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

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

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

The Bureau of Meteorology’s fancy magical and secret homogenization protocol does not detect changes that obviously affect the temperature (like the clearing in the photo below). But sometimes the BoM make “corrections” to site changes that don’t appear to have mattered. The BoM don’t even document major site changes a lot of the time, even iconic sites that affect huge areas are badly managed.

In the last ten years land was cleared around the thermometer. This denuded area has a lower humidity, and higher volatility of temperatures. The data from this thermometer may be used to “correct” thermometers 1,400 km away.

Bourke Australia, Satellite view. “Back of Bourke”.

The town is the last outpost of civilization, so infamous it has it’s own cliche: “The back of […]