In all the hoohah about global warming one thing that gets too little attention, one among many, is how exactly we think we know how much it’s warmed since Prince Albert died. The impudent way some supposed authorities tell us the difference to two decimal places globally when we don’t know the temperature in many places to two degrees in 1861 is bad enough. But when we do have records of some sort, which are essentially limited to the English-speaking world plus Japan well into the 20th century, it often turns out that we’re being fed a load of dingoes’ kidneys. As for instance with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which has just been caught by The Australian newspaper engaging in one of those weird manipulations where it is difficult to distinguish statistical trickery from sheer incompetence. Though of course they are not mutually exclusive. But if you wanted to persuade people global warming was a hoax, a cunning plan to panic people into handing all power to the state in pursuit of a transnational agenda, it’s exactly what you’d do. Just not this badly.
One should never underestimate the incompetence of government. But one should also be aware that when such incompetence reinforces the agenda of senior politicians and public servants it is far less likely to be rooted out, or even noticed, than when it runs contrary to that agenda. Thus it is revealing that calls for an independent audit of Australia’s weather records, including crucially the accuracy of the digitizing of the long-run historical ones, are being opposed by the current Labour administration of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
These records are important partly because they’re among the very few direct temperature observations that we have from the dreaded “pre-Industrial” era, especially outside the continental United States. (The earliest are actually from Sydney in 1858 not 1861.) For the rest, the whole claim that there’s been 1.5C of warming, or even wackier claims like “Global temperatures reached 1.65C above preindustrial levels, scientists said on Thursday”, depend on us knowing from proxy data how hot it was in 1861 everywhere to two decimal places. Which plainly we do not.
When you look at the original Australian data, you see temperature in Fahrenheit entered to one decimal place. They were trying to be precise: As the Australian observes:
“The temperatures are recorded in fahrenheit and in meticulous detail: dry bulb, wet bulb, maximum and minimum in the shade, mean, max in the sun, minimum on the grass, dew point, and on it goes.”
But you don’t therefore conclude that they’re exactly right. You realize there were real fallible humans trudging out to real fallible thermometer installations on what was meant to be an exact schedule and peering at mercury in a glass tube and estimating what it said and trying to write it down accurately. But if you believe that every 09:00 reading was taken at exactly 09:00, that nobody ever slept in or lingered over breakfast or hurt themselves going downstairs you are not fit to comment. Which oddly is not the problem here.
It is significant. Though it pales beside the fact that nobody was even attempting such measurements over most of the land surface of the Earth at the time, never mind the oceans. But it also pales beside the fact that the BOM utterly flubbed the digitization, so these crucial records are false and worthless.
For instance, as The Australian demonstrates graphically, if you take the measurements for August 1907 and those from August 1867 they match exactly, to the decimal, every single day. And why? Because someone copied the correctly-digitized data from 1907 and pasted it in for 1867:
“A fact check by The Australian at the National Archives confirmed the double-up did not exist in the handwritten records and the 1867 data was wrong online.”
And it’s not merely rewriting the past:
“The data errors are not just historical, with the audit, conducted with pattern-recognition software, finding more than 40 per cent of the flagged entries or events dated after 1990.”
It’s such a mess that one is tempted to suspect incompetence on the grounds that conspirators would have been more careful. Though when it comes to human folly, very little is impossible.
“The audit also identified what it described as a ‘broken seam’ pattern, in which 14 days of data were repeated, followed by a two-day gap precisely where source records were missing, then another 15 days of duplicated readings. In other instances, there were 17 consecutive days of identical daily maximum temperatures, a flatline the audit said was statistically impossible.”
And on and on it goes:
“Other examples included 647 consecutive days with no observations at a station rated to ACORN standard, the reference network used for climate calculations, and 408 consecutive days at another station with no decimal precision recorded.”
So yes, incompetence rages. But not just incompetence. The records are important because of the theory that the Earth is heating relentlessly due to human GHGs. And thus it is that in addition to bungles by people who didn’t seem to know what Ctrl+C Ctrl+V did, or what 1907 was, there are deliberate adjustments. And these are tendentious in the extreme:
“The audit also found that at Sydney Observatory, maximum temperature adjustments were positive in every year from 1910 to 2020, amounting to 110 years of one-way changes with no net cooling adjustment applied.”
Why? Because they just knew what the readings should be, and the data were a national treasure only as long as they said what they should say and if not we have ways to make you talk.
Nobody with any interest in factual accuracy, regardless of their polemical position or lack of same, could possibly think it wasn’t a mess requiring investigation. Could they?
Well, the BOM spewed the usual rhetoric:
“The bureau rejects allegations of fraudulent or deliberate manipulation of Australia’s temperature record – there is no evidence to support this assertion, and it has no basis in fact.”
Moreover, bwa bwa bwa; it praised itself because it:
“worked continuously to maintain the integrity, quality and transparency of Australia’s meteorological and climate datasets”.
So are you fools? Heck no.
“BOM said it was ‘aware of a report produced by a member of the public regarding Australia’s long-term temperature record’. Bureau analysis of the underlying data related to the dates in question has confirmed a small number of duplicated historical daily temperature records, namely four post-1910 months relevant to ACORN-SAT. These account for fewer than 200 daily values from a dataset containing more than seven million values. Our assessment is that they have a negligible effect on Australia’s long-term temperature record.’”
Bosh. There were dozens of errors. And of course “BOM did not explain how the duplications had occurred.” And to be fair, it may well have no idea. But to minimize the problem and defend the mess as in the finest tradition of public service is the response of people not only arrogant and inept but also wedded to the results.
On the face of it the opposition is very peculiar since they are presumably confident about the facts behind their long-standing climate alarmism. And also presumably confident about the accuracy of BOM statistics. Why do they want to give ammunition to their critics?
As they already have. Australian commentator Topher Field began a podcast “Chalk up yet another win to the conspiracy theorists”. And we say also to Conquest’s Second Law that the best way to predict the behaviour of a large organization is to assume that it’s secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. That the data has been brazenly mangled is exactly the kind of thing that fuels theories that climate alarmism is a deliberate plot. Refusing to check once it’s been discovered and publicized is even worse.
And there they go again.
