These are big claims indeed, that would require remarkable evidence.<\/p>\n
Former prime minister and climate science denier Tony Abbott called for an independent review, while News24<\/a> (formerly Sky News Australia) and 2GB<\/a> also promoted the story, which sent climate science denial blogs into a flutter.<\/p>\n On Thursday night, the bureau released a statement<\/a> saying the claims were based on \u201cseveral misunderstandings\u201d and accusations of human intervention in the data were \u201cfalse and unsubstantiated.\u201d<\/p>\n The bureau\u2019s temperature records have been a constant target for climate science sceptics for more than 15 years. So what is going on?<\/p>\n First, a primer.<\/p>\n When it comes to temperature records, the bureau makes the raw temperature data from its weather stations available to the public.<\/p>\n But the bureau\u2019s main temperature dataset for measuring climate change \u2013 known as ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network \u2013 Surface Air Temperature) takes observations from 112 weather stations and performs a quality control process to remove the effects of local changes (like a station moving) that could artificially alter the readings.<\/p>\n There are of course multiple other datasets that show Australia\u2019s climate<\/a>, just like the rest of the planet, has warmed and how this heating presents a troubling laundry list of risks<\/a> that leave almost no aspect of life in the country untouched.<\/p>\n The Australian\u2019s reporting \u2013 that includes at least eight pieces of coverage from stories, follow-ups and cartoons to editorials \u2013 centres on an \u201caudit<\/a>\u201d of the raw data, which it said was carried out by a retired scientist and a former computer engineer.<\/p>\n There are too many claims to list here, but they range from accusations that sequences were detected showing \u201cobvious patterns of human intervention\u201d to missing or duplicated data.<\/p>\n How was this audit done? The audit report does not outline its methodology, saying only it had used statistical software and computer coding. This lack of a methodology might cause some to pause, but not The Australian.<\/p>\n The most striking example from the report, wrote The Australian\u2019s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, came from the minimum temperature readings for August 1907 for Sydney\u2019s Observatory Hill that were found to have been duplicated in the record for August 1867.<\/p>\n Sydney\u2019s Observatory Hill. Photograph: James D Morgan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n This deserves an explanation from the bureau.<\/p>\n But it is also true that data before 1910 is not used in ACORN-SAT and so, in the context of what the bureau\u2019s data says about Australia\u2019s changing climate, it is irrelevant.<\/p>\n A bureau spokesperson said it had examined the claims made in the report and less than 200 observations from the 7m in ACORN-SAT data had been affected by duplication.<\/p>\n The spokesperson said 10 months of observations had shown duplicate data for minimum temperatures at Observatory Hill, but only three of those months were after 1910. A fourth month of duplicate temperatures had been identified at Charleville in Queensland.<\/p>\n They are all from handwritten records of pre-1946 data that have been manually digitised.<\/p>\n double quotation markI found The Australian\u2019s coverage of the matter to be quite feverishAndrew Wilkie<\/p>\n The \u201cresultant impact on Australia\u2019s long-term temperature record is so small as to be statistically irrelevant,\u201d the bureau said.<\/p>\n No further duplicate months had been found in the entire network of weather station readings.<\/p>\n But how could these duplications have happened? A spokesperson said a \u201cworking hypothesis\u201d was that the errors likely occurred in the 1950s or 1960s.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is when the original handwritten records (field books) were transferred to a punch card system,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is plausible that the manual handling introduced the duplication. Discussions with former bureau employees indicate the digitisation in question occurred prior to the 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter |Every weekday<\/p>\n Sign up to Politics, really<\/p>\n Our political team brings you up to speed on the stories that really matter and what they mean for you<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Data failure?<\/p>\n What about the claimed \u201cpatterns of human intervention\u201d in temperature data?<\/p>\n Another claim of the audit was that a run of 17 consecutive days of 31C maximum temperatures at Palmerville on Queensland\u2019s Cape York in 2004 was evidence of \u201cdata failure\u201d. \u201cThe probability of this occurring naturally is effectively zero\u201d, the audit report claimed, and \u201cless likely than winning the lottery every week for a year.\u201d<\/p>\n The bureau rejected this and said the audit had appeared not to have taken into account how some historical raw observations were recorded to the nearest degree, as was the case with the Palmerville site at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cIn combination with lower temperature variability in the tropics, this makes repeated patterns in the raw data more likely.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Secret climate business\u2019<\/p>\n In one follow-up piece, David Evans, a climate sceptic, made the odd declaration that \u201csecret climate business\u201d at the bureau had to end and repeated it in an editorial he wrote for the newspaper<\/a>.<\/p>\n I say odd, because the so-called audit could not have been done had all the data not already been made public. The ACORN-SAT has already been the subject of two independent reviews and the methods it uses have been published in peer reviewed journals.<\/p>\n The recent audit report had two authors. Lloyd described one, Tom Berger, as an investigator and \u201cformer computer engineer and specialist in data-based deception analysis\u201d.<\/p>\n According to Berger\u2019s own website, he has also been a corporate entertainer for more than 30 years<\/a> and had \u201cmesmerized corporate audiences worldwide\u201d blending \u201cmind-bending entertainment with neuroscience-backed insights \u2013 revealing thoughts, predicting actions, and cracking the code of persuasion\u201d.<\/p>\n A second author, Geoff Sherrington, was described only as a \u201cretired scientist\u201d.<\/p>\n Sherrington described himself as a retired geochemist at a mining company when he signed a declaration in 2022 rejecting the role CO2 plays in the climate<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018Red meat to its audience\u2019<\/p>\n Lloyd wrote that the audit report<\/a> had been sent to the bureau \u201con behalf of Mr Berger\u201d by the independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie, who received a letter back from the bureau explaining its investigations, and saying accusations of fraudulent or deliberate data manipulation had \u201cno basis in fact\u201d.<\/p>\n Wilkie told Temperature Check he wasn\u2019t asked by The Australian to comment and \u201cfelt uncomfortable\u201d the article might have been interpreted as him having doubts about the bureau\u2019s integrity or its climate data.<\/p>\n \u201cI found The Australian\u2019s coverage of the matter to be quite feverish, and red meat to its audience, which flooded one article with about 1,000 comments,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He had \u201cno reason to reconsider my trust in the bureau,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Attacks on the bureau\u2019s temperature records have been orchestrated by climate science deniers for more than 15 years. Previous episodes have been described by scientists as \u201charassment\u201d<\/a>. One former bureau boss described the source of previous attacks as a \u201cfever swamp\u201d of climate science denial<\/a> that had wasted scientists\u2019 time.<\/p>\n On each occasion, The Australian newspaper, rather than the scientific literature, was the journal of choice for sceptics to make claims of a conspiracy within the bureau.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792911370_892_Politics_really_trail_1x1.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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