Black is white, hot is cold. That is what we are continually being asked to believe, including by the counsel for Michael Mann in his defamation trial again Mark Steyn.
If you haven’t already started listening along, I suggest you begin with the re-enactments in the daily Ann and Phelim podcasts. I have just finished listening to Day 5, Mann in the Box. And I’m angry.
I am angry that information can be so misrepresented, and I am also angry that for so many years John Abbot and I have not been properly supported in our fight for the parallel data to enable some checking of the last thirty years of thermometer temperature data for Australia.
If you listen to Day 5, Mann in the Box, you will hear Ann McElinney incredulous that climate scientists could believe tree ring data from 1134 AD, but not 1980 (I might have got those years wrong). Thus, the need to ‘hide the decline’ and for ‘Mike’s trick’, which is swapping to thermometer data from proxy (tree ring) data as convenient, which is routinely done by climate scientists as detailed in the Climategate emails.
As Ann explains, from Michael Mann’s own words, the infamous hockey stick graph that created so much impetus for action on climate change, is reliant on tree ring data that are assumed to be reliable back some centuries but are known to not be reliable since the 1980s – it makes no sense.
Welcome to the world of climate science where hot is cold and black is white. And more specifically to my world where I have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the temperature data for Australia, and much of the rest of the world, is not reliable for at least the last thirty years. I have shown this through my blog series, Hyping Maximum Daily Temperatures (Parts 1- 7).
Specifically, that the switch over to automatic weather stations where temperature is increasingly measured as electrical resistance through platinum resistance probes that are susceptible to electrical interference particularly at airports, and that can be calibrated to measure how ever many degrees warmer (or cooler) that Andrew Johnston, the current head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, might deem appropriate.
I’ve been assured over the last few years, including by Andrew Johnson, that the change from mercury thermometer to platinum resistance probe is not the cause of, nor a contribution to, global warming as reported on the nightly television news. If it was, this would be evident as an increase in the number of hot days and their average temperature – just the same as what we are told has been caused by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
They treat us like mugs (by which I mean idiots or lazy ducks in a park), and for the most part my colleagues behave as such. Thank goodness for Mark Steyn. Finally, someone who calls black for black – except when he is joking.
The most straightforward way to know the effect of the change to temperature probes – and to distinguish this from the potential effects of warming from carbon dioxide – would be to compare the automatic readings from the probes with the manual readings from mercury thermometers at many weather stations over many years.
The bureau has been collecting this data as handwritten recordings on A8 forms. There is no official list but, piecing together information, I am confident that parallel data – measurements from probes versus mercury – exists for 38 weather stations and from many of these there should be more than 20 years of daily data available to enable comparisons. Access to all this information, and its analysis, would enable some assessment of the consequence of the equipment change. The issue is doubly complicated by the bureau using more than one type of probe, changing the type of probe used, and the type of data transmitted electronically – initially averaging values and then changing to the recording of instantaneous values.
It was back in 2015 that I first tried get the parallel data for Wilson’s Promontory Lighthouse. (You can read the letter I first sent to the Bureau by CLICKING HERE, and an overview of the saga by CLICKING HERE.)
Then in December 2017, after John Abbot told me that I had been going about it all wrong, I challenged him to get the data for me. Thus began his attempt to get this data through Freedom of Information (FOI).
After some years, and so much correspondence and denial, rather than hand over the temperature data to John Abbot, we ended up at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) with me as the expert witness and him representing himself. That was in February last year, nearly a year ago. Except that trial never proceeded, for reasons I still don’t understand except that Andrew Johnson does not want Boris Kelly-Gerreryn to have to give evidence under oath, for reasons that I do understand.
So, we were forced back into mediation. I was contacted sometime after this by a lawyer concerned that we were representing ourselves. I encouraged him to put the word out through his network that we should get some help, some assistance preferable from someone who understood how difficult it is to win at the AAT and a lawyer experienced in the same. Then I get a phone call from John Roskam asking about all of this because Stuart Woods had contacted him having seen the note from this lawyer to the network of Australian lawyers who ostensibly concern themselves with issues of public interest. Yes, I confirmed, it would be good to get some legal assistance, and that was the last I heard of it.
John Abbot has though received more correspondence from Boris Kelly-Gerreyn specifically a letter dated December 7, 2023. In this letter, the bureau is back to denying that any of this parallel data exists. Boris Kelly-Gerreyn is the General Manager, Data Program and Chief Data Officer, Bureau of Meteorology.
It is the case that in climate science: black is white, and hot is cold and the Conservative side of politics seems, for the most part, to just go along with all of this. The planet is boiling and all of that, let’s go nuclear, say the sitting ducks. Etcetera. Etcetera.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jennifer whilst I really appreciate your efforts in this matter please be careful as it a proven strategy for many public servants to just wear down people until their health is impacted, their finances are depleted or they give up.
We have a problem where we live where a National Park was supposed to have a hazard control burn done 10 years ago, on arriving to do the burn the relevant authorities took one look (from their very expensive helicopter) and decided not to burn it as they would not be able to control the burn. Now some Honey Possums who have inhabited the area for many millennium through bush fires and droughts have been found and need to be protected from fire. Meanwhile 300 residential properties and their families are less than 100 meters from the National Park and are not important enough to warrant management of the extreme fire risk that now exists. Add to that now the Shire Council against their own policies are dumping the wood chips they create clearing fire breaks into the bush. Bureaucracy has simply gone mad.
Jennifer you say that they (The Bureau) deny that any of this parallel data exists. If that is the case they surely have failed to prove the new system for for purpose. The explanation below outlines exactly why.
Back in the seventies I was working with the Commonwealth Health Department in Automatic Data Processing. We processed Chemists claims against the National Health Scheme. Every month we received a bundle of scripts from the pharmacists claiming the balance owed under the scheme where the patient paid the first 50 cents and the federal Government made up the difference.
Processing was initially on punch card and then on paper tape with the work having to be done twice, initial punching by one operator and then verification by another where discrepancies between punch and verification were scrutinised and fixed. The corrected tape was then copied to magnetic tape and flown to Canberra where the data was processed into the final claim and cheques issues to pharmacists all over the Country.
Big changes were on the way with the advent of on line processing. The Health Department led the way, implementing a new system which eliminated the paper tape verification element and almost halving the work involved. The data from chemists claims was keyed directly to the Canberra computer on line and the system was programmed to detect errors which were then corrected online. Instead of some 70 workstations there were 40, three or four of which had VDU’s or visual display units-screens as we know them today. The Common User Data Network (CUDN) was initially shared by Health and TAA but grew exponentially driven by demand for improved data processing economies.
To be certain the new system was fit for purpose the old paper tape and the new on line were parallel run for a period of time and the results compared. Much was made of the parallel running process and understandably so as a lot of money was paid to pharmacists each month.
If the parallel temperature data exists and the bureau won’t share it then something is surely being hidden and they are doing a Michael on the Australian public. If the parallel data does not exist then the Bureau should be held to account for failing to prove the new system for purpose and made to run the two systems run in parallel as they should have been when the new system was implemented.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=committees/estimate/26894/&sid=0006
We need a capable script writer to pen another Yes Minister show taking the piss, basically out of the government agencies. Climate isn’t at risk. The whole thing is about money and power
Hi Jennifer,
Please keep fighting for truth in Climate Science in Australia.
Can I offer you a gentle Video to relax from all your hard work.
https://youtu.be/ZbFXC6MAqVw?si=vJ8bLiM82NrwDxiZ
The Mills of the Gods grind slowly, but always true.
The outright corruption of officials trying to justify their climate change agenda and associated policies is not un-noticed by the wider public. The public are now learning that manipulation of data to create a particular climate scenario is not being done in the public interest but is being done to line the pockets of corrupt officials. The public worldwide are now rejecting control of the elites who are trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the people and they will be punished by the people.
Jennifer, why are you so fixated on one out of dozens of physical. isotopic and geochemical palaeotemperature proxies ?
M&M have brewed up enough statistical Kool Aid to drown a stand-up comic, but nobody really mistakes it for disinterested science
Let it go.
Russell
The history of science shows that it is only when a failed paradigm is replaced, that it can be accepted as wrong. In short, if you want to move beyond the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming it needs to be replaced. We need a new theory and new tools.
I am developing a new theory of climate, and I am working it up from first principles, and from reliable data both proxy and instrumental. And while it has temporarily been taken away from me, I would like to get back to using artificial intelligence for rainfall and temperature forecasting.
So far, my attempts to develop the reliable data sets are being thwarted by the institutions and certainly not aided by colleagues. In the first instance, it would be good if you, and others, accepted that there was more than 1.5C of cooling through the first half of last century and more than 1.5C of warming during the second half.
Cheers,
Jennifer, i’m sorry , but attributing to me belief in what you term:
“the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming”
betrays an hilariously narrow and at times inverted view of the history of the interaction of science and policy in recent decades.
The hilarity stems from forgetting something Australian witnesses as diverse as Ian Pilmer and Tom Wigley can remind you of: confronting Carl Sagan’s polemic abuse of climate models in the pages of Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, and Nature years before CO2 forcing became a focus of policy , and being lambasted by Al Gore’s factotum Naomi Oreskes for my trouble in her books and movies quoting them.
You really should catch up on your reading !
Thanks Russell, but this isn’t about you, or Ian Plimer. You have had your go, the both of you. And you have been a failure.
It is about the models/tools currently used to characterise weather and climate, and that are so dismal at forecasting droughts and floods.
And the molesting of the historical data sets.
You may not believe in the hockey stick, but it is promoted in schools and universities, it is then consensus science endorsed by the key institutions and as far as I can tell the Conservative side of politics, at least when they are in government and could do something about all this nonsense.
Show us how your AI models are better than BoM. Predict the next grain season in the Western Australian wheat belt. Talk is cheap.
Thanks David. John Abbot and I used a different set of indices with some variations to the network structure back in 2015, when we had a go at forecasting for the WA Wheat Belt. We presented the research at an AI conference in Hobart that was mostly attended by young South Koreans, Chinese and Indians, though the conference was in Australia at University of Tasmania.
Our presentation was subsequently developed into a book chapter, sponsored by the organisers of the conference and can be downloaded from here:
Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2016. Forecasting monthly rainfall in the Western Australian wheat-belt up to 18-months in advance using artificial neural networks. In AI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Eds. B.H. Kand & Q. Bai. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-50127-7_6.
I was actively forecasting from 2012 through to 2017. Then I stopped. I got up one morning, it was after our GeoResJ paper was published, and I also stopped reading all the vitriol and hatred including from Gavin Schmidt.
I would be keen to have a second go at building a capacity to do this forecasting. But next time I would do it differently, and I would only begin if I had a larger team and more money to get started. And I don’t need to prove anything any more. I would get back involved if there was some good will, from within Australia. And of course, I am now concerned about the integrity of the temperature data, I want the parallel data first, you can read more about this in the Weekend Australian, here:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/court-case-draws-attention-to-the-unreliability-of-green-experts/news-story/d156222db73295acfd64730740e77c48
To Russel Steiz What a compliment and I suspect it was meant to be an insult. Now if you really want to insult someone you would tell them they were the intellectual equivalent of Michael Mann somebody who’s whole claim to fame was totally dismembered by two guys. Using Mann’s own data. There are none so blind as those who do not want to see. More commonly known as Ideologues.
The Hansard record makes it clear that the data you sought were available. Why lie?