Climate Change

It has only taken ten years, that is how long a few of us have been detailing major problems with how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology measures daily temperatures. Now, I’m informed, the Bureau are ditching the current system and looking to adopt an overseas model that it claims will be more reliable. There will be no media release. There

Full marks to David Mills, writing in the Courier Mail, for asking why the government tends to bury good news reports about the Great Barrier Reef. There are a few other questions that I would like answered. Key government ministers, marine scientists, and climate scientists have been unable to acknowledge: Q1. Overall coral cover has been increasing since at least

Dear Committee Secretary, The purpose of this letter is to share research and analysis conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs (“the IPA”) with the Select Committee on Cost of Living (“the committee”). The findings contained in this submission are based on wide-ranging analysis published in numerous IPA research reports over the past 12 months regarding issues relevant to the

My request three years ago to obtain temperature data from the Bureau of Meteorology should have been a straightforward process, but what I encountered was a determination to obstruct and obfuscate. The recent saga – sparked by that Freedom of Information request and Graham Lloyd’s report in The Australian last month – illustrates deficiencies in the system. In practice, it

Since Graham Lloyd’s article, Mercury rising in Bureau of Meteorology probe row, was published on the front page of The Weekend Australian earlier this month, there has been some confusion regarding the availability of parallel temperature data. These are the temperatures handwritten into the field books of meteorological observations, both the temperatures as recorded by a mercury thermometer, and from the

In the five years following the installation of probes in automatic weather stations (AWS) as they replaced mercury thermometers across Australia, the annual frequency of extremely hot days increased by an average 18.7%. This new analysis by Perth journalist and climate researcher Chris Gillham makes a mockery of claims by the Bureau that the transition from mercury thermometers to automatic

At Cape Otway Lighthouse overlooking Bass Strait, the highest daily January temperature ever recorded is 43.3°C on 24th January 1982, and the lowest January temperature ever recorded is 3.3°C on 2nd January 1900. In between some 30,000 (365 x 82) daily maximum and minimum temperatures were recorded by a succession of lighthouse keepers at 9am each morning, every day of

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has replaced most of its mercury thermometers with platinum resistance probes in automatic weather stations. My assessment of nearly twenty years of parallel data from Mildura, and just three years of parallel data from Brisbane airport, indicates that the probes can record both hotter and colder than the mercury, but are not equivalent. UPDATEThere was some discussion

How accurate is the official temperature history for your city or town? Statistical analysis of 3 years of maximum temperature data for Brisbane airport shows the temperatures recorded from the probe in an automatic weather station are significantly different from the mercury thermometer. This contradicts claims by the Bureau’s Director, Andrew Johnson, that measurements from these two instruments are equivalent.

There is no surer proof that people are losing faith in the scientific establishment than the recent Rasmussen poll of Americans which found 60 per cent of respondents agreeing that, ‘Climate change has become a religion that “actually has nothing to do with the climate” and is really about power and control”.’ Even 45 per cent of Democrats agreed. This is a