again, your investigative reporter apparently failed to do a quick online search for ‘Penrith 47.3’ or the like. Maurice Newman, a former Chairman of the ABC put it rather succinctly in The Australian:

“…according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, little old Penrith in Sydney, Australia, was the warmest spot on the planet, recording its highest temperature ever, having “broken the all-time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney metropolitan area”. Well, perhaps in all that excitement the bureau can be forgiven for overlooking the fact Penrith Lakes started recording temperatures only in 1995 and for missing a much higher temperature recorded in nearby Richmond in 1939. But they were right. It was hot.”

2.2) Brisbane newsreader:

“Queenslanders have suffered through temperatures at least 10 degrees above average as the heatwave sets in for the weekend.

The claim of “at least 10 degrees above average” is again severally misleading including that sparsely populated areas in the hot centre have a long history of very high fluctuations in temperature that were more severe than those of late. Your programme failed to reveal the proper perspective of various less alarming reports such as in the Brisbane Times on 15/Feb/2018 (even though it too is partly exaggerative or mistaken when compared with the relevant BoM databases):

“[BoM] forecaster Sean Fitzgerald said much of Queensland recorded temperatures above 35 degrees during the week.
In particular, out west is where it is very very hot – temperatures out there are at or exceeding 40 in some places, so quite a bit above average,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

“Lots of places are five degrees above average and some places are even 10 degrees above average, so plenty of warm temperatures about the state.
“You’re talking about places like Charleville, Longreach, Roma even Toowoomba.”

Records were also broken in Winton in central-west Queensland which recorded 46.5 degrees on Wednesday, breaking a February 28, 2016, record of 45.5* degrees, while a couple of hundred kilometres south, in Richmond, a 1983 record of 44 degrees was broken when the town hit 44.5 degrees.”
However, when the BoM databases are examined, all six stations cited were relatively cool in recent times. (e.g. figures 4, 5, 6)

Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6

Mistakenly, the forecaster’s statement about Richmond is strongly contradicted in figure 3, and, although the stated 45.5 in 2018 is apparently OK, one of the corrective BoM tweets on the saga in 2.1 above admitted that it was 2.3 degrees hotter in 1939. Also, the Winton, Roma and Toowoomba examples only have short records that are incapable of providing long-term trend determinations. Moreover, Winton’s 45.5 in 2018 did not break the record high of 46.9 on 1/Dec/2006 anyway!

2.3) Melbourne newsreader:

“The state’s public transport system and power supply have come under pressure as Melbourne baked through its hottest day in two years.

There were 193 days hotter than 40 degrees recorded at the Melbourne Regional Office before its closure in 2015. At Olympic Park, the replacing station, it spiked at 41.7 0C on 6/Jan/2018 atop a modest month average of only 27.2 0C. Some more notable past highs were; 2009* = 46.4, 1939* = 45.6, 1908 = 44.2, 2003 = 44.1, 1862 = 44.0.

So, a single 41.7 0C day in Melbourne is hardly a big deal but it is dressed-up to be a sign of pending doom. * Catastrophic bushfires driven by extreme winds from the hot interior.

Please advise what corrective action will be taken over the seriously misleading statements in all of these seven points, and over failure to check their validity or provide balance.

Ends. [This is the extent of the text and charts as provided by Bob, and I thank him for letting me putting them on the public record here.]

I would encourage others with a strong empirical background to also lodge formal complaints.

An underlying theme of the Four Corners program is that the general situation across Australia is one of declining rainfall. In fact, while the overall trend for south western Australia, the example provided in the program, may be one of decline, in many other areas there has been record high rainfall over the last decade. For example, the highest recorded annual rainfall total since 1900, for the Murray Darling Basin, was in 2010.

Annual rainfall totals for the Murray Darling Basin. There is no evidence of general decline in rainfall, and it is noteworthy the highest annual rainfall ever recorded was in the last decade – in 2010.

Also, last week, I blogged on the issue of the unreliability of the temperature measurements as narrated by Michael Brissenden in this Four Corners program.

Sarah Ferguson and Michael Brissenden Withhold Important Information from the Australian Public Concerning Climate Change

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Australian politicians, and the media they sponsor, have been throwing their hands in the air and screaming unprecedented climate change – particularly over the last two weeks. A focus has been on the record number of new record hot days. But in all of this, there is no mention that the method used to actually measure hot days has changed.

This week’s Four Corners program began by interviewing Karl Braganza from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Braganza explained that it is really only since the 1990s that we have started to see the extreme heat. What he didn’t mention is that a totally new method of measurement came into effect on 1 November 1996 – with the transition continuing, so each new year, additional weather stations have their mercury thermometer replaced with an electronic probe taking one-second spot readings.

For example, the Bureau claimed a new record hottest day for September for the state of Victoria on 23 September 2017, which was actually a one-second spike from an electronic probe installed in June 2012. The Bureau reported this as the hottest September day back to 1889. Yet between 1889 and 1996 a completely different method was being used to measure maximum daily temperatures at Mildura.

According to the Guinness World Records, a record must be standardisable and verifiable. Yet the new record from Mildura was not measured according to world standards of calibration for the use of electronic probes which specifies that one-second readings be averaged over at least one minute. Meanwhile this questionable data is being used to justify ever more expenditure on Australia’s perceived climate catastrophe – without any questioning by leading Australian journalists Michael Brissenden or Sarah Ferguson, who presented Monday night’s program that lamented the new record hot days.

In not reporting that the incidence of “extreme heat” corresponds with a change in how maximum temperatures are measured, these two journalists, Brissenden and Ferguson, have withheld important information from the Australian public.

Given the new, very different, method of measuring temperatures, it would be assumed that there are dozens of reports published by the Bureau that document how comparable the measurements from electronic probes have proven at different locations, and under different conditions. Yet there are none!

The Bureau claims, when asked, that temperatures from its electronic probes and traditional mercury thermometers are comparable – without providing any actual evidence. My analysis of temperature data from Mildura indicates that there is a statistically significant different – with the first probe (in place from 1996 to 2000) recording too cool, and subsequent probes too warm relative to the mercury thermometer (often by up to 0.4 degrees Celsius).

I have been attempting to bring this to the attention of the media, particularly the ABC for some months. But their journalists turn-away. They don’t want any scrutiny of this much revered institution, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Gambling at an Australian mobile casino is a popular and fun pastime for many people. It’s easy to jump in at any time and many casinos have a very wide range of games to choose from. The popularity of online casinos is based not only on the good odds but also on the fact that you can play games from the comfort of your own home, which is why mobile casinos in Australia have developed at such a rapid pace.

Even in the Australian parliament there is a closing-of-ranks. Rather than consider my evidence, Monday before last Senators Richard Di Natale and Anne Urquhart from the Australian Greens claimed that the questions I have been raising about the integrity of the temperature data amounted to ‘climate denial’ and harassment of the Bureau’s CEO, Andrew Johnson.

In reality, my few emails to Johnson have focused on the single issue of how temperatures are measured, which really has nothing whatsoever to do with denying climate change. Indeed, if we are to accurately quantify the magnitude of global warming, then the integrity of the temperature databases is paramount. Yet the number of documented anomalies continues to grow – as does the indifference of our political class.

Sarah Ferguson introducing Michael Brissenden on Monday night’s ABC Four Corner’s program that ostensibly reported on climate change. Four Corner’s is a publicly funded news program, that claims to be investigative. On Monday night it could be best described as climate porn, or climate propaganda with critical information withheld – perhaps through ignorance.