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.
The Hansard record makes it clear that the data you sought were available. Why lie?
[…] Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers. This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward. This is a key point that mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike are so far mostly ignoring, can certainly has not been mentioned in this trial. I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series, entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’. […]
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.
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
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 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.