Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

temperates

Willie Soon Explains About the Sun, and How to Better Report Science

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Temperatures are always changing, and the pattern of change tends to follow cycles. But most science reporters don’t understand this, because they have very little understanding of the solar system and are promoted within their organisations based on their capacity to repeat and repackage rather than to analysis.

For most locations on this Earth, temperatures change daily as the Earth spins on its axis relative to the Sun creating day and night. (Where I live daily changes in temperature are in the order of 10 degrees Celsius.) Temperatures change with the seasons because of the tilt of the Earth relative to its orbit around the Sun. Then there are the ice ages, because of changes in the orbital path of the Earth around the Sun. All these changes are essentially driven by the Sun, or at least the Earth’s distance and position relative to the Sun’s irradiance that is ever changing but in measurable and predictable ways.

Yet the elites, who control our once-independent scientific institutions, would have you believe that carbon dioxide is more powerful and has a more significant effect on temperatures than the Sun.

Instead of acknowledging the cycles, they would have you believe that temperatures are rising in a linear way and that this has created an imbalance that is causing the world to overheat and that this is all your fault. They have an agenda, it is not about communicating the complexities of the solar system, but rather about social and economic revolution.

A recent paper with many authors, including my friend and colleague Willie Soon, explains in detail that the institutions (most notably the IPCC) are mistaken in their assessment of the importance of carbon dioxide relative to the Sun, at least in part because in making their calculations they fail to adequately consider all the relevant measures of solar irradiance and are somewhat muddled when it comes to actual temperature trends for specific locations. (Of course, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology deliberately muddles temperature trends by remodelling the raw data.)

The paper by Willie and colleagues is rather long, 71 pages in the pre-print that I have. It is long because it goes into detail, explaining the potential complexity of solar irradiance including the sixteen different ways of measuring changes in ‘total solar variability’ since the 19th century and earlier, and even how the sun-climate effect is more pronounced at certain places on Earth.

The paper was recently published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics Volume 21, beginning on page 131, and can be downloaded by clicking here:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131

This is an important contribution to our understanding of not only total solar irradiance and how this is measured, but also how the institutions muddle the temperature, and also the solar irradiance, measurements. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is an all-out campaign to discredit this important research by Willie Soon and his colleagues. The campaign appears to be openly supported by Facebook as detailed in the following correspondence from Willie and two of the papers co-authors, Ronan and Michael Connolly.

In defence of their recent paper, and in a letter to a ‘Facebook Fact Checkers’, Willie Soon et al. suggest how science journalists might report contentious issues. Specifically, with reference to a recent paper by Danish philosopher Mikkel Gerken. They suggest:

1. Inclusive Reliable Reporting

Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report hypotheses in a manner that favours the most reliably based ones by indicating the nature and strength of their respective scientific justifications.

2. Epistemically Balanced Reporting

Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report opposing hypotheses in a manner that reflects the nature and strength of their respective scientific justifications or lack thereof.

Obviously, this type of reporting would be somewhat time consuming, certainly much more so than the current approach where journalists tend to simply and conveniently assume that the more important the affiliation the more reliable the science. Of course, in this age of disinformation where the populous is mostly held in contempt by the elites, it would be a revolutionary way to report science. A first requirement though would be a level of scientific literacy from science reporters.

A chart from the important new paper by Connolly, Soon et al. 2021

The feature image at the top of this blog post is of the Sun going down over Darwin.

Following is the recent letter from Willie and colleagues to the misguided Facebook ‘Fact Checker’.

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Dear Drs. Vincent and Forrester,

We are writing this open letter to you because it has recently come to our attention that your Climate Feedback website has published an article making multiple false or misleading claims about an Epoch Times newspaper article (by Alex Newman) that reported on a new peer-reviewed paper we co-authored. Your website’s “fact- check”/”feedback” also made false or misleading claims about our paper.

This means your website is effectively spreading the very misinformation that you purport to be trying to fight. Additionally, because your website is currently one of Facebook’s approved “independent fact-checkers”, anybody who shared or tries to share a link to the Epoch Times article now receives a warning.

In other words, not only is your “fact-check” promoting misinformation, but you are effectively hindering the public from sharing important information with their friends and family.

We are writing to you to ask you to immediately correct this erroneous “fact-check” and to inform any groups that may have been using your website as an “independent fact-checker” (including Facebook) of the error.

We are also cc’ing and bcc’ing various parties who are either directly affected by the consequences of this “fact-check” or may be more generally concerned about the arbitrariness of the “fact-checks” offered by websites such as yours, and the problem of “who will ‘fact-check’ the fact-checkers?”

We believe the discussion below is of relevance for everybody given the recent trend of the media, social media and internet search engines towards using “independent fact-checkers” like yourselves for down-ranking, suppressing or even deleting content. Therefore, we have chosen to make this an open letter. We encourage people to share our letter and our accompanying “fact-check fact-check” with the public – although we ask people to first redact the e-mail addresses.

The article in question is this one edited by Dr. Lambert Baraut-Guinet.
Dr. Baraut-Guinet claims to have “fact-checked” an Epoch Times newspaper article by Alex Newman which compared the findings of our recent scientific review paper to the findings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1’s recent 6th Assessment Report (AR6).

Baraut-Guinet alleges that Newman made false claims that were “incorrect” and “misleading” in his reporting. He similarly asserts that several other media outlets publishing articles repeating some of Newman’s reporting were “incorrect” and “misleading”. Baraut-Guinet also asserts that our peer-reviewed paper makes “incorrect” and “misleading” claims.

Background to Newman’s article:

Our paper that Newman was reporting on is a detailed scientific review on the complex challenges of establishing how much of a role solar activity has played in northern hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century (and earlier). It was co-authored by 23 experts in the fields of solar physics and of climate science from 14 different countries and was published in the peer-reviewed journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA).

The title of our paper is, “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate”, and it was published online in early August. Coincidentally, a few days later, the UN’s IPCC AR6 was published. While the IPCC AR6 had concluded that it was “unequivocal” that recent climate change was human- caused, our findings were much more circumspect and cautious, e.g., from the abstract of our RAA paper:

For all five Northern Hemisphere temperature series, different TSI estimates suggest everything from no role for the Sun in recent decades (implying that recent global warming is mostly human-caused) to most of the recent global warming being due to changes in solar activity (that is, that recent global warming is mostly natural). It appears that previous studies (including the most recent IPCC reports) which had prematurely concluded the former, had done so because they failed to adequately consider all the relevant estimates of TSI and/or to satisfactorily address the uncertainties still associated with Northern Hemisphere temperature trend estimates. Therefore, several recommendations on how the scientific community can more satisfactorily resolve these issues are provided.

That is, the IPCC was offering a remarkably confident claim about the “attribution” of recent climate change, whereas we were explicitly warning that it was too premature to be drawing such conclusions. Our analysis found an alarmingly wide range of plausible estimates for a solar contribution (in the paper itself we elaborate on how plausible estimates for the solar contribution range from 0%-100% of the long-term warming since the mid-19th century!).

Newman was apparently intrigued by the contrast between the two studies both coincidentally published at around the same time. He interviewed several of us to learn more about our findings. He also reached out to the IPCC for their response, as well as to other scientists who might disagree with our analysis as well as some who might agree. If you read his article, his efforts to carefully and openly present multiple perspectives are self-evident.

If you compare Newman’s ‘balanced reporting’ journalistic approach to the framework you provide at Science Feedback for informative reporting, it is clear that Newman was taking considerable care to avoid any of the aspects of misinformation that you identify as problematic. In contrast, as we will detail in the attached ‘fact-check fact-check’, Baraut-Guinet’s ‘fact-checking’ of Newman’s article is littered with almost all of the hallmarks of misinformation which your framework warns against.
Yet, ironically, Baraut-Guinet’s “fact-check” is currently being used by Facebook (and probably other platforms) as a justification for censoring Newman’s article.

According to your website’s “About” page “Our first mission is to help create an Internet where users will have access to scientifically sound and trustworthy information. We also provide feedback to editors and journalists about the credibility of information published by their outlets.” Therefore, we hope you share at least some of our concern about the fact that this article by Baraut-Guinet on your website is now promoting misinformation – and as a result effectively misleading editors, journalists and also several of your partners & funders that you list on your website, e.g., Facebook’s “Third Party Fact Checking program”.

We hope that after reviewing the information in this e-mail, you will get Baraut-Guinet to correct his erroneous analysis, update his flawed verdict of “Incorrect” & “Misleading” to “Correct” & “Accurate”, and also to contact the various groups (including Facebook’s fact checking program) who have mistakenly used his flawed analysis to warn them that your website had posted an erroneous “fact-check”.

In our “fact-check fact-check” we explain how the approach we took to reviewing the scientific literature in our RAA paper was fundamentally different to that taken by the IPCC. We also explain that our objectives were fundamentally different too.
The IPCC explain on their website that they were set up by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in conjunction with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with the primary objective of providing “scientific information that [governments] can use to develop climate policies” (https://www.ipcc.ch/about/, accessed 5th September 2021). As we explain in the fact-check fact-check, the specific climate policies the IPCC are interested in are those that will help the UNEP in arranging international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On the other hand, our primary objective was “to convey to the rest of the scientific community the existence of several unresolved problems, as well as to establish those points where there is general agreement”.

That is, the IPCC’s scientific assessments are carried out to help governments in implementing the UN’s political goals, while our scientific assessments are carried out to help the scientific community (of which all 23 of us are members) to improve our collective understanding of the causes of climate change.

So, different goals. But, we also used different methods.

The IPCC’s approach is a “consensus-driven” one of trying to identify a “scientific consensus” on each of the key issues. This approach works very well when there is indeed universal scientific agreement on the point. However, it is problematic whenever there is scientific disagreement on a given issue. And ironically, most scientific research occurs when there is ongoing scientific disagreement on the subject. Therefore, this is a surprisingly common occurrence. The IPCC’s general approach to dealing with scientific disagreement appears to be to use “expert judgement” to identify the most “likely” perspective on the subject (ideally one which best suits the UNEP’s aims) and then use “expert judgement” to dismiss those studies which dissent from that perspective.

Several researchers have praised the IPCC for this “consensus-driven” approach as they say it allows the IPCC to “speak with one voice for climate science” (e.g., see Beck et al. 2014; Hoppe & Rödder 2019). This is very helpful for the UNEP’s goals, since it allows the governments to focus on their negotiations without being distracted by scientific disagreements within the scientific community. However, we believe that it is unfortunately hindering scientific progress and the process of scientific inquiry.
For this reason, we explicitly avoided the IPCC’s “consensus-driven” approach and instead chose “…to emphasize where dissenting scientific opinions exist as well as where there is scientific agreement”. As Francis Bacon noted in the 17th century, “if we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.”

These are different goals and different methods. So ultimately, it is not that surprising that we came to different conclusions on several key scientific questions.
When different scientists come to different conclusions by following different scientific approaches, it is very challenging to decide which one is “factual” and which is not. We appreciate that this can create problems for an “independent fact-checker” like your organization when asked to weigh in on a scientific disagreement. However, as we will discuss later, maybe this is not something that you should even be trying to do.

Science thrives best when scientists are allowed to disagree with each other. Rather than trying to shut down one side of a given scientific disagreement as “incorrect” and promoting the other side as “correct”, maybe we should be welcoming the fact that scientists are still “doing science”.

Who has been cc’ed and bcc’ed?

A major problem with the current set-up of your website is that you purport to provide “fact-checks” or “feedbacks” on articles, but if anybody disputes your “feedback”, the only formal mechanism you currently offer on the website is to submit a comment through your on-line “contact us” form. We were unable to find an e-mail address for Dr. Baraut- Guinet, the editor in charge of the article in question. However, you are currently listed on the Science Feedback website as the Founder & Director (Dr. Vincent) and Science Editor, Climate and Ecology (Dr. Forrester), and we were able to find your e-mails on-line. Therefore, we assume that you are the appropriate people from your website to contact, and that you can contact him.

We have also cc’ed and bcc’ed several people whose professional reputations have been directly attacked by Dr. Baraut-Guinet through his accusations, as well as several people whose reputations have directly or indirectly been used by Dr. Baraut-Guinet to justify his claims.

Specifically, we have cc’ed Alex Newman, since Dr. Baraut-Guinet is (falsely) accusing him of not having carried out his journalistic duties. We have also bcc’ed our 20 co-authors on the research paper in question (Connolly et al., 2021, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131), since Dr. Baraut-Guinet is smearing our scientific reputations by (falsely, as we explain in our ‘fact-check fact-check’) accusing us of making “incorrect” and “misleading” claims in our scientific research.

Additionally, we have bcc’ed Prof. Tim Osborn, Dr. Britta Voss and Prof. Patrick Brown. Dr. Baraut-Guinet has taken quotes from each of them from previous reviews on your website, and copied-and-pasted them the “Scientists’ feedback” for his “fact-check” on Alex Newman’s article.

Your Science Feedback framework claims that the “Scientists’ feedback” is needed before the editor can reach a verdict:

“Process for deciding on a verdict
The final ruling regarding the verdict attributed to the claim is made by a Science Feedback editor based on suggestions by the scientists contributing to the review.”

Therefore, it should have been a warning flag that none of the three scientists listed in the “Scientists’ feedback” section had contributed suggestions specifically about Alex Newman’s reporting. Instead, their ”feedback” was copied- and-pasted from feedback on previous articles or claims.

We appreciate that Baraut-Guinet did include an explanatory note for each of them saying, “[ This comment comes from a previous review…”. But, many casual readers would miss this. Indeed, we have already heard from several friends who independently told us about the article and none of them had noticed this caveat.

At any rate, we have bcc’ed these three scientists to let them know that Baraut-Guinet is using quotes from them on different articles to imply that they had also directly commented on Alex Newman’s article.

We have also cc’ed Jonathan Lynn (Head of Communications and Media Relations of IPCC), the representative from the IPCC that provided statements to Alex Newman for his article, since Baraut-Guinet misleadingly implies in his article that Newman failed to present the IPCC’s position on the various points made. This is factually inaccurate as well as misleading, lacking in context and also a Strawman argument (i.e., 4 of the types of misinformation criticised by your framework), since Newman states clearly in his article that he specifically reached out to the IPCC for comment, and reported the IPCC’s responses. This included a clarifying statement from Prof. Panmao Zhai (co-chair of Working Group 1 AR6), who we have bcc’ed.

Finally, we have bcc’ed multiple people who we know are concerned about how influential “fact-checking” organizations like yours have become and are wondering “who will fact-check the fact-checkers?” We think they will find our “fact-check fact-check” of your fact-checker, Dr. Baraut-Guinet’s article helpful. We suspect they will also be interested to see how your organisation will respond to this problem.

Recommendation 1: We recommend you correct the existing “fact-check”/”feedback” on Alex Newman’s article. Currently, your website asserts that his reporting was “Incorrect” and “Misleading”. This should be changed to “Correct” and “Accurate” immediately.

Recommendation 2: Those groups that are using Climate Feedback as a “fact-checker” should be contacted to let them know of your website’s erroneous analysis of this article.

Recommendation 3: All of your editors should be reminded that your “framework for claim-level reviews” was
presumably not to be used as an inspiration for what to do, but rather for identifying misinformation.

However, once this is done, we would also encourage you (and others reading this open letter) to consider whether the very idea of “fact-checking” on science reporting is as good an idea as it might initially seem.

Commentary on whether this plan of “fact-checking” is working
Finally, we think that it is time for society to reflect on whether this recent trend in “fact-checking” is wise. We note that a lot of this trend can be specifically traced back to debates over journalistic approaches to the scientific reporting of climate change.

Specifically, in the early 2000s, some researchers who believed that the IPCC reports offered the definitive “scientific consensus” on climate change were frustrated that journalists would still report the perspectives of scientists who disagreed with the IPCC reports. In particular, the Boykoff & Boykoff (2004) paper argued that the journalistic norm of “balanced reporting” was leading to a ‘false balance’ by implying that the supporters of the IPCC reports and the critics represented a 50:50 split among the scientific community.

This study (and more generally the argument) was highly influential and convinced many journalists that they had a duty to stop carrying out what they assumed was ‘false balance’ and instead only report on the scientific perspectives they believed were “correct”. That is, on any given scientific disagreement, the journalists would be obliged to find out what the “scientific consensus” was. If a scientific study disagreed with this consensus, it was not to be reported on.
This alternative journalistic approach is often referred to by its supporters as “reliable reporting”, although critics might call it “narrative-driven journalism” (or “ideological reporting” if the critic disagreed with the journalist’s political ideology).

A major problem with relying on this “reliable reporting” approach to journalism is that it effectively requires the journalist to act as the arbiter of an often complex scientific disagreement. When even the scientists themselves are in disagreement, this puts a very heavy burden on the journalist. Nonetheless, over the years, the argument about ‘false balance’ has convinced many journalists to abandon the classical ‘balanced reporting’ approach.

Today, it is very rare to find journalists like Alex Newman who continue to apply the ‘balanced reporting’ approach when covering scientific disagreements. As a result, over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly difficult to find open-minded and honest discussions on these scientific issues in the traditional media.
However, until recently, it was still relatively easy to find those discussions elsewhere by using social media and internet searches. Therefore, social media platforms and internet search engines are now being criticised for still allowing people to find out about ongoing scientific disagreements. As a result, these platforms are being increasingly pressured to actively suppress “misinformation”. Essentially, they are being pressured to adopt the same techniques of suppression described above which were applied to the media.

But, since the original premise of most social media platforms and internet search engines was to allow users to share and search for the information they wanted, if these platforms engage in this suppression, it is an especially draconian form of censorship.

To try and justify this censorship as “reducing the spread of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’”, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google/Youtube and others have started relying on “independent fact-checkers” such as Climate Feedback. However, as we demonstrated in our “fact-check fact-check”, attempting to “fact-check” on issues where there are ongoing scientific disagreements (as Dr. Baraut-Guinet did here) is very risky – and can easily result in generating misinformation (as Dr. Baraut-Guinet did here).

Therefore, we suggest that it is time for a re-think on the current reliance on “fact-checkers”, and also for journalists to re-think the “reliable reporting” approach.
Personally, we think that a return to encouraging “balanced reporting” would be a good option. However, we note that there was a recent paper by the Danish philosopher, Prof. Mikkel Gerken, which presents several options: Gerken (2020), “How to balance Balanced Reporting and Reliable Reporting”, Philosophy Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11098-019-01362-5 [The paper is paywalled. However, if you don’t have access, but are comfortable using the controversial “sci-hub” website, you could probably find a copy that way].

Gerken describes the above approaches to journalism when it comes to science reporting as follows:

1. Balanced Reporting. Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report opposing hypotheses in a manner that does not favor any one of them.

2. Reliable Reporting. Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report the most reliably based hypotheses and avoid reporting hypotheses that are not reliably based.
He agrees that there are valid concerns about both approaches. The first approach can potentially lead to “false balance”, while the second approach can potentially lead to narrative-driven journalism, or even propaganda.

Therefore, he suggests two potential compromises:
3. Inclusive Reliable Reporting. Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report hypotheses in a manner that favors the most reliably based ones by indicating the nature and strength of their respective scientific justifications.

4. Epistemically Balanced Reporting. Science reporters should, whenever feasible, report opposing hypotheses in a manner that reflects the nature and strength of their respective scientific justifications or lack thereof.

He favours the 4th option. However, either the 3rd or 4th option rules out the necessity for the 2nd option of suppressing the existence of genuine scientific disagreements, and also avoids the risk with the 1st option of potentially creating a ‘false balance’.

In our opinion, the public are not as prone to ‘false balance’ as the proponents of Option 2 insist. We think that most people recognise that if a journalist provides two competing perspectives on a scientific issue it does not necessarily mean that the scientific community is split 50:50 on it. However, for journalists who are concerned about the risk of ‘false balance’, options 3 and 4 might be suitable alternatives to option 1.

Indeed, arguably, Alex Newman’s approach in his Epoch Times article combines elements of Options 1, 3 and 4.

Importantly, it is only with Option 2 that there is a necessity for “independent fact-checkers” for science reporting. For the other options, the readers are made aware of the existence of differing scientific perspectives and it is up to them to investigate further if they are interested.

Regards,
Dr Ronan Connolly, Dr. Willie Soon and Dr. Michael Connolly

Update 30th September 2021

Interestingly when I cross posted this at Facebook it was very popular with more than 10,000 impressions:

Just filing this here.

Cooling the Past: Made Easy for Paul Barry

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It is not disputed that Blair Trewin under the supervision of David Jones (both working at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology) remodel all the historical temperature data generating trends and statistics that look quite different from the actual measurements.

The remodelled series are then passed on to university and CSIRO climate scientists who base much of their climate research on these ‘second-hand’ statistics.

So, when Michael Mann and David Karoly tell you it’s getting hotter and hotter, this is their interpretation of Blair Trewin’s statistics, not their interpretation of the actual data.

When I say there needs to be more scrutiny of what Blair does to the actual measurements, I’m simply making a request.

As Andrew Bolt explains in his column yesterday harshly entitled ‘On the deceit of Paul Barry’:

Marohasy does not say the Bureau is “part of a huge conspiracy”. What she does say is undeniably true: the Bureau has repeatedly adjusted its data, with the result that the past looks cooler and therefore the warming greater.

The only dispute is over whether the Bureau has done this correctly, to make the data more accurate. It says yes, Marohasy says no.

What evidence does Barry offer that she’s wrong? None. No interest. All he has is mockery and an appeal to his mob.

Thanks Andrew, for explaining the situation so succinctly.

It is the case that none of the adjusting is denied by Blair at the Bureau.

To help Paul Barry and others explore what Blair has actually done, my colleague Jaco Vlok has created a table with an interactive drop-down menu for each of the 112 weather stations with remodelled data.

The adjusting is laid-out, and explained here:

https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/acorn-sat-v1-vs-v2/

Go and have a play!

For example, if you click on the link, and scroll down (the 112 stations are listed alphabetically) all the way to Wagga, and then across to TMax you will find a chart that shows the raw data, and then the Blair Trewin reconstructions for this weather station that is used to calculate national averages and global warming.

One of the charts from the drop-down table created for Paul Barry by my friend and colleague Jaco Vlok.

First Blair created ACORN V1, that was back in 2011.

ACORN V2 is the data reworked to further increase the rate of warming.

Thanks Jaco. Thanks Andrew.

Now, Paul … go and have a look, and play. It is not a conspiracy, nor is it rocket science. But understanding can take time, especially when it is not what you might expect Bureau employees to be doing to the historical temperature data.

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The feature image shows Jaco Vlok (far left) backing me up in a dispute about the value of remodelling historical temperature data.

After the Tragic Wildfires: History is Rewritten or Forgotten

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The infernos of January 2020 will be remembered for destroying so much of southeastern Australia. I weep for the burns’ victims. So many people and so much wildlife in so much pain.

In terms of area of land burnt, these last few weeks may be recorded as unprecedented. This has everything to do with our mismanagement of the landscape, including the lack of hazard reduction burning especially in eucalyptus forests.

We were warned in the report from the 1939 Royal Commission by Judge Leonard Stretton, and in the more than 18 major inquiries since, forests are potentially dangerous and explosive places. Fuel loads must be kept within acceptable limits.

Blaming the recent fires on climate change is to rewrite our temperature history, something the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been doing for some time. This has involved the:

  1. remodelling of measured values
  2. addition of hotter locations to only the most recent years in the compilation of a national average trend
  3. transition to electronic probes that are designed to record hotter for the same weather, and
  4. deleting of the hottest day in the official record, which was January 3, 1909.

These misdeeds have all been comprehensively documented, yet the current government turns a blind eye, while referring the matter of a firefighter who claims an Indigenous heritage to the Australian federal police. It is as though we are ruled over by a political elite more interested in continuing subsidies to electricity companies, and continuing funding to corrupt coral reef researchers – both of which have a vested interest in catastrophe – rather than listening to practical solutions to these and other major environment issues currently confronting Australia.

BUSHFIRE HISTORY, REMEMBERING JANUARY 1939

The “Report of the Royal Commission to inquire into the causes of and measures taken to prevent the bush fires of January 1939 and to protect life and property and the measures to be taken to prevent bush fires in Victoria and to protect life and property in the event of future bush fires” begins:

In the State of Victoria, the month of January of the year 1939 came towards the end of a long drought which had been aggravated by a severe hot, dry summer season. For more than twenty years the State of Victoria had not seen its countryside and forests in such travail. Creeks and springs ceased to run. Water storages were depleted. Provincial towns were facing the probability of cessation of water supply. In Melbourne, more than a million inhabitants were subjected to restrictions upon the use of water.

“Throughout the countryside, the farmers were carting water, if such was available, for their stock and themselves. The rich plains, denied their beneficent rains, lay bare and baking; and the forests, from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder. The soft carpet of the forest floor was gone; the bone-dry litter crackled underfoot; dry heat and hot dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen. And so it was that, when millions of acres of the forest were invaded by bushfires which were almost State-wide, there happened, because of great loss of life and property, the most disastrous forest calamity the State of Victoria has known.

“These fires were lit by the hand of man

“Seventy-one lives were lost. Sixty-nine mills were burned. Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged. Townships were obliterated in a few minutes Mills, houses, bridges, tramways, machinery, were burned to the ground; men, cattle, horses, sheep, were devoured by the fires or asphyxiated by the scorching debilitated air. Generally, the numerous fires which during December, in many parts of Victoria, had been burning separately, as they do in any summer, either ‘under control’ as it is falsely and dangerously called, or entirely untended, reached the climax of their intensity and joined forces in a devastating confluence of flame on Friday, the 13th of January.

“On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAZARD REDUCTION BURNING

Just last week, at the height of the January 2020 bushfire emergency, Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton referred a complaint against a firefighter, who allegedly falsely claims Aboriginal heritage, to the Australian federal police. I have no opinion on Bruce Pascoe’s lineage, but I do know that the Mob he identifies with have real solutions to our recurrent bushfire tragedies. Their culture has a long history of land management through the expert use of fire as a tool to create visually pleasing and practical mosaics resistant to the spread of wildfires.

Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu draws from the more technical work by Bill Gammage entitled “The Biggest Estate on Earth”. This tome explains how Aborigines actively and skilfully managed the land in a far more systematic way than has ever been acknowledged. And I know, from my time spent reading original sources at the South Australian Museum about the Yaraldi of the Lower Murray River, that there were also complicated systems of governance, with a focus on a sustainable harvest and the storage of food.

Judge Stretton’s 1939 report also noted:

When the early settlers came to what is now this state [of Victoria], they found for the greater part a clean forest.Apparently, for many years before their arrival, the forest had not been scourged by fire … Their canopies had prevented the growth of scrub and bracken to any wide extent. They were open and traversable by men, beasts and wagons. Compared to their present condition, they were safe” (p. 11).

While quick to refer Bruce Pascoe, who is best known for his unorthodox perspective on Aboriginal history, to the federal police, Minister Dutton and his government have over a very long period of time turned a blind eye to the rewriting of Australia’s historical temperature record by Blair Trewin and David Jones of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The work of Trewin and Jones underpins the notion of an unprecedented climate emergency, when the real issues are perhaps management of fuel loads in forests and current resourcing.

Indeed, now absurdly corralled by the climate change meme, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is actively promoting the need for yet another Royal Commission as though this will prevent future bush fire tragedies. Yet recommendations of previous Royal Commissions have never been implemented. For example, a hazard reduction burn across at least 390,000 hectares each year was recommended for the state of Victoria.

It is because “The Elites” don’t trust the work of practical land managers, whether that be thinning young forests to ensure that a proper over-storey canopy develops, or adopting straight-forward hazard reduction burningprogrammes. Climate change may be a convenient scapegoat, but it will not protect our land into the future.

HOTTER AND DRIER SUMMERS

Sunday morning on national television the Prime Minister said a Royal Commission into “the killer bushfire season” is necessary and reiterated claims that the nation is facing a “new normal”, with more severe natural disasters on the way; he said he would be seeking more powers to allow the Australian Defence Force to respond more quickly.

Bill Gates has famously said that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, and that fundamental to improvement is the capacity to accurately measure.

Yet we have a situation where key statistics are either remodelled or ignored.

Mr Morrison mentioned hotter and drier summers in his television address. The historical record shows that the land mass of Australia is not drying out. Last year, 2019, was exceptionally dry. But the long-term trend is not towards a drier continent but rather we have on average had consistently wetter years since the 1970, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Annual average rainfall for Australia, 1900 to 2019.

It is also the case that summers are not getting drier, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Average summer rainfall since 1900.

According to the Bureau, recent summers have been hotter, but such claims would not pass scrutiny if assessed, for example, for inclusion in the Guinness Book of records. This is because of all the changes to the way temperatures are now measured.

The Rutherglen agricultural research station has one of the longest, continuous, temperature records for anywhere in rural Victoria. Minimum and maximum temperatures were first recorded at Rutherglen using standard and calibrated equipment back in November 1912. Considering the first 85 years of summer temperatures – unadjusted, as in not homogenised – the hottest summer on record at Rutherglen is the summer of 1938–1939.

Figure 3. The hottest summer at Rutherglen was the summer of 1938-1939. This chart only extends to the summer of 1997-1998. Since January 1998 temperatures have been measured with a electronic probe and it is impossible to know whether it is measuring hotter or colder than the original mercury thermometer, because the Bureau makes none of this information public.

At Rutherglen, the first big equipment change happened on 29 January 1998. That is when the mercury and alcohol thermometers were replaced with an electronic probe – custom built to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s own standard, with the specifications still yet to be made public.

According to Bureau policy, when such a major equipment change occurs there should be at least three years (preferably five) of overlapping/parallel temperature recordings. Except the mercury and alcohol thermometers (used to measure maximum and minimum temperatures, respectively) were removed on exactly the same day the custom-built probe was placed into the Stevenson screen at Rutherglen, in direct contravention of this policy.

The policy implications are significant, far more significant than Bruce Pascoe paraphrasing some text from the early explorers to make a point, while claiming an Aboriginal heritage.

In 2011, the Bureau made further changes to how it measures temperatures in that it stopped averaging one-second readings from the probe at Rutherglen over one minute. The maximum temperature as recorded each day at Rutherglen is now the highest one-second spot reading from the custom-built probe. That is correct – spot reading.

Across Australia non-standard methods of measuring (spot readings) from non-standard equipment (custom-built probes) make it impossible to establish the equivalence of recent temperatures from Rutherglen – or any of the Bureau’s other 695 probes in automatic weather stations – with historical data.

REWRITING OUR TEMPERATURE HISTORY

It was at the Sydney Institute in 2014 that I first began to detail the extent to which the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has rewritten our temperature history to create the impression of catastrophic global warming using the technique of homogenisation. This is in addition to the issues with calibration.

Back in 2014, I showed how temperatures are changed in the ACORN database, and not by a small amount. I showed that the recorded values — the actual measurements — are often changed by more than a degree from the original measurements to remove the cooling trend from at least 1940 to 1960. Cooling the past, makes the present appear hotter.

If we consider, as an example, Bourke in western New South Wales, the temperature as measured using a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson Screen at the official recording station was 38.9 degrees Celsius.  This value was changed to 38.4 in the first official ACORN database, and then dropped-down by a further 0.3 degrees when the Bureau published version 2 of ACORN.

Table 1. Temperatures actually recorded at Bourke in January 1939, and temperatures then changed for the first version of ACORN, and then changed again for the next version of ACORN.

This is in addition to the more recent issues that I have uncovered, issues caused by the transition to electronic probes without due regard to calibration. In the case of Mildura, I have shown that the official electronic probe is regularly recording 0.4 °C hotter than the mercury thermometer in the same shelter.

Then there is the issue of how all the temperature series are added together.

Concerned that the Bureau made many errors in its calculation of the mean Australian temperature, Merrick Thomson, a retired accountant, asked questions in a submission to a government inquiry some years ago, specifically:

  1. Why was the mix of stations changed with the transition to ACORN, and why was this not explained and declared, particularly given that it has resulted in a large increase in theannualtemperature for Australia.Hecalculates this was 56 °C.
  2. What criteria is used to determine whether or not a station becomes part of the national network, and specifically, why was the very hot location of Oodnadatta added to the national network in 2011?

His submission was never acknowledged, and his questions never answered.

So, when the Bureau announce that last year was the hottest on record we can have absolutely no confidence that this is true.  The charts they show, and values they present are totally contrived.

I recently explained to Chris Smith on Sky News that the hottest day ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment at an official recording station is 51.6 °C at Bourke in January 1909. I also explained that this legitimate record has been expunged from the record by Blair Trewin at the Bureau.

Over the last six years I have provided more and more evidence — some of it reported by Graham Lloyd and published in The Australian — which shows Blair Trewin, under the direction of David Jones, is falsely rewriting our temperature history.But nothing has ever been done about this. Rather, successive state and federal governments have let the meme of human-caused catastrophic global warming grow, while neglecting the forests.

I have it on good advice that the detail of my accusations against the Bureau have been discussed by the Australian Cabinet, including in the presence of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. At that time then prime minister Tony Abbott was apparently keen to have some sort of inquiry into the industrial-scale remodelling by Jones and Trewin through the process of homogenisation. But his efforts were thwarted by Greg Hunt and Julie Bishop.

REWRITING THE HISTORY OF THE LOWER MURRAY RIVER

When it comes to really important practical environmental issues like restoring the Murray River’s estuary, they also all turn a blind eye.

The Tauwitchere sea dyke has destroyed the once abundant fishing grounds of the Yaraldi. This Mob once caught both Murray cod and also mulloway depending on the season; it is all detailed in the South Australian Museum. The solution to the dwindling fish stocks in the Lower Murray River is simple: remove the barrages and bring back the sea tide. Instead some locals complain of climate change.

Since 1941, the barrages have blocked 90 per cent of flows between the lakes and the South Ocean. Over the last decade, a new and false history and geography of the Lower Lakes, Coorong and the Murray’s mouth have been created. But so far, no government minister has ever rallied against this rewriting of history.

When I wrote a report about it, explaining all the benefits that could come from restoring the Murray River’s estuary, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (our ABC), ran a campaign against me.

The restoration of the Murray River’s estuary would not only be good for the environment, but it would also free-up so much water for upstream farmers and firefighters.

ELITES RUN AUSTRALIA, BUT FOR HOW MUCH LONGER

For decades respected Aboriginal elders have been invited onto local bushfire management committees, only to find government-appointed chairpersons refusing to even record their advice. In the Dreaming active land management is so important, while a particular zeitgeist and red tape now most deliberately prevent it. Then there is the issue of adequate resourcing. So, much money is provided to science managers to fake news about the Murray River, the Great Barrier Reef and human-caused catastrophic climate change. Yet the real and pressing issues concerning management of weeds, feral animals, and fuel loads in forests is mostly ignored. Meanwhile, artificial constraints on commercial opportunities for the sustainable harvest of so much of our natural bounty, including kangaroos and crocodiles, are indirectly imposed by Hugh Jackman and other Hollywood celebrities who support campaigns led by Terri Irwin. Grahame Webb has spent a lifetime overseeing the successful resurgence of crocodile numbers in the Northern Territory, only to now be prevented from realising any commercial gain for his Aboriginal colleagues because of successful campaigning by Hollywood Elites.

As Bruce Pascoe writes in Black Emu:

Strangely, though, when Ross Garnaut, who prepared the climate-change policy for the Rudd Government in 2008, championed kangaroo farming as a way of conserving the land and cutting greenhouse gases, because cattle are greater polluters than motor cars, the press could hardly contain their contempt” (p. 53).

I’ve discussed the need to not only restore the historical temperature record, but also the need to restore the estuary of our longest river system, with Minister Simon Birmingham. But he tells me that there is no advantage in it for South Australia. Also, he has told me that the Australian Greens — effectively run by his mate and fellow South Australian Sarah Hanson-Young — would never support such an initiative.

I met with Sarah Hanson-Young back in 2011. She told me that while she sees some merit in the Murray River having an estuary, South Australian Greens and Liberals ‘will hold the line’ together on this one.

It is the case that here in Australia, just a few rule over us, and at the behest of their politics that has scant regard for the natural environment, and little more for the economy.

Contrary to the impression given by our ABC, quiet Australians of diverse lineage are not being heard, while the mostly white leadership across The Greens, Coalition and Labor parties together decide how key issues will be managed.

Worse, it is a fact that practical individuals who operate outside the current zeitgeist are hounded by our elites and our government.

Peter Ridd was sacked for telling the truth about the Great Barrier Reef under the watch of the current Coalition government. If Peter Dutton wants to be useful, he would refer Terry Hughes rather than Bruce Pascoe to the Australian federal police. Perhaps Minister Dutton has not yet heard about the latest revelation of misconduct from within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University?

The political Elite know there is a disproportionate influence from what is understood as the AGL* faction of the New South Wales Liberal party. It is this faction that not only ensures various subsidies for various energy sources, but also oversaw the taxpayer funded $443 million grant to the tiny Great Barrier Reef Foundation — to Malcom Turnbull’s mates. I heard not a slither of discontent from Minister Dutton on this, yet the faux research findings they sponsor directly and negatively impact all Australians.

There is a real need for Peter Dutton to make important referrals to the Australian federal police. Those who do fake science and attempt to pass it off as the truth, and those who remodel the historical temperature record to something completely different, need to be held to account.

The terrifying infernos of recent weeks are a wake-up call. It is time that the Prime Minister and all the Ministers in the current Australian Government showed some real leadership. They know the real issues, and they understand the politics. So, it is past time they climbed out from under the thumbs of the catastrophists embedded in our most important government-funded institutions. Stop taking orders from them, and start referring them to the Australian federal police.  Their misdeeds are significant.

____

* AGL Energy Ltd is an Australian listed public company involved in the generation and retailing of electricity for residential and commercial use.

***
UPDATE JANUARY 16, 2020

Adding an east coast of Australia rainfall chart, as requested by a couple in the thread. Whichever way you cut the data, Australian rainfall data does not show a drying trend, and for non-UHI affected inland sites the temperatures generally show cooling to about 1960, and then warming since. Its about as warm now as it was back more than 100 years ago. This is no consistent with lots of homogenised data from other places … but I think many sceptics and alarmists should spend more time with the data before forming their opinion.

Annual average rainfall for the east coast of Australia.

It has been hotter, fires have burnt larger areas

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The word unprecedented is applied to almost every bad thing that happens at the moment, as though particular events could not have been predicted, and have never happened before at such a scale or intensity. This is creating so much Klonopin anxiety, because it follows logically that we are living in uncertain time: that there really is a climate emergency.

The historical evidence, however, indicates fires have burnt very large areas before, and it has been hotter.

Some of the catastrophe has been compounded by our refusal to prepare appropriately, as is the case with the current bushfire emergency here in Australia. Expert Dr Christine Finlay explains the importance of properly managing the ever increasing fire loads in an article in today’s The Australian. While there is an increase in the area of national park with Eucalyptus forests, there has been a reduction in the area of hazard reduction burning.

The situation is perhaps also made worse by fiddling with the historical temperature record. This will affect the capacity of those modelling bushfire behaviour to obtain an accurate forecast.

We have had an horrific start to the bushfire season, and much is being said about the more than 17 lives lost already, and that smoke has blown as far as New Zealand. Unprecedented, has been the claim. But just 10 years ago, on 9 February 2009, 173 lives were lost in the Black Saturday inferno. On 13th January 1939 (Black Friday), 2 million hectares burnt with ash reportedly falling on New Zealand. That was probably the worst bushfire catastrophe in Australia’s modern recorded history in terms of area burnt and it was 80 years ago: January 13, 1939.

According to the Report of the Royal Commission that followed, it was avoidable.

In terms of total area burnt: figures of over 5 million hectares are often quoted for 1851. The areas now burnt in New South Wales and Victoria are approaching this.

Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia. But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter. In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Mean maximum summer (December, January February) temperatures as measured at Rutherglen in rural Victoria by The Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the period when mercury thermometers were used. Data unadjusted/not homogenised.

The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria. It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.

Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic devise with a sheath of unknown thickness. In the United States similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five (5) minutes and then the measurement recorded.

The year before last, I worked with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology (BMKG), and understood their difficulty of getting a temperature equivalence between mercury thermometers and readings from electronic probes at their thousands of weather stations. The Indonesian Bureau has a policy of keeping both recording devices in the same shelter, and taking measurements from both. They take this issue very seriously, and acknowledge the problem.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a policy of a three year period of overlap, yet the metadata shows that for its supposedly highest quality recording stations (for example Rutherglen), the mercury thermometer is removed the very same day an electronic probe is installed. This is a total contravention of the Bureau’s own policy, and nothing is being done about it.

I explained much of this to Australia’s Chief Scientist in a letter some years ago — neither he, nor the Bureau, deny that our current method of recording temperatures here in Australia is not covered by any international ISO standard. It is very different from methods currently employed in the United States and also Indonesia, and as recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation.

Then there is the issue of the remodelling of temperatures, I explained how this affects trends at Rutherglen in a blog post early last year.

The remodelling, that has the technical term of homogenisation, is a two-step process. With respect to the temperature maxima at Rutherglen, the Bureau identified a ‘statistically significant discontinuity’ in 1938–1939. Values were then changed.

It is somewhat peculiar that the Bureau did not recognise, in its process of remodelling the historical data for Rutherglen, that the summer of 1938-1939 was exceptionally hot because of drought, compounded by bushfires. Rather David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau used the exceptional hot January of 1939 as an excuse for remodelling the historical temperature record at Rutherglen, with the changed values subsequently incorporated into international data sets.

These made-up values are then promoted by the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This propaganda is then tweeted by Hollywood superstars like Bette Midler to The Australian Prime Minister.

After a recent Sky News Television interview that I did with Chris Smith several people have contacted me about the hottest day ever recorded in Australia. They have suggested it is 16th January 1889 being 53.1 degrees Celsius at Cloncurry in Queensland. A problem with this claim is that the temperature was not measured from within a Stevenson screen, though it was a recording at an official station. A Stevenson screen (to shelterer the mercury thermometer) was not installed by Queensland meteorologist Clement Ragge at Cloncurry until the next month, until February 1889.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment (a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen) at an official recording station is 51.7 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Bourke Post Office on January 3, 1909.

We are all entitled to our own opinion, not not our own facts.

*****
The picture featured at the very top of this post is of grass trees at Scott River, Western Australia, taken in January 2007, following a “mild, patchy burn” by David Ward. David has contributed several articles on bushfire management to this blog, you can find some of the links here:https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/2009/04/the-mathematics-of-connectivity-and-bushfire/

New Record Temperatures Need Justification

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IN September 2017, the Bureau declared the hottest ever September on record for the state of Victoria based on temperature data from Mildura.

I’ve since shown that this was helped along by the Bureau replacing a mercury thermometer with an electronic probe that can record a good 0.4 degrees hotter for the same weather.

There is not only the issue of the Bureau not providing any information on how the electronic probe was calibrated, but as I’ve explained to the Chief Scientist, there is also the issue of averaging:

There is a lot of natural variability in air temperature (particularly on hot sunny days at inland locations), which was smoothed to some extent by the inertia of mercury thermometers. In order to ensure some equivalence between measurements from mercury thermometers and electronic probes it is standard practice for the one-second readings from electronic probes to be averaged over a one-minute period, or in the case of the US National Weather Service the averaging of the one-second readings is over 5 minutes.

The Australian Bureau began the change-over to electronic probes as the primary instrument for the measurement of air temperatures in November 1996. The original IT system for averaging the one-second readings from the electronic probes was put in place by Almos Pty Ltd, who had done similar work for the Indian, Kuwaiti, Swiss and other meteorological offices. The software in the Almos setup (running on the computer within the on-site shelter) computed the one-minute average (together with other statistics).

This data was then sent to what was known as a MetConsole (the computer server software), which then displayed the data, and further processed the data into ‘Synop’, ‘Metar’, ‘Climat’formats. This system was compliant with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards. The maximum daily temperature for each location was recorded as the highest one-minute average for that day. This was the situation until at least 2011.

I have this on good advice from a previous Bureau employee.

It is likely to have been the situation through until perhaps February 2013 when Sue Barrell from the Bureau wrote to a colleague of mine, Peter Cornish, explaining that the one-second readings from the automatic weather station at SydneyBotanical Gardens were numerically-averaged. At some point over the last five years, however,this system has been disbanded. All, or most, of the automatic weather stations now stream data from the electronic probes directly to the Bureau’s own software. This could be an acceptable situation, except that theBureau no-longer averages the one-second readings over a one-minute period.

Indeed, it could be concluded that the current system is likely to generate new record hot days for the same weather, because of the increased sensitivity of the measuring equipment and the absence of any averaging/smoothing. To be clear, the highest one-second spot reading is now recorded as the maximum temperature for that day at the 563 automatic weather stations across Australia that are measuring surface air temperatures.

Just yesterday, the Bureau fed that “hottest ever” meme with a claim that analysis of data from about 700 weather stations across the country showed Wednesday was the hottest day recorded in Australia, with the nationally averaged maximum daytime temperature reaching 41.9C.

That was apparently a full degree higher than the previous record of 40.9C set on Tuesday, which itself broke the mark of 40.3C from January 2013.

But how exactly are the temperatures being measured, and which stations are being combined?

The Bureau has deleted the hottest day ever recorded with a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen, which was 51.6 degrees Celsius at Bourke in 1909.

Then there is the issue of the Bureau cooling the past. 


For example, it is a full 1.4 degrees cooler in Darwin on 1st January 1910 in the official ACORN-SAT version 2, temperature data base, relative to the actual temperature recorded back then in a Stevenson Screen with a mercury thermometer.

I have also documented how the Bureau put a limit on how cold a temperature can be recorded.

Not to mention closing stations in high altitude regions that may record colder temperatures. So the 700 weather stations used to calculate the hottest day on Wednesday may be skewered warmer since the closure of stations in the coldest places:

During June and July 2017, blizzard conditions were experienced across the Australian Alps, but we will never know how cold it actually got. Because a MSI1 card reader prevented the equipment – able to record down to minus 60 – from recording below minus 10 at Thredbo and probably also at many other locations.

It is also impossible to know how cold this last winter was relative to 1994 because the weather station at Charlotte Pass was closed in March 2015 – it is no longer in operation.

I’ve written to the National Audit Office about only some of these issues and that was some years ago now.

I could go on …

How to Evaluate the Evidence of Contrarians – Scientifically

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FUNDAMENTAL to the scientific method is the assumption that reality exists independently of our belief systems; that there is such a thing as evidence, and that it matters.

There seems to be general agreement on this point from both the left and right sides of Australian politics.

Indeed, in an article in The Weekend Australian newspaper (page 18) written by Graham Lloyd entitled ‘No place in debate for contrarian hijackers’, Misha Ketchell who is the editor of the influential academic publication The Conversation is quoted claiming to care so much about the evidence that the opinions of ‘sceptics’ must be excluded.

But this begs the question: how do we define scepticism, and on what basis do we discount the opinion of a so-called sceptic?

If their opinions are at complete odds with the evidence: then wouldn’t it be more useful to show this? To use them, and their wrong claims, to explain the truth within the theory of human-caused global warming?

It is claimed that sceptics like myself have an undue and powerful political influence, repeatedly successfully thwarting attempts to implement necessary public policy change.

Indeed, if my arguments are so devoid of evidence, this should be easily proven. Except that the skills scores from my rainfall forecasts, when compared with reality, are far superior to anything forecast by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

There has always been a role in science for models and predictions — that can be objectively tested against reality/the evidence —- so the predictions of sceptics could be juxtaposed against predictions from the consensus.

Another way of finding universal truths is through simple observation. If we have catastrophic sea level rise, for example, then this should be evident when we visit the beach, or somewhere like Sydney Harbour. It should be evident in our coastal landscapes. I explained some of this in a recent talk I gave at the Maroochydore Surf Life Saving Club that the Institute of Public Affairs had filmed and that is now available on YouTube.

Given science is about real world phenomena, it should not be that difficult for Misha Ketchell to test the evidence repeatedly being put forward by particular individuals, like myself, against what comes to pass in the real world — what is observed.

But instead of relying on such simple tests of the truth — in my rainfall forecasts or in a coastal landscape or at a coral reef — those in authority, and who edit important journals and websites, have decided that I should be banned.

As Graham Lloyd explains on page 18 of today’s Weekend Australian, I’m listed, in, of all places, the journal Nature as a dangerous dissident who must be shunned, and denied, because, it is claimed, that I misrepresent the evidence. That so many of us are actively de-platformed is only just now being acknowledged, and I am grateful that it has today been explained in The Weekend Australian.

The conspiracy against me dates to at least 2008 when Bryant MacFie gifted $350,000 to the University of Queensland (UQ) in a donation facilitated by the Institute of Public Affairs to pay for environmental research scholarships. After I set all of this up, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) intervened and told the Law and Agricultural facilities that if the program was to go ahead it must be without me … because as someone sceptical of global warming I lacked integrity.

I was replaced by Richard Burns, as the team leader. And more recently, in January just this year, after another strategic intervention perhaps involving the Bureau this time, I was removed as team leader from a project with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The University of Queensland program did go ahead without me back in 2008.

I moved to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The Blue Mountains is, of course, a great place for bush walking, which is a great way to reconnect with the natural world. It is in nature that we find evidence for the universal truths that exist independently of any and everything Misha Ketchell, and other such Australian opinion leaders, choose to publish — or not.

So, while I have repeatedly tried to escape to nature, it draws me back to science … as a method for transcending the chatter now everywhere in our scientific institutions and their publications.

I have kept showing that David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau of Meteorology keep changing the temperature record, and more recently that the journal Nature publishes incorrect information from David Wachenfeld, the chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, as detailed in the article that follows.

Science is a method, science is never settled. We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong. But history will eventually show that it is Misha Ketchell who is wrong and that this editor is not using a reasonable, or in any way evidence-based, criteria for deciding what should be published. This is so very wrong and so very harmful to science, democracy and the capacity of other opinion leaders and academics to evaluate the evidence which is so necessary if they are to get to the truth in such matters as climate change.

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The following article was published in The Weekend Australian on 7th September 2019.

Coral death knell exaggerated, says rebel quality assurance survey

The death of inshore corals near Bowen had been greatly exaggerated, according to the findings of a rebel quality assurance survey by reef-science outsiders Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy.

The shallow reef flats of Stone Island have played a key role in divisions over the health of the – inshore Great Barrier Reef and the impact of run-off from agriculture.
Dr Ridd was disciplined for attempting to blow the whistle on the widespread use of before and after pictures taken a century apart near Stone Island that suggested coral cover had disappeared.


A follow-up paper by Queensland University reef scientist Tara Clark, co-authored by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist David Wachenfeld, confirmed the coral loss.

Despite winning his unfair dismissal case against JCU and being yesterday awarded more than $1.2m by the Federal Court, Dr Ridd effectively has been dismissed as a crank by other scientists.

An expert scientific panel last month accused him of spreading scientific misinformation like pro- tobacco lobbyists and anti-vaccination campaigners.

But Dr Ridd and Dr Marohasy have spent the past two weeks documenting the corals around Stone Island, which they found were still very much alive.

The in-the-water quality assurance snapshot of onshore corals near Bowen and the Whitsundays has been partly funded by the Institute of Public Affairs.

The hundreds of hours of aerial and aquatic footage will be archived and some of this made into a documentary.

Dr Marohasy and Dr Ridd repeated the transects used in the Clark research which found there had been a serious decline in reef health from historical photographs in the late 19th century to the present.

Dr Marohasy said if the transects used in the Clark analysis had been extended by 30m to the south of Stone Island they would have found a different story.

An annotated aerial photograph of Clint’s Reef, taken with my drone Skido on about 25th August 2019, for planning underwater photography and aerial mapping.

“I saw and photographed large pink plate coral on August 25 — some more than 1m in diameter — at the reef edge just 30m from where Tara Clark and colleagues ended their transect as published in Nature,” Dr Marohasy said.

Several hundred metres away, across the headland, in the northern-facing bay, was an area of 100 per cent coral cover stretching over 25ha.

Dr Ridd said the finding of the survey was that there was “good coral all over the place” around Stone Island.

“What we saw was not consistent with the proposition that the inshore reefs have been destroyed by farm run-off,” Dr Ridd said.

He said the findings were at odds to those of Dr Clark and her team.

The survey results follow a report by GBRMPA last week that downgraded the long-term outlook for the reef from poor to very poor with particular concern about run-off in onshore reef areas.

Dr Ridd said there were “lots of people around Bowen who get very angry when people say all their coral is wiped out”.

“How would people in Sydney feel if everybody was saying that the water in Sydney Harbour has turned brown from pollution, the bridge was rusting scrap and the Opera House was crumbling ruin,” he said.

Dr Wachenfeld said it was always great to see evidence of healthy coral in inshore areas.
“The body of published science tells us most of our inshore reefs are extensively degraded,” he said. “When we find healthy patches that’s good news.”

Dr Wachenfeld said a paper published in 2016 contained information about coral around Stone Island and nearby Middle Reef.

This article was first published in The Weekend Australian, and can be viewed online here.

****

The feature image, at the top of this blog post, is of me flying Skido, just south of Bowen over mudflat to the west of Bramston Reef. This drone aerial cinematography may be included in an upcoming documentary (yet to be scripted), that could be made following a short film called ‘Most Corals are Beige’ (directed by Clint Hempsall, written by Jennifer Marohasy) that is planned for release mid-October in Melbourne.

To be sure to know more about the short film and possible documentary consider subscribing for my irregular e-news.

Me under the water at Beige Reef, off Stone Island, at the entrance to Bowen Harbour.