Previous posts have introduced the work that Chris Gillham is doing in spot auditing the accuracy of the Bureau of Meteorology's temperature records. He has now re-recorded the daily max and min temperatures from one Australian weather station for one year, Perth 9034 in 1940, using original sources in The West Australian newspaper. Below is an initial look at the historic data (in red) compared to the BoM's "unadjusted" or "raw" records (grey) for the station. Its fairly clear that Read more [...] none

Chris Gillham has completed re-digitizing one years worth of the daily temperature records for Perth in 1940 (perth-1940-actual-raw). These are digitised for all of 1940 at Perth Regional Office 9034 from temperatures published in The West Australian newspaper. While the majority of the temperatures agree with contemporary BoM data, up to a third of the temperatures in some months disagreed, sometimes by over 1C! This is a very strange pattern of errors, and difficult to explain. I will Read more [...] none

Record temperature always make the news, with climate alarmists trumpeting any record hot day. But what if the historic record temperatures recorded by BoM were adjusted down, and recent records were not records at all? More detective work using old newspapers by Chis Gillham in Adelaide this time. The BoM claims the hottest ever Feb max at West Terrace was 43.4C on 1 February 1912. They got the date sort of right except the Adelaide Advertiser below shows Feb 1 at 112.5F (44.7C) and Feb 2 Read more [...] none

Continuing the comparison of historic sources of temperature and contemporary records, Chris Gillham has compiled a list of maximum and minimum daily temperatures for Perth for the months of January, February and March 1940 and uncovered some strange discrepancies (highlighted - all months at perth-newspapers-mar-qtr-1940). Chris notes that while BoM's contemporary temperatures largely agree with temperatures reported in newspapers of the day, a couple of temperatures in each month disagree Read more [...] one

Siliggy has pulled a simple list of maximum temperatures for Adelaide from old newspapers early last century then compared to the BOM records for that time. In most cases the BoM records are 1.5C cooler that the current record. What a clear demonstration of how much they have been adjusted down -- equal to the putative warming trend! JoNova posts on ACORN. Read more [...] none

I read an interesting article article about Peter Martin, head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He has a refreshing, mature attitude to his job. 'I want people to challenge our data - that's a good thing, it helps us pick things up,' he says. Big contrast to the attitude of Climate Scientists. Examples that they believe they cannot be challenged are legion, from meetings to peer review. For example, emails expressing disagreement with the science are treated as threatening, as Read more [...] one

There is a battle brewing between dynamical and statistical models. The winner will be determined when the current neural ENSO conditions resolve into an El Nino or not in the current months. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society compares the predictions of ensembles of each type of model here. Although most of the set of dynamical and statistical model predictions issued during late April and early May 2012 predict continuation of neutral ENSO conditions through the Read more [...] none

To screen or not to screen? The question arises in the context of selecting which sets of tree-rings to use for millennial temperature reconstructions. One side, represented by CA, says screening is just plain wrong: In the last few days, readers have drawn attention to relevant articles discussing closely related statistical errors under terms like “selecting on the dependent variable” or “double dipping – the use of the same data set for selection and selective analysis”. Another Read more [...] none

Just what is the 'research' that Gergis et.al. claims to have done? And what are the sceptics complaining about? The 'research' claimed by the Gergis et.al. team is captured in the following graphical representation of the past temperature of the Australiasn region. The hockey stick shape has also been produced using similar methods and random data, as shown in my AIG news article in 2006, and also in chapter 11 of my 2007 book "Niche Modeling". It is obvious that if the same result Read more [...] none

You may by now have heard here or here that "Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium" by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Stephen Phipps, Ailie Gallant and David Karoly, has been put "on-hold" by the Journal, due to "an issue" in the processing of the data used in the study. It is illuminating to review the crowing commentary by Australian science intelligencia and the press reaction to the paper. ABC's Read more [...] none