Price of electricity is rising, not sure about temperatures

Because the masses believe that global atmospheric temperatures are rising unnaturally – the Hazelwood coal-fired power station was decommissioned, and the price of electricity is surging across Australia.

The evidence, however, for a rise in global temperatures is actually not that compelling – unless you believe the output from computer models. Rather, since at least November 2009 there has been evidence piling up and up, and up some more, that key temperature records are being remodelled to prop-up the notion that global temperatures are rising – and to agree with the output from the computer models.

This might all sound conspiratorial. Except there is nothing particularly secret about what is happening.

For example, a brand-new peer-reviewed paper explains how recent adjustments to the RSS satellite temperature record are optimised, resulting in a 30 per cent increase in global warming – not new warming, but warming of the pre-existing record.

Of course, this remodelling has been happening for some time with the surface thermometer-based temperature record. Again, it is legitimised through the peer-review literature, and also the notion of homogenisation – a fancy word for saying that scientists can remodel temperature measurements until they show warming of approximately 0.9 degree Celsius per century, in accordance with theory.

If you can't make sense of the technical literature, go and read the Climategate emails, which are a stash of private correspondence between leading climate scientists available online since November 2009. For example, Phil Jones wrote to Tom Wrigley in September 2009,

If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we'd still have to explain the land blip.

(Phil Jones heads the Climatic Research Unit, the University of East Anglia, which creates HadCRUT, a key surface temperature dataset which informs the United Nations, which created the Paris Climate Accord, which affects government policy here in Australia – including how much I pay for my electricity.)

All the key surface global temperature datasets have since adjusted away the 1940s land and sea blip.

British rock-star and television personality Brian Cox held-up such a revisionist depiction of global temperatures when he was a panellist on Q&A last year. When Malcolm Roberts queried the chart, suggesting that it was simply an erroneous temperature reconstruction missing the 1940s blip – the One Nation Senator was laughed at and jeered.

I have taken some solace in the knowledge that while there is much adjusting of temperature measurements in the development of official trends (surface and satellite), the original, raw data is also being recorded – and filed. So, I have always thought, once this obsession with catastrophic global warming eventually comes to an end (as surely it must), we will be able to start over, with the real data.

Except, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has recently put in place strict limits on how cold a temperature can actually be recorded. So, when the automatic weather station which now operates in the town of Goulburn (not far from Canberra), recorded a measurement of minus 10.4 degree Celsius, the 'quality control' system in place 'corrected' this to minus 10.0 degree Celsius. None of this is denied. When I protested, the Bureau emailed:

The correct minimum temperature for Goulburn on 2 July, 2017 is -10.4 recorded at 6.30am at Goulburn Airport AWS… The Bureau's quality control system, designed to filter out spurious low or high values was set at -10 minimum for Goulburn which is why the record automatically adjusted.

Further attempts at clarification have been met with stonewalling. Though after three days the Bureau did insert the correct measurement of -10.4 degree Celsius into the CDO dataset, where -10.0 had previously been showing. Once upon a time, if a scientist perceived a possible error (e.g. equipment malfunction), they had the option of simply reporting no result. The idea of making up a number would have been abhorrent.

This automatic resetting will be facilitated with the move from liquid-in-glass thermometers (which must be read manually) to electronic thermistors in automatic weather stations as now operating at Goulburn.

The correction of actual measurements in ostensibly raw datasets is perhaps the insidious consequence of a process that began some twenty years ago. Back in 1996 Simon Torok and Neville Nicholls published the first homogenised dataset for Australia, building on the work of Phil Jones and others, who were already publishing global remodelled historical temperature reconstructions – as updates.