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This is the so called joke audit
To make it all look o-so-convincing, the BOM asked three experts (from NOAA, NZ, and Canada) to look over it all, and score the BOM against its peers. But the peers standards are not too high in the first place: NOAA was caught with 89% of it’s own thermometers in the wrong spots near air conditioners and whatnot, and NZ’s records were so bad, they disowned them themselves. (NZ adjustimongered their temperature trends from 0.06C right up to 0.9C, got caught, and their
response under legal pressure was to say but it’s ok,
“There is no “official” or formal New Zealand Temperature Record”.)
How useful is it when a team of substandard institutions is asked to evaluate whether the BOM practices are “amongst international best practice” when it is international best practice to ignore concrete, car-parks, tarmac, and lose the data too? We aren’t impressed if the BOM is as bad as the rest of the world, we want open data, transparent methods, and reproducible results. We want high quality to mean, well, high… quality.
ACORN and the BOM claim that since the new results are pretty much the same, really they give more confidence than ever that Australia has warmed since 1960.
Ken Stewart and the independent BOM analysts team have sliced and diced through the ACORN data.
They conclude:
- Like the old HQ series, the Acorn record is also still impossible to replicate.
- The record is much shorter than 100 years for many sites. It’s supposed to be high quality, but it has many gaps and spurious errors. If volunteers can write code on laptops to check for errors — and find, for example, that one 36.8C was accidentally changed to a 26.8C (and there are many) why can’t the Australian BOM?
- Like the old series, Acorn’s trends are very different from what the raw data shows. (Why do we bother with thermometers?)
- Hot and cold extremes have been adjusted, for the most part warming winters and cooling summers, and at some sites new and more extreme records have been set.
Here’s a piece of sleight of hand — ACORN, they claim, has a random set of a adjustments of both up and down (which is what we’d expect).
The official
CAWCR Technical Report No. 04:
“There is an approximate balance between positive and negative adjustments for maximum temperature but a weak tendency towards a predominance of negative adjustments (54% compared with 46% positive) for minimum temperature.”
But the independent auditors point the positive adjustments are
larger than the negative:
While there may be a numeric balance of positive and negative adjustments, analysis of a representative sample indicates that adjustments predominantly increase warming.
This is for me the most sinister point. Recall that Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, stated clearly that the adjustments made
“a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature”. Knowing that critics were drawing attention to that statement and pointing out it was not so, the BOM apparently paid attention themselves to this matter. That’s fair enough, perhaps it was an honest oversight. But having been notified of the bias, they then went on to create a situation where they can state a half-truth which makes it appear his statement is true, while in reality is it still not. Is it just incompetence, or something worse? Did they not check the overall effect of their adjustments? Did they think that no one else would do that?
We are asked to believe that climate models today can accurately predict the future, but that in the first half of the 20th Century simple equipment like thermometers systematically overstated temperatures, and that those errors were only just “discovered” recently. Scientists have been using thermometers for 300 years, yet the flaws in most Australian historical thermometers apparently cannot be explained even to people with qualifications in engineering, statistics and maths. Furthermore, historic thermometers are well known to be placed in sites that now are surrounded by concrete, bitumen, and sometimes have electronic heat pumps warming the locale as well (in the form of air conditioners). In some places, tens of thousands of internal combustion engines pass by daily. When common sense suggests that modern thermometers are more likely to have artificial warming sources close by and ought to be adjusted down to compare with historic ones, the BOM adjusts the older historic and better placed thermometers downwards instead.
It defies common sense.
You don’t need to have a PhD to know Australians deserve better.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/th...mperature-set-starts-again-gets-same-results/
