The Homogenisation of Rutherglen

This post provides a link to download as a PDF, Chapter 9 of Climate Change The Facts 2017, The Homogenisation of Rutherglen”, by Jennifer Marohasy.

When climate scientists from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (the Bureau) issue media releases at the beginning of each year telling us that last year was the hottest on record, most of us understand that to mean that they have simply added up the figures. We assume that last year really was the hottest. Very few of us are aware that, over time, the combination of weather stations used to calculate the average temper-ature for Australia has changed, or that individual temperature series are remodelled. In this chapter, I focus on the issue of remodelling. It has a technical name in climate science: it is called homogenisation. Homogenisation is justified on the basis that corrections must be made for non-climatic variables.