Australia’s climate has warmed by more than 1.5C since 1910, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s main long-term temperature data. If you were so motivated, you might think if you could discredit this data, then you would undermine the whole climate change story and even – perhaps – the rationale for cutting Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past week, The Australian newspaper has launched a major reporting campaign based on a “forensic audit” that attempts to discredit the data, claiming it has found “widespread errors” that raise “questions about the integrity of records used for climate analysis”.
These are big claims indeed, that would require remarkable evidence. Former prime minister and climate science denier Tony Abbott called for an independent review, while News24 (formerly Sky News Australia) and 2GB also promoted the story, which sent climate science denial blogs into a flutter. On Thursday night, the bureau released a statement saying the claims were based on “several misunderstandings” and accusations of human intervention in the data were “false and unsubstantiated.” The bureau’s temperature records have been a constant target for climate science sceptics for more than 15 years.
When it comes to temperature records, the bureau makes the raw temperature data from its weather stations available to the public. But the bureau’s main temperature dataset for measuring climate change – known as ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature) takes observations from 112 weather stations and performs a quality control process to remove the effects of local changes (like a station moving) that could artificially alter the readings. a free newsletter There are of course multiple other datasets that show Australia’s climate, just like the rest of the planet, has warmed and how this heating presents a troubling laundry list of risks that leave almost no aspect of life in the country untouched. The Australian’s reporting – that includes at least eight pieces of coverage from stories, follow-ups and cartoons to editorials – centres on an “audit” of the raw data, which it said was carried out by a retired scientist and a former computer engineer.
There are too many claims to list here, but they range from accusations that sequences were detected showing “obvious patterns of human intervention” to missing or duplicated data. The audit report does not outline its methodology, saying only it had used statistical software and computer coding. This lack of a methodology might cause some to pause, but not The Australian.
The most striking example from the report, wrote The Australian’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, came from the minimum temperature readings for August 1907 for Sydney’s Observatory Hill that were found to have been duplicated in the record for August 1867. This deserves an explanation from the bureau. But it is also true that data before 1910 is not used in ACORN-SAT and so, in the context of what the bureau’s data says about Australia’s changing climate, it is irrelevant.
A bureau spokesperson said it had examined the claims made in the report and less than 200 observations from the 7m in ACORN-SAT data had been affected by duplication. The spokesperson said 10 months of observations had shown duplicate data for minimum temperatures at Observatory Hill, but only three of those months were after 1910. A fourth month of duplicate temperatures had been identified at Charleville in Queensland.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
