Jennifer Marohasy

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Media Rules Prohibit Dissent

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MODERN history suggests that democracy aligns, and progresses, with the expansion of civil liberties, including access by ordinary citizens to government information. But the new media reform bills tabled in [Australian] federal Parliament last week appear unashamedly about the introduction of an additional layer of bureaucracy unaccountable to the public or the judiciary.

To address the potential problem of a concentration of media control, the government appears determined to concentrate the power of oversight into the hands of a single political appointee – the public interest media advocate (PIMA) – entrusted to be wise enough to act in the public interest.

The PIMA will administer public interest tests in the merger or takeovers of media interests. But unlike other areas of government where there is a public interest test, such as the application of freedom of information laws, the decisions of the PIMA will not be subject to judicial review or appeal through the courts.

It may even be unique in this respect.

Under the constitution, the doctrine of the separation of powers divides the institutions of government into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial.

The legislature makes the laws, the executive put the laws into operation, and the judiciary interprets the laws.

This doctrine is often assumed to be one of the cornerstones of fair government. It enables an entity separate from the executive to review a government decision such as that resulting from the implementation of a public interest test.

But this is possible only if the specific legislation embodying a public interest test has incorporated this safeguard for an appeal through the courts.

This is the case, for example under freedom of information legislation, FOI. In contrast, under the proposed media reform legislation, review of decisions will not be available.

The explanatory memorandum says these processes would be costly and time consuming to review, but we consider such an argument entirely unpersuasive.

The new public interest test will be considered in addition to the existing Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s substantial lessening of competition test, the Australian Communication and Media Authority’s existing media diversity tests and where necessary, the Foreign Investment Review Board’s national interest test.

The idea of applying a public interest test to determine the acceptability of any proposed further concentrations in media control or ownership may be appealing to some who may view this as an extra safeguard.

However, let’s consider how well a public interest test may operate in practice with reference to FOI.

Under FOI, a public interest test is applied, in some circumstances, by government agencies and departments to determine public access rights to documents.

This test requires the government department to state relevant factors, both for and against disclosure.

This should be, in theory, followed by a balancing of these factors, each objectively examined and given an appropriate weighting, leading to an impartial decision on whether the public interest is better served by disclosure or by non-disclosure.

When we applied in 2010 to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) for disclosure of documents relating to expenditure on certain science programs it administered, our request was initially refused.

Following a protracted appeal process through the Information Commissioner that included scrutiny of the manner of application of the public interest test, the original decision was reversed and the documents eventually were fully disclosed.

Had this review failed, it would have been possible for us to appeal against the decision through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Federal Court and the High Court.

No such appeal will be possible when the PIMA hands down his or her decisions.

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This opinion article by John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy was first published in the Australian Financial Review on Monday 18th March, 2013. http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/media_rules_prohibit_dissent_YY0bcVGgqdzXvNgEXC8gLO

Climategate 3: Thank you Mr FOIA

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SOMEONE hacked into the Climatic Research Unit, CRU, at the University of East Anglia and published thousands of confidential emails between leading climate scientists online in November 2009 [1]. Many of the emails showed that leading proponents of anthropogenic global warming were having great difficulty justifying their own propaganda. One of my favourite emails is from Kevin Trenberth, Head of Climate Analysis at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, to the infamous Michael Mann complaining that there has been no global warming:

“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather)…

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

While the hack was widely condemned by mainstream climate scientists and the hacker would likely go to jail for a long time – if only he could be found. For me, the stolen emails represented a first opportunity to see the extraordinary deceit and corruption within the mainstream climate science community; the very people running the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, at the United Nations.

Indeed I have always held the hacker in high esteem. He is one of my heroes.   Along with Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), he is a great champion of science.

Anyway, yesterday the hacker provided several high profile bloggers, including Anthony Watts, with password access to some 220,000 additional emails!

WUWT will be publishing some of the new material over the next few days and probably also weeks and months [2].

In a covering email [3] the hacker explained he had done this because he was keen to off-load the remaining material and was not in a position to sort through the material and cull the sensitive and potentially socially damaging material:

“I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.
Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.”

I have often wondered who the hacker was, and what motivated him. In this latest email he provides significant insights. In particular, like many readers of this blog, he is clearly concerned about the increasing misallocation of resources by government in the name of anthropogenic global warming.

He is acutely aware that the opportunity for any one individual in a community to be fed, clothed and educated depends to a large extent on the collective wealth and wellbeing of that society. Towards this end, the covering email is also a plea for the better allocation of the “assets” at our collective disposal.

Mr FOIA, as he calls himself, wrote:

“Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Clearly Mr FOIA also places a premium on the truth, writing:

“Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.”

Thank you Mr FOIA.

 

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[1] All the emails, documents and computer code, from the original release in November 2009, can be downloaded from Wikileaks at 

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails,_data,_models,_1996-2009

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[2] I’m guessing that What’s Up With That will be a best place to find new emails as they are released. This morning the following was posted…

[Read more…] about Climategate 3: Thank you Mr FOIA

National Parks Fueled Summer Bushfires in the Pilliga

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IN January 2013, from the comfort of their lounge rooms, many Australians watched the forests of the Pilliga burn. The word Pilliga wasn’t mentioned in the sensational reportage as such. The stories were primarily about the devastation and drama of Australian bushfires. Mention was made of the town of Coonabarabran and of the Warrumbungles National Park.

The extent of the bushfire that ravaged the region – that also includes Baradine, Coolah and Dunedo – was in part a consequence of the creation of large areas of national park by a government that promised the creation of the National Parks would ensure the permanent conservation of the forests. There was no mention of this false promise in any of the television reportage.

Yet it is such recent history. Indeed in May 2005 then Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, banned logging in many of the Pilliga forests converting them to National Park and claiming this would ensure their “permanent conservation”.

Bob Carr said that these forests were iconic, the inference was that they were natural, and it was clearly stated that their conversion to National Park would ensure conservation. In reality most of the Pilliga forests are less than 160-years-old and were the creation of a timber industry.

When European explorers first saw this country in the 1820s they described much of the region as grassland and open woodlands. Pastoral leases followed and by the early 1870s it was estimated that 25,000 sheep and 30,000 cattle were grazing where forests would later grow. Severe drought resulted in stock deaths and the abandonment of the leases before flooding rains in the early 1880s triggered a massive germination of cypress and Eucalyptus.

Timber communities established. Wood cutters thinned the cypress, carefully managed cool fires to reduce the fuel loads that quickly accumulated on the forests floor, created fire trails and described themselves as the “eyes and ears” of the forest. So, instead of grassland or dense acacia, magnificent Pilliga forest grew.

Armchair environmentalists came to revere the same forests, writing of their incredible biodiversity and about the barking owls.

The timber communities began losing access to the forests that they had created in 1967 when 80,239 hectares became the Pilliga Nature Reserve. In 1986, under a new government-enforced management regime, the annual rate of cypress pine sawlog production was reduced to 53,000 cubic metres. The annual forest growth rate was estimated to be 70,000 cubic metres.

In 1999 there was a new and aggressive push to convert more state forest to national park. A decision was due in 2002 but it was not until May 2005 that the timber industry, until then generating $38.4 million and employing 420 people, was told that it finally had to go.

The Australian public was told that the NSW government had saved these iconic forests.

Not true.

But it is the victor who gets to write the history in his favor, and so the origin of the magnificent Pilliga forests that were so badly burnt this summer, and the timber communities that nurtured them over more than three generations is ignored – to one day be forgotten.

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This is a modified version of an article by Jennifer Marohasy first published in The Land newspaper. The image is from a photograph from a bushfire in the Pilliga forest in, probably, the 2006-2007 summer.

Cooking Books for Hot Summers

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The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has “confirmed” that it is been the hottest summer on record in Australia. But I’m sceptical.

The “record breaking hot summer” is apparently a statistical fact derived from simply averaging across 104 or 112 localities – depending on whom at the Bureau is providing the information.  No mention is made of how the temperatures for all of these localities have been “corrected” over recent years through the ACORN program [2]. In general the “corrections” are such that temperature records for specific localities pre-1970 are adjusted down, while records for specific localities post-1970 are adjusted up.

In their media release [1] attention is drawn to the town of Moomba in South Australia which apparently had the highest temperature recorded at 49.6 degrees C. Interestingly the station of Moomba only opened in 1972 – this of course is not reported in the same media release.

I’ve been trying to get a good long temperature series for some rainfall hindcasting that I’ve been doing for southeast Queensland, and have found that none of the Brisbane temperature recording stations have had any permanence. While once the main temperature recording station for Brisbane was in a bay-side suburb, in recent years the temperature recording station has been moved to the middle of East Brisbane just south of the city’s CBD – where coincidently it tends to be hotter.

The Bureau’s media release goes on to claim this summer follows a pattern of extremely hot summers in various parts of the world over the last few years.

The phenomena whereby government climate scientists correct the historical temperature record to support their theory of anthropogenic global warming is not unique to Australia. In fact the Australian Bureau of Meteorology may be simply following instructions from The Team. The Team are, of course, that notorious in-group who run policy at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. In the leaked Climategate emails there is discussion involving The Team focused on the need to reduce global sea surface temperatures, SST, during the early part of the 20th Century by about 0.15 degree C.. By reducing, the blip in SST temperatures for example between 1940 and 1945, it is suggested that the rate and magnitude of global warming for the period 1910 to 1945 can be made to not exceed the rate and magnitude of warming for the 35 year to 2009.

Interestingly recent “corrections down” to historical global temperatures by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISS, have been concentrated in this period, Figure 1. The net effect of the adjustments has been to generate a more smoothly increasing global temperature since 1880, and reduce a warming blip that occurred in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The US National Climatic Data Center has also been making “corrections” to the historical global temperature record, Figure 2.  Indeed through administrative means January 1915 can be made to appear significantly cooler than January 2013, Figure 2.

This used to be known as cooking the books, however, of course, our esteemed climate scientists have detailed justifications for all the changes they have been busily making to all the global historical temperature databases.

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1. Issued March 1, 2013: Bureau of Meteorology confirms it’s been the hottest summer on record… http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20130301.shtml
2. A team of independent auditors, bloggers and scientists went through the BOM “High Quality” dataset and found significant errors, omissions and inexplicable adjustments, read more here… http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/threat-of-anao-audit-means-australias-bom-throws-out-temperature-set-starts-again-gets-same-results/
3. Figures 1 and 2 are courtesy of Ole Humlum, Professor of Geosiences at the University of Oslo, Norway.  Click on the above charts for a slightly improved view. Visit http://www.climate4you.com for the best view and background information.

Your Temperatures Diddled

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ALMOST exactly three years ago Michael Hammer showed that the official temperature rise profile for the 20th century in the United States is largely, if not entirely, an artifact of adjustments applied after the raw data is collected from the weather stations [1]. It was a very neat little analysis, first published at this blog. It was a neat little analysis that was, for the most part, ignored.

Back then, meteorologist Anthony Watts was busy documenting evidence of problems with the official temperature record in the US because of poor placement of weather stations and Ross McKitrick was attempting to calculate just how artificially elevated temperatures might be as a consequence.

Then interestingly, just last month, John Hinderaker cited the original study by Mr Hammer at Powerline [2] and other studies, concluding:

‘These disclosures highlight a key fact with respect to global temperature data: the data sets are utterly lacking in integrity. Global warming alarmists confidently announce that worldwide temperatures have risen by, say .1 degree over a decade. It would be extraordinarily difficult to take measurements at many locations around the globe that would actually demonstrate that proposition. But the real situation is much worse: no one tells you what temperatures were actually measured at the world’s weather stations. Rather, they report claims of global warming based on “adjusted” temperature data–adjusted by alarmists, with the systematic purpose of manufacturing a rising temperature trend. If you subtract the “adjustments,” it may well be that there has been no net warming over the last 100 years at all.’

Ho Hum. But no one was publishing the proof in the technical literature.

[Read more…] about Your Temperatures Diddled

How Scientific Ideas Become Fashionable (Part 2)

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MICHAEL Crichton wrote the Oscar-winning science fiction adventure Jurassic Park. But screen writing was not his first career, he studied medicine at Harvard, and later in life became very concerned about environmentalism and science, and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction. In a lecture to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 2003 he said:

“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.”

For sure every day we are bombarded with information from the internet, radio and television and making sense of it can be difficult.

Scientists are meant to know the difference between fact and fiction and as a first check of the reliability of a source of information they will often ask if it has been “peer-reviewed”. Peer-review means that research findings are conducted and presented to a standard that other scientists working within that field consider acceptable. This is normally achieved through publication in a scientific journal and involves the editor of the journal asking for comment on the validity, significance and originality of the work from other scientists before publication. In short, the system of peer-review means scientific research is subject to independent scrutiny but it doesn’t guarantee the truth of the research finding.

In theory rebuttals play an equal or more important role than peer review in guaranteeing the integrity of science. By rebuttals I mean articles, also in peer-reviewed journals, that show by means of contrary evidence and argument, that an earlier claim was false. By pointing out flaws in scientific papers that have passed peer-review, rebuttals, at least theoretically, enable scientific research programs to self-correct. But in reality most rebuttals are totally ignored and so fashionable ideas often persist even when they have been disproven.

[Read more…] about How Scientific Ideas Become Fashionable (Part 2)