New South Wales’ Premier Domenic Perrottet, 40, is in trouble for having worn a Nazi uniform to his 21^st birthday costume party in 2001. Tasmanian green-minded Independent Andrew Wilkie suffered even worse exposure in 2011 when it came out that as a senior Duntroon cadet in 1983, he allegedly forced his juniors to salute the 50th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power.

Foolish as those youthful episodes were, a team of climate scientists with strong University of Queensland connections only nine years ago indulged in equivalent Third Reich foolishness. They not only got clean away with it but have trailed clouds of academic glory ever since. This team maybe created and certainly stored online photoshopped portraits of themselves as top Nazis. They even converted a 1936 Nuremberg rally of helmeted troops into a gathering of their own climate faithful (reproduced atop this page).

The team comprised a dozen or so members of the Skeptical Science blog, founded and led by John Cook, who was Climate Communication Fellow for Queensland University’s Global Change Institute.[1]He is now postdoctoral research fellow at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, and is or was Assistant Professor in the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Virginia, US. He continues as leader of Skeptical Science. Far from being “sceptical” of catastrophic global warming, it exists to smite and denigrate anyone questioning the orthodoxy. In 2011 Skeptical Science won the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and in 2016, it scooped up the Friend of the Planet Award from the US National Center for Science Education. (Note Joanne Nova’s take on that via the link).

Cook became “Dr Cook” after his 2016 UWA thesis on the ludicrous topic of “the cognitive psychology of climate science denial.”[2] He is author of the infamous 2013 paper supposedly proving a 97 per cent consensus of 12,000 science papers’ abstracts about human-caused warming. This study, despite a peer-reviewed critique of its overwhelming flaws in logic and design, has been downloaded 1,376,048 times, cited 754 times and extolled in the media more than 200 times. In 2013 it was rated globally the year’s 11^th most influential research paper.[3] The paper’s characterisation of the consensus (namely that humans are causing some warming) is so nebulous that almost every climate sceptic would agree with it. Cook’s follow-up submission of a co-authored paper[4] to Earth System Dynamics copped a stinging rejection from editor Matthew Huber.[5]

In August 2013, three months after Cook’s “97 per cent paper” appeared, genuinely sceptic researcher and IT guru Brandon Shollenberger trawled the Sceptical Science website seeking data in order to critique the study. Buried within the site and intended for private use only was a trove of photoshopped and creepy – if not horrific — images, including one of Cook (left) in elaborate faux-Nazi dress-up and labelled “Reichsfuehrer SS — J.Cook”, the title held by Heinrich Himmler from 1929-45. Himmler was founder of East Europe’s Einsatzgruppen and key architect of the Holocaust. The original which the photoshoppers may have used is on Himmler’s wiki page here, although Wiki’s is minus the cap. Each Nazi symbol or regalia has been replaced with symbols and logos of Sceptical Science, such as twin penguins and leaves. For example, a tiny swastika on Himmler’s lower pocket-button becomes a Sceptical Science leaf.

In the Sceptical Science version of massed Nuremberg supporters, someone has added a  scrawled annotation and arrow indicating that “Herr John Cook” substitutes for Hitler on the dais. Swastikas on the three main rally banners have become SkS leaves.

Cook’s second lead author, Dana Nuccitelli, was likewise photoshopped into Nazi contexts. Nuccitelli featured as tank commander and despatch rider (“herrtankboy” and “herrscooterboy”), along with lame likenings to Dr Who.

Other photoshopping involved mockery of key sceptics Anthony Watts (wattsupwiththat, the world’s most-viewed climate blog), maths whiz Christopher Monkton and UK journo James Delingpole. Their heads were pasted onto the ripped torsos of Spartan hoplites.

When Shollenberg and Watts exposed the trove, the Skeptical Science people did not delete it but hastily moved it to a different folder called “a11g0n3“, which is nerd-speak for “allgone”. But this trove also became publicly discoverable before being thoroughly ‘disappeared’ once and for all, but by then sceptics had screen-grabbed the images and were indignantly posting them on their own sites.

To this day there has been no explanations why or how Cook’s Sceptical Science back parlour was festooned with Nazi stuff. No-one has suggested genuine sceptics did any sabotage – this seems an inside job. Cook in the previous decade had run a hobby as cartoonist and satirist, especially mocking climate “deniers”. This could be coincidence and I make no assertion that Cook did any of the photoshopping. Of course, he should at least have been aware of the compromising material and dealt with it appropriately.[6]

One theory is that Skeptical Science was working up a “false flag” operation to compromise genuine sceptics, but this seems unduly conspiratorial.

Using Occam’s Razor, the simplest fit would be that Cook’s associates had a fascination for Nazism’s memorabilia and regalia. With smarts on a par with high-school gaming nerds, I can picture  them spending idle hours amusing themselves splicing Nazi material to create in-jokes about each other.  That’s a guess at one possibility, but only a guess and only a possibility. Basically, until Cook & Co., share the pics’ backstory, how the portfolio came to be will remain a mystery.

Declaring a slight interest, in 2015 I enrolled as a false-flag student to Cook’s UQ Denial 101X MOOC (massive open on-line course) on how to pulverise “climate deniers”. I reported on my grading here, Putting the stink in distinction and commented, “One normally gets a buzz from study. But my brain needs a shower and scrub to feel clean again.”

The analyst  Shollenberger, meanwhile, was still trying to get from Cook the data underpinning Cook’s mega-popular (or infamous) “97 per cent” paper. Cook, after emailing him some minor data, went into refusal mode. Shollenberger escalated his requests to Cook’s employer, the University of Queensland. By this time the university was probably discomfited by both the obvious flaws in the paper and sceptics’ Schadenfreude about the Nazi photoshopping. It refused him the data needed for assessing Cook’s maths and methods.

In a spectacular development, the university’s “head research legal”, Jane Malloch, then wrote to US-based Shollenberger threatening, implicitly, to turn him in to the US law enforcement agencies for allegedly hacking the website’s material. There was no “hack”, the material and pictures had simply been left lying around on the website. Just googling could bring them up. UQ also banned Shollenberger from further contacting John Cook. Shollenberger called Malloch’s bluff and published the  full text of the letter  here. Valium recommended before reading.

Even more spectacularly, the university added that it would sue Shollenberger if he disseminated any element of its threatening letter. To wit,

“The University of Queensland owns copyright in this letter, and you are advised that any publication by you of this letter or persons acting in concert with you, will constitute an infringement of The University’s copyright. University of Queensland reserves its right to take any and all legal action against any person, including you, who publishes this letter.”

Shollenberger commented,

Meaning the University of Queensland might sue me if I show you the letter they sent threatening … to sue me. Yes, that is the level of behavior used to defend the “consensus” on global warming. People who speak out against it can find themselves threatened with legal action and warned if they tell anyone about the threats, they’ll get in even more trouble.[7]

Shollenberger thought the university heavyweights were telling him he couldn’t even forward the letter to his solicitor. UQ’s double-dose legal threat inspired a side-splitting Hitler-Downfall parody which you can enjoy below.

I don’t know if such a threat has ever been made in the legal world before or since, but I’m reasonably sure the University of Queensland isn’t the most enlightened spot in the Southern Hemisphere. For further evidence, see scientist Richard Tol’s fruitless letter to the then vice-chancellor Professor Peter Hoj requesting Cook’s data.[8] In the event, Shollenberger eventually found enough of Cook’s “secret” data lying around on the website to demolish the study. In the peer-reviewed literature Legates et al further wrecked it.[9]

Digesting all this, you might be wondering, are these climate alarmists and their hangers-on mentally OK? It’s a fair question. A few years before the Skeptical Science photo-fiddling, a 100-strong UK film crew had laboured for months to create a high-gloss mini-film for the Sony-sponsored anti-emissions lobby 10:10 about a school-teacher literally exploding two kids into bloody pieces. (Viewer caution: not for the squeamish). Why? The kids had expressed doubt about nostrums like energy-saving light bulbs. Dubbed “Splattergate”, the short-lived movie was billed “a complete catastrophe for environmentalism”.

Back home, as the ABCTV News says as punctuation, we had a dozen of Australia’s existing and rising stars in climate science film themselves for ABC1 shaking their booties to save the planet, while chanting, “We’re climate f—g scientists, we’re scientists, what we think is true… sucking d—k in Copenhagen.”

Amid the urgings of these photoshoppers of Reichsfuehrers, role-players of child-murderers and potty-mouthed prolonged adolescents, Australia is now en route to net-zero economic suicide and subservience to the Chinese juggernaut. Great job, climate scientists.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is now available: Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com.

[1] “The Global Change Institute advances discovery, creates solutions and advocates responses that meet the challenges presented by climate change, technological innovation and population change.”

[2] From the abstract: “I also found that an effective approach to neutralising the influence of misinformation is inoculation against misinformation techniques.”

[3] It is often said, falsely, that President Obama himself praised the paper. The praising was done merely by a fan-blog that used Obama’s name . Actual testimonials for the website are from the fake Nobel Prize laureate Michael Mann, “Merchants of Doubt” conspiracist Naomi Oreskes, disgraced hacker Peter Gleick and long-time Barrier Reef doom-cryer Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (the reef coral is now at record extent).

[4] “Agnotology: learning  from mistakes”

[5] “The long, didactic introduction is not appropriate for this journal and all the meat of the paper is currently in the appendix, which is a strange place for it. Indeed, as currently structured there is no paper in this paper, i.e. there is no actual science (hypothesis, testing of a hypothesis) in the main body… Second, much of the discussion in the appendix is written in an inflammatory and insufficiently supported fashion. Removal of subjective characterization would make the paper stronger by reducing the verbosity and, of more lasting value, by focusing on scientific issues.

It is entirely irrelevant whether the authors of some papers also distribute pamphlets to school headmasters, just as it is scientifically irrelevant what the political affiliation or religion or hair color of authors are… 

The root logical flaw in many of the papers discussed in the appendix is that showing a statistical correlation between some non-CO2 variable and some observed climate time series somehow disproves the hypothesis that CO2 is a driver of climate change. This is as silly as saying the cost of my sneakers is correlated with how fast I run and, therefore, I have invalidated the hypothesis that training makes me run the 100 yard dash faster. Do we really need 70 pages of text and two dozen R routines to recognize the logical problem here? 

[6] Dr Cook in 2021 did a podcast for Queensland University’s Liveris Academy “exploring what he believes makes a good leader, the role of optimism in leadership and how to effectively exert positive influence.”

[7] Shollenberger, Brandon. The Climate Wars: How the Consensus is Enforced. Kindle Edition, 280/499

[8] Cook had a small team of friends and assistants who rated abstracts of papers to see how much they supported the human-caused global warming theory. Critics wanted to know how thoroughly they managed to rate around 2000 papers each, with one rater managing to rate 4000. One rater processed 675 abstracts in 72 hours, a superhuman effort.

[9] Legates, D.R., Soon, W., Briggs, W.M. et al. Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change . Sci & Educ 24, 299–318 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

Solar panels were meant to be all sunshine and lollipops, with nothing but tingly virtuous feelings for their subsidised owners. With an effective economic lifespan of little more than a decade – after 12 years in service their output is nothing like their original capacity and at the 15-year mark, it becomes a pointless fraction, especially if they’re not cleaned on a very regular basis. Which is the reason why millions of panels are already being crushed and dumped in landfills, with millions more to follow.

Got a landfill in your neighbourhood? Well it’s probably time to do some homework and what is being dumped there.

Solar panels are a veritable toxic cocktail of gallium arsenide, tellurium, silver, crystalline silicon, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals. Ground up and dumped in their millions into landfills, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect on water supplies, the environment and human health as their poisonous entrails leach into the water table over the coming centuries.

John Droz helps rain on the ‘solar can do no wrong’ parade, below.

Solar Realities
Election Integrity
John Droz
13 December 2022

Part 1 – Summary of Solar Energy Concerns

Let’s step back, put aside the marketing hype, and look at some of the key consequences of promoting and subsidizing industrial solar energy:

1. Solar projects rarely have meaningful state rules or regulations to abide by (note: a similar situation also exists for another current political favorite: wind energy);
2. Solar lobbyists often attempt to further handicap local communities from enacting meaningful regulations, by advocating an expedited approval process;
3. Solar projects require 100% backup, so we must pay for twice the energy sources;
4. Solar projects require 100% backup, which is typically from gas, so that needs to be factored in when discussing cost, environmental impact, CO2 reduction, etc.;
5. Solar facilities are likely a net energy sink (e.g., see this study);
6. When a comprehensive and objective financial analysis is done, solar is 5x± the cost of conventional electrical energy sources (e.g., here, here, here, here & here);
7. Despite states shelling out Billions of dollars to benefit the solar industry, no scientific, thorough, objective studies have shown that solar is a net benefit. See this 2021 Study: Built Solar Facilities are Chronically Underperforming;
8. Solar has a high potential for substantial environmental harm, like polluting
   aquifers with carcinogens (e.g., here, here, here, here and here) [also see Part 2];
9. Solar will likely reduce nearby home values (e.g., here, here, and here);
10. Solar can take prime farmland out of production (e.g., here), which results in loss of jobs, loss of farm equipment & supplies sold, and a loss of consumer produce;
11. Solar facilities with batteries can be a major hazard (e.g., here and here);
12. Solar facilities can be problematic to nearby airports (e.g., FAA, study and study);
13. Solar results in an enormous toxic disposal problem for the state (e.g., here, here, here, and here) — who will pay for that and where are the state rules about this?
14. Solar has no scientifically-proven consequential net reduction of climate change! In fact, some studies (e.g., here, here, here, here, here and here) conclude that there’s good evidence that solar facilities make climate change worse; and
15. Going solar likely benefits Communist China (e.g., here here, and here).’

Some additional sample relevant information about solar energy:

Part 2 – Solar Panel Toxicity Overview

When potential solar project host communities ask solar developers what toxic materials are in their solar panels, they typically say that they are not aware of any.

Although that may seem evasive, it may be an accurate response as:

1. most solar panels come from China,
2. China does not have anywhere near the environmental concern that we do, and
3. Chinese suppliers are unlikely to divulge negative information about their products.

The takeaway is: buyer beware. In other words, potential host communities for industrial solar facilities should be aware of what we do know — and then act accordingly to fully protect their community.

So what DO we know? We know that these are some of the toxic (some carcinogenic) chemicals that have been identified as likely being in solar panels (click on the links to get an idea of what some of the adverse health consequences are):

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAs) (also see here and here)
Perfluorooctane sulphonate (PFOS)
Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)
Fluorinated Ethylene (FEP)
Cadmium Telluride
Copper Indium Selenide
Cadmium Gallium diselenide
Copper Indium Gallium diselenide
Silicon Tetrachloride
Hexafluoroethane
Polyvinyl Fluoride

Also, here is a basic explanation of the silicon manufacturing part of solar panels. The following are some additional toxic chemicals that have been identified as possibly being involved in the fabrication of solar panels, which might end up in the finished product:

Hydrogen chloride
Silicon tetrachloride
Hydrochloric acid
Sulfuric acid
Nitric acid
Sulfuric acid
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
Formaldehyde
Arsine gas
Trichlorosilane gas
Silane gas
Sulfur dioxide
Sulfur hexaflouride
Sodium hydroxide
Potassium hydroxide
Lead

Now that they have been alerted to the severity of the solar panel toxicity issue, what do conscientious states and communities do to protect their citizens and eco-systems from these life-threatening chemicals?

With solar, there are two major concerns with these toxic materials:

1. Over the 20± year estimated life of solar panels, how do states and local communities make sure that these chemicals will not migrate from solar panels into soils and local aquifers? and
2. How will solar panels with these materials be safely disposed of at the end of their useful life, and who will pay for it?(Note: these panels will not biodegrade, plus it is extremely difficult to recycle very much of these panels.)

The answers to both questions should primarily be found in state laws, and secondarily in local ordinances.

It is unconscionable to have state legislators mandate solar projects (e.g., via Renewable Portfolio Standards [RPS] legislation), yet not likewise pass accompanying appropriate legislation to protect their citizens (and environment) from the well-documented toxic threats that can result from their RPS.

Additionally, for state legislators to throw the responsibility of protecting citizens and the environment onto the backs of local representatives, is beyond unreasonable. In North Carolina, for example, what sense does it make to require that a hundred counties must get educated on the impacts of these toxic materials, and then write (and pass) a hundred local ordinances that try to address that threat to their communities?
Election Integrity

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr. — January 19, 2023

“Cruise ship alarmists: check your premises and update your facts. Take a week long cruise. Bring some books to beat ‘climate anxiety.’ Epstein, Koonin, Bryce, Lomborg, Smil, Morano …. all affordable and best sellers.”

I am leaving the country on a cruise ship next week. It’s a rather amazing, affordable get-away. A week at sea with multiple international destinations is for the masses–the middle class and some lower-to-middle upper class. (Cunard from New York City to Liverpool will have to wait for some of us.)

There will be around 5,400 passengers and 2,200 crew on board (Allure of the Seas). The reformulated diesel that powers the ship (electricity too) represents the work of hundreds of thousands of “energy slaves.” All to have the experience that Kings and Queens of yore could only dream about.

Cruise ships are little cities at sea. They are monuments to freedom, joining the Supermarket and, of course, the ultimate capitalist institution, the Stock Market. There is virtually no government, just “simple rules for a complex world.”

All of the great food one can eat and a reflective look at the open ocean. Destination excursions to see eco-treasures. Again, all made possible by dense, reliable mineral energies.

Complaint! (Stephen Fern, Ark2030)

Bah, humbug–the climate busy-bodies do not like such conspicuous consumption, fueled by dense mineral energy. Here is a recent post from Stephen Fern, founder of Ark2030, in response to a next-generation mega-cruise ship, The Icon of the Seas (Royal Caribbean).

I suppose this is the perfect illustration of where the world has gone wrong. A glorious celebration of greed, consumption and avarice; packaged as ‘entertainment’. All on one boat.

It presents the perfect contrast to what ‘Ark Lovers’ are seeking.

A world where our happinness is based upon a mutual respect for people, planet and prosperity.

Where our fulfillment comes from our connection with nature, positive relationships with family and friends, belonging to communities that care about each other and the environment around them.

Looking after our physical and mental well-being, eating healthy local seasonal food and enjoying every aspect of a life that is on offer for free.

Not just taking what we want just because we can … and always making sure we give back more than we take.

More Complaint! (Angry Assaad)

Enter Assaad Razzouk, the “angry clean energy guy,” and head of Gurīn Energy in Singapore (renewables), and author of “Saving the Planet without the Bullshit.” The chapter “Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit”: A Luxury Cruise Liner is a Stinking Floating Dumpster,” states:

Luxury cruises are punctured garbage bins on water. 47 cruise ships emit 10 times more sulphur dioxide in European waters (2017 data) than all of Europe’s 260m cars combined. That’s just 1 of 3 air pollutants discharged from the ships’ smokestacks.

And it gets worse … Many in the industry also use the dirtiest possible fuel to power their ships, one that is 100 times more polluting than road diesel

– Bunker fuel is waste from the oil refining process and it is an environmental nightmare. Pitch black, thick, heavy and toxic, it doesn’t evaporate and it emits more poison than other fuels because it’s loaded with sulphur, which when burned releases gases harmful to human health and to the environment. These gases are poisonous to fish and seabirds and aren’t much good for humans living near ports, because they travel hundreds of kms: 70% of shipping emissions occur within 400kms of land.

Industry emits a staggering amount of poison, much of which makes it into our lungs. Ship engine oil pollution increases incidences of childhood asthma and cancer, contributing to an estimated 1,300 premature deaths a year around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and 60,000 a year globally

By using this fuel, the industry is also subsidizing the oil and gas sector. If shipping lines weren’t buying it, oil and gas companies would have to dispose of it safely, an expensive proposition – and a subsidy in the order of $450 billion

The shipping industry dumps its plastic in the oceans. It dumps its trash. It dumps its excess oil. It also dumps its foul wastewater

Ships are required to treat waste using equipment referred to as ‘Marine Sanitation Devices’ – except this can mean literally any equipment designed to treat sewage, often leaving behind toxic contaminants, bacteria and heavy metals that harm marine ecosystems

The shipping industry is also responsible for a billion tons of carbon a year. If it were a country, it would be the 6th largest polluter in the world. Its emissions are growing to such an extent that they are currently expected to be anywhere from 50% to 250% higher by 2050

Price they paid for all that poison: Zero

Friends of the Earth

Check your premises and facts, Angry Assaad. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and the real pollutants named have been going down and down. Check the websites of the major cruise lines and learn about the amazing technology that leaves the ocean waters as clean as they are found. And ditch the emotions and take a cruise yourself to see how you like it. (But please, not floating wind turbines or solar buoys to interfere with operations.)

Friends of the Earth

In Cruise Ships’ Environmental Impact (March 14, 2022), the eco-group Friends of the Earth states:

Cruise ships are a catastrophe for the environment — and that’s not an overstatement. They dump toxic waste into our waters, fill the planet with carbon dioxide, and kill marine wildlife. Cruise ships’ environmental impact is never ending, and they continue to get bigger. They once were small ships, around 30,000 tons. Now, corporations are building billion-dollar cruise ships to hold more than 9,000 people. They’re doing everything they can to pack these floating cities full of tourists while polluting everything in their path. 

Worse:

… everything that cruise ships come in contact with are likely to be harmed along their journey. The air, water, fragile habitats, coastal communities, and wildlife are all affected. But most governments have refused to take actions to actually regulate the cruise industry and buried their heads in the sand to ignore the ongoing damage to the environment and communities. 

Cruise ship alarmists: check your premises and update your facts. Take a week long cruise. Bring some books to beat ‘climate anxiety.’ Epstein, Koonin, Bryce, Lomborg, Smil, Spencer …. all affordable and best sellers.

From Jennifer Marohasy’s blog

Jennifer Marohasy

There is more than one way to ruin a perfectly good historical temperature record. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology achieves this in multiple ways, primarily through industrial scale remodelling (also known as homogenisation – stripping away the natural warming and cooling cycles that correspond with periods of drought and flooding), and also by scratching historical hottest day records, then there is the setting of limits on how cold a temperature can now be recorded and also by replacing mercury thermometers with temperature probes that are purpose-built, as far as I can tell, to record hotter for the same weather.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) regularly claims new record hot days, and Australian scientist report that heat records are now 12 times more likely than cold ones. But how reliable – how verifiable – are the new records?

I have been trying for five years to verify the claim that the 23 September 2017 at Mildura was the hottest September day ever recorded in Victoria. According to media reporting at that time, it was the hottest September day all the way-back to 1889 when records first began. Except that back then, back in September 1889, maximum temperatures were recorded at Mildura with a mercury thermometer. Now they are recorded with a temperature probe that is more sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and can thus potentially record warmer for the same weather.

In the absence of any other influences, an instrument with a faster response time [temperature probe] will tend to record higher maximum and lower minimum temperatures than an instrument with a slower response time [mercury thermometer]. This is most clearly manifested as an increase in the mean diurnal range. At most locations, particularly in arid regions, it will also result in a slight increase in mean temperatures, as short-term fluctuations oftemperature are generally larger during the day than overnight.” Research Report No. 032, by Blair Trewin, BoM, October 2018, page 21.

To standardise recordings from temperature probes with mercury thermometers, one-second readings from probes are normally averaged over one minute – or batches of ten second readings are averaged and then averaged again over one minute. That is the world-wide standard to ensure recordings from temperature probes are comparable with recordings from mercury thermometers. But the Australian Bureau of Meteorology do not do this, instead they take one-second instantaneous readings and then enter the highest of these one-second spot readings for any given 24-hour period as the official maximum temperature for that day.

There is an easy way to test this.

Many Australians check the ‘Latest Weather Observations’ for their local weather station online at the Bureau website, but few realize that the values they see there represent the last one-second recording for any given half hour period.

For example, for the 23rd September 2017, the highest value for that day as shown on the observations page for Mildura was 37.2 °C, recorded at 12:00pm.

Yet 37.7 °C was entered into the data archive as the official maximum temperature for 23rd September 2017 at Mildura.

This represents a discrepancy of 0.5 °C.

This is because the Bureau uses the highest one-second reading as the the maximum temperature for that day, while the last (not the highest or averaged) one-second reading for any 30-minute period is displayed on the ‘Latest Weather Observations’ page.

There is absolutely no averaging. None at all in direct contravention of international norms and standards.

This is confusing, most unconventional, and in fact ridiculous.

Consider the temperatures as recorded at Sydney’s Observatory Hill automatic weather station just yesterday, as another example.

Australia is a land of drought or flooding rains and so relatively hot years like 2017 tend to be followed by cooler years including the last three years. Until yesterday, 18th January 2023, Sydney apparently had its longest spell of days with temperatures below 30 °C in 140 years. And I watched as Chris Kenny on Sky Television last night made reference to this and showed the ‘Latest Weather Observations for Sydney – Observatory Hill’ with the temperature showing 30.1°C at 2.30pm.

I went online to the Bureau’s data archive to see the maximum temperature officially record for this weather station for 18th January 2023. At 9 am this morning, a different value was entered, the value of 30.2°C, giving a discrepancy of 0.1.

There is a discrepancy because the value on the ‘latest observations’ page is the last one second reading for that 30 minute period, while the value entered into the permanent archive is the highest one second reading for the entire day.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) provides a clear definitions of daily maximum temperature. This temperature can be read directly from a mercury thermometer, but when using a temperature probe ‘instantaneous’ values must be averaged over one to ten minutes.

Back to Mildura and in summary, both the one second value of 37.2 °C shown for 12:00 pm on 23rd September 2017, and the different one second value of 37.7 °C recorded as the daily maximum temperature at Mildura on that same day are not compliant with any international standard and therefore are not verifiable or standardisable against the temperatures as officially recorded at Mildura using a mercury thermometer from January 1889 until 1 November 1996. It is thus disingenuous to claim a new record hot day back to 1889 for 23rd September 2017, because the temperature on 23rd September 2017 was measured with a different type of recording instrument (temperature probe) and in a non-compliant way (no averaging).

Theoretically it is possible to know how the values of 37.2 °C and 37.7 °C compare with a mercury thermometer for that location at that time of year as Mildura is meant to be a location with parallel measurements. That is measurements from both a probe and a mercury thermometer in the same automatic weather station recorded on what are known as A8 Forms.

I have been seeking this information for 34 different locations as part of a Freedom of Information Request, so far denied by the Bureau. An appeal against this is being heard in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on 3rd February 2023 in Brisbane.

The current probe, the third for Mildura, was installed on 27th June 2012. As I will show in a future blog post in this series, this probe has a very different recording profile relative to the previous probes and the mercury thermometer.

There is theoretically parallel data (temperatures recorded from both probes and mercury) for Mildura for the period from 1 January 1989 until 28 January 2015, and many scanned A8 Forms were provided to me following the intervention of Minister Josh Frydenberg in November 2017. But the Bureau has so far withheld the A8 Forms pertaining to the entire month of September 2012. This is the only September for which there are parallel recordings with the same probe used to record the 23rd September 2017 claimed record hot day and a mercury thermometer.

Mildura has one of the longest temperature records for any where in the Murray Darling Basin region. The official data for this region shows an increase in the number of warmer years after the temperature probes became the official recording instrument beginning on 1 November 1996.

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