Back in 2014, when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia, and after a series of damning articles in The Australian newspaper showing the extent to which the Bureau of Meteorology remodel historic temperature series exaggerating warming, there was opportunity for a review.

There was real opportunity for an overhaul of how the Bureau not only change recorded temperatures, but also forecasts the weather.

The plan went to Cabinet, and it was ‘shut down’ by then Environment Minister Greg Hunt. He is on the public record proudly explaining that he ‘killed’ the idea.

Greg Hunt wanted everyone to know that he stepped in and squashed the idea, and Tony Abbott has never ever been asked to explain how and why he let that happen.

Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the articles that precipitated the calls for a review of the Bureau was sent to South America for a stint, and I lost my adjunct position at Central Queensland University. That was in 2015.

In the eight years since, the Bureau has further exaggerated historic warming trends, while also rolling out a new series of resistance probes in electronic weather stations that can record even warmer for the same weather.

It is not as though this has been without consequence. The Bureau’s hyping has provided justification for far reaching economic interventions, so there is no longer a functioning energy market in Australia. Instead, governments from both sides of politics have provided hundreds of billions of more taxpayer funding, and faster and faster with whatever legislation and regulation is needed, to enforce the transition to renewable energy and the closing down of coalfired power stations.

Meanwhile the Bureau has been working towards faster and faster resistance probes, designed to be ever thinner and thinner, thus even more responsive to fluctuations in air temperature – and political pressures for ever more hot days. Without the inertia of market forces, or a mercury thermometer, which will take a minute or two to adjust to a change in air temperature depending on the wind speed, the probes can record higher daily temperatures for the same weather.

This allows the Bureau to keep calling new record hot days, and claiming they are a consequence of human-caused global warming. For example, the Bureau claimed a record new hottest-ever September on 22nd September 2017 for Mildura, and then extended this to the entire state of Victoria, claiming the hottest back to 1889, because of carbon emissions, without explaining you can get the same effect from more sensitive equipment. Temperatures back in 1889 were measured with mercury thermometers, not resistance probes.

It was the calling of that new record for Mildura that caused me to complain to John Abbot, a scientist and a lawyer, about the need for the parallel data. These are the temperature measurements taken by mercury thermometers at the same time and place as the measurements from the resistance probes, thus potentially providing a check on the excesses of the Bureau.

It took more than three years, and an appearance at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, before John Abbot was able to extract even a small amount of the parallel data from the Bureau for the one location of Brisbane Airport under Freedom of Information legislation.

After I analysed the three years of data provided as over 1,000 scanned reports and showed that the measurements from the probe and the mercury at Brisbane airport are different, with the probe sometimes recording up to 0.7C warmer than the mercury and that this difference is statistically significant, and after Graham Lloyd wrote up the story that was published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday 15th April, I was invited onto Chris Kenny’s program on Sky TV.

It wasn’t the lead story, on Monday 17th April.

Chris Kenny introduced the topic of catastrophic human-caused global warming as ‘a debate’. He then proceeded to introduce me as a biologist in an ‘argument’ with the Bureau of Meteorology over measurements from new instrumentation that overstates current temperatures. Except the bureau won’t argue with me, they are ignoring me – to the extent possible, at least publicly.

Chris Kenny, nevertheless, introduced the topic thus, and only after a long segment in which he lamented that the Princess of Wales Catherine was reportedly denied access to the Queen’s bedside before her death, for concerns it would offend the Duchess of Sussex Meghan.

I thought that was old news. And certainly, of no economic consequence – while our entire economy is restructured at great expense to stop global warming because the measurements show it is getting hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, the two royal commentators that he had on before me, discussing Meghan, where allowed to go on and on, and on, and they were allowed to engage in some ‘debate’, specifically about politics within families and how Meghan has been a disruptive influence.

Of course, if Chris Kenny could have two conservative commentators on the segment before me debating Meghan, he could have at least theoretically found a conservative commentator to debate me on the topic of the resistance probes and the Bureau hyping warming. Not to mention how this provides reason for more government funding for the cartels that make so much money out of renewable energy at taxpayers’ expense.

Except Chris Kenny didn’t, and he won’t have anyone debate me, or the topic. Not the details of the topic of how temperatures are measured, or the history of Conservatives, beginning with Margaret Thatcher, making a hash of it. The Conservative media only ever present this issue as the fault of others, and they elevate the same others to positions of reverence the minute they change sides be it Patrick Moore or Michael Shellenberger.

As Tucker Carson has been explaining since he was removed as the most popular anchor from Fox News, for getting into the detail on an unpopular issues – even showing footage of the QAnon Shaman being escorted peacefully by Capitol police on 6th January
– if you want a job in the mainstream media, you need to self-censor.

And if you want a job in politics and you can’t do it yourself, then get someone like Greg Hunt to do it for your entire team, the entire Cabinet – for you and Scotty and also Peter Dutton.

I have observed that over the last decade Conservatives have shown more groupthink than the Greens and Labor combined on this and most other issues, while claiming they would welcome debate. If only the Australian Broadcasting Corporation allowed it. Nevermind that they were the government for most of the last decade.

As Timothy Crouse wrote in his famous analysis of mainstream pack journalism:

“In the world of straight, objective journalism, the more freedom you gave the reporter, the more he censored himself. Freedom scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all.

Freedom simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man on a battlefield. [ends]

And so, Chris Kenny devalued my segment, that potentially provided just the ammunition the Conservatives need to argue against Net Zero, by placing it at the very end of the evening and after amusing gossip concerning the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

I have read former Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex’s, memoire Spare, towards the end he laments the royal family’s relationship with the British media. He goes into some detail about how both Charles and the late Queen have/had PR teams in constant negotiation with the media. He explains how what is reported is less to do with the news, and more about what both sides determine to be convenient and acceptable within their own bizarre rules of this game, for any moment in time. No wonder there has never been any proper ‘debate’ about human-caused global warming in the UK, with the former Prince, now King Charles III, known to have this issue as his pet project that the media will respect given their rules of engagement.

I would be grateful to Chris Kenny for having me last on his program on Monday 17th April after the front page article by Graham Lloyd in The Weekend Australia, except there was no debate, and there is no debate. That is the most destructive and worst of all the lies.

Moreover, most Conservatives consistently repeat the Bureau’s claims of imminent catastrophe. There is Tim Wilson, the former member for Goldstein and a former IPA employee, and a great champion of the official line on all of this. Then there is the former deputy PM Josh Frydenberg. He is right across the issue of the Bureau fudging the historical record and could have at least tried to do something about it when he was the former Minister for the Environment. Why doesn’t Chris Kenny, or one of the other Sky News commentators, get some debate going by having one of these champions of catastrophic warming, and therefore presumably the Bureau’s faux historical temperature reconstructions also on his program for a debate?

Then, of course, there is Greg Hunt. Back in 2014 he apparently ‘killed’ Tony Abbott’s attempt to force an enquiry into the industrial scale remodelling of Australia’s temperature history through the process of homogenisation that underpins the narrative that gives us more and more expensive, while less and less reliable, electricity.

Most Conservatives politicians in Australia already know that there are major problems with the Bureau’s characterisation of our temperature history, and maybe even that the new record hot days that the Bureau are constantly calling are a consequence of custom-designed resistance probes rather than global warming. But they pretend otherwise and look the other way.

No one really wants to have the debate – on either side of Australian politics.

I will continue this story as part of a series I’m calling ‘Jokers, Off-Topic Reviews and Drinking from the Alcohol Thermometer’.
You can read my previous comment here: https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/05/jokers-and-temperature-as-radio-chatter

From Jennifer Marohasy’s Blog

Jennifer Marohasy

I gave a talk yesterday, over Zoom , as you do nowadays, explaining that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology don’t really know how to measure temperatures anymore, so they take the recordings they have, and remodel them until it looks like how they think it should. That is then republished as an annual assessment of climate variability and change.

The assessment is published at the beginning of each year and advertised as an update, but the Bureau don’t always include the most relevant numbers – if they don’t feel like it. That might sound outrageous, and it is. But then again, the Bureau does what it wants to do. That has been the case since at least November 1996, when the transition began away from measuring temperatures using traditional liquid-in-glass thermometers which are mercury for maximum temperatures and alcohol for minimum temperatures.

Meteorologists often refer to the average temperature, but it would be misleading to think this is the average of all the temperatures measured say every hour over a day, or a month, or a year. Rather it is the highest temperature, and the lowest temperature as measured each day. These two extreme values are added together giving the daily mean.

Before November 1996, when most official maximum temperatures were measured with a mercury thermometer, the highest temperature was less extreme than it is now. This is because mercury in a glass tube, which is the essence of a mercury thermometer, takes some time to adjust to air temperature, so there is an amount of inertia.

Nowadays, the Bureau takes temperature readings every one second from what are called resistance probes and the very hottest of these instantaneous values is designated the maximum temperature for that day.

It is actually slightly more complicated.

If you will indulge my interest in all things technical – and concentrate intensely on what I write for just a moment or at least slightly longer than it took a probe to record the maximum temperature at the airport in Cordoba, Spain, a couple of weeks ago – a new record maximum for Spain for April. That was the media headline. What was not explained, because it spoils the story somewhat, and because people have trouble concentrating on detail, is that the temperature was recorded at an airport with the probe located between the runway tarmac and the taxiing apron.

In the olden days, maximum temperatures were recorded from places like botanical gardens by astronomers who sometimes also kept their telescopes there. They were fascinated with the natural environment and continually looking for new ways to measure it. Nowadays, it is the case that airports are the primary site across the world for recording temperatures, that are reported by meteorologists, often on the nightly news, with yet another record-breaking hot day more likely to increase viewer engagement. So, it is at the end of the day, month, and year that the weather report is analysed in terms of increased traffic volume metrics (for example clicks) rather than the meteorologist’s skill at predicting, for example, how much rain or snow actually fell.

This relatively new imperative is aided by not only having the probes at airports, where more frequent take offs and landings by ever more powerful jet engines, will continually increase the likelihood of a blast of hot air being recorded as the hottest day ever, but also by all the electrical noise.

For sure, I need to explain how this works.

A mercury thermometer is completely impervious to the beat of airport radar that may move across the tarmac every 30-40 seconds. Not so, what are referred to as ‘low noise’ amplifiers attempting to precisely measure the change in resistance of the platinum electrodes in the resistance probe: that is how the probes measures temperature. These electrodes may not only be energised every time the radar sweeps over them, but also by the chatter from a pilot in the airport’s control tower.

As an analogue engineer recently explained to me, because of all the radio interference at airports, it is not really a place to be recording temperatures with resistance probes. Yet this is exactly where most of these temperature recording devices are now located – and not just in Australia, but across the world. So, the average global mean temperature may not only include the blast from a jet plane landing at Cordoba, Spain, but also the chatter from pilots and the control tower because temperature is now primarily measured as changes in electrical current and at airports.

Of course, those measuring temperatures using these probes at airports would be working hard to exclude radio frequencies (RF) getting into the input of the receiving amplifier and causing random errors. At least one would hope so – unless they are jokers.

The real test of this is seeing how the readings from a mercury thermometer compare with readings from these resistance probes at airports – around the world.

The original Joker was of course the arch-criminal obsessed with absurdity and joke-based crimes: clown-like in appearance and personality, a master of intrigue and escape. And, so, I was pondering the number of times the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has escaped having to show the parallel data for my hometown of Brisbane – or any of its many other airport sites – despite multiple reviews, reports, advisory panels, and peer-reviewed studies rejecting claims that its temperature record is biased or flawed. Here I am quoting directly from the The Guardian on Sunday, an article by Graham Readfearn in which he seems to delight, perhaps as the joker’s sidekick, about how many times any proper review of these measurements has been rebuked, including a proposal by Senator Cory Bernardi, that there be some oversight by the National Audit Office.

Rather than show even Bill Johnston a limited amount of parallel data for Canberra airport back in 2014, when he made a Freedom of Information request, the Bureau destroyed it, or so the story goes.

In the ‘Batman and Robin’ episodes I watched as a child on an old black and white television, the Joker was ever elusive and in the most imaginative ways.

John Abbot, who like Johnston has made FOI requests for parallel temperature data from airports, wrote in The Australian newspaper – at about the time the new record hot temperature was being recorded from Cordoba airport in Spain – explaining how rather than provide some parallel data for Brisbane airport, the Bureau falsely claimed the data never existed.

In fact, a relatively small amount of the data that the jokers claimed did not exist was eventually provided to Abbot, by the same jokers just before Easter. That was on Thursday 6th April when the jokers sent Abbot 36 separate emails to which were variously attached a jumble of scans of over 1,000 handwritten reports.

As though anyone expects to receive scans of over 1,000 hand-written reports across 36 emails when they are told they will eventually be provided with parallel data for Brisbane airport for the three years August 2019 to July 2022.

Abbot immediate onforwarded the mess to me.

I will continue this story as part of a series I’m calling ‘Jokers, Off-Topic Reviews and Drinking from the Alcohol Thermometer’.

On the topic of alcohol following is how many times the Bureau has changed the alcohol thermometer measuring minimum temperatures at Brisbane Airport over the last two decades. One thermometer used to last 100 years.

A JUMBLE OF METADATA
Year Opened 1992/ Minimum Temperature
14/FEB/2000 INSTALL Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Type Dobbie S/N – 18985) Surface Observations
06/MAY/2008 INSTALL Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Type Dobbie S/N – 19048) Surface Observations
04/JUN/2012 INSTALL Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Type Dobbie S/N – 19266) Surface Observations
06/MAY/2008 REMOVE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Type Dobbie S/N – 19266) Surface Observations
24/JUL/2020 REPLACE – (jtaylor2) Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 33803) Surface Observations
05/AUG/2020 REPLACE – (jtaylor2) Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 33849) Surface Observations
10/MAY/2019 REPLACE – (jtaylor2) Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Dobbie S/N – 2546) Surface Observations
03/SEP/2015 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 19048) Surface Observations
24/NOV/2019 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 19048) Surface Observations
08/MAY/2013 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 23264) Surface Observations
06/MAY/2015 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 27637) Surface Observations
26/AUG/2015 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 27637) Surface Observations
19/MAR/2016 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 27637) Surface Observations
09/JUN/2013 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 27654) Surface Observations
29/MAY/2020 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 32894) Surface Observations
09/AUG/2020 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 32894) Surface Observations
29/JUL/2021 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 33820) Surface Observations
03/DEC/2020 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Amarol S/N – 33824) Surface Observations
09/JUN/2004 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Dobbie S/N – 19048) Surface Observations
21/DEC/2005 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Dobbie S/N – 19266) Surface Observations
10/JUL/2015 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now Dobbie S/N – 2546) Surface Observations
15/MAY/2016 REPLACE Thermometer, Alcohol, Min (Now WIKA S/N – 43095) Surface Observations

B. ANNUAL MAXIMUM TEMPERATURES FROM BRISBANE AIRPORT

END NOTES

Notes, and links, to some more of the topics mentioned above and much thanks to energy economist Alan Moran for organising the Zoom, and I will forward my notes in due course to you for the coal miners.

1. I confirmed on 3rd March 2021, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology admitted, as I surmised in a blog post on 10th February, that the reference value for 2021 was not actually included in its calculation of the amount of warming as published in the 2021 Annual Climate Statement, more here; https://ift.tt/W2Qmj6F
In short, we have a 2021 Annual Climate Statement that does not include the new 2021 value in its calculations.

2. Paul Homewood sent me an email about the new hot day in Spain, and his email linked to a BBC article that you can read here: https://ift.tt/gtsoiIY . Homewood has a website and you can sign up for his emails.

3. I was so disappointed that Graham Readfearn got his article published last Sunday in The Guardian, quoting Ailie Gallant from Monash University. https://ift.tt/r6DL2Fl

4. Regarding Bill Johnston, you can read more about the Canberra airport saga here: https://ift.tt/cdkEb7A

5. It is the case that John Abbot had some detail of the history of his interactions with the Bureau published by THE AUSTRALIAN and then republished by the Institute of Public Affairs:
‘BOM makes heavy weather over temperature data’ ’tis here https://ift.tt/0i3HbK6