Dr Bill, this quote by Jennifer Marohasy is about you?

"Retired scientist Dr Bill Johnston used to run experiments there. He, and many others, can vouch for the fact that the weather station at Rutherglen, providing data to the Bureau of Meteorology since November 1912, has never been moved."

Yet as I understand it, your knowledge of the Rutherglen site dates to a few years leading up to 2000? And you were not even based at Rutherglen. So your vouching for their being no move since 1912 is entirely erroneous? However, apparently on the basis of your say so Marohasy was writing letters to Government Ministers demanding heads roll at the BOM.

As to dealing with problem data, as a scientist you should be well aware that there are good statistical methods for dealing with missing or abnormal data. The confidence intervals will be greater, but that doesn't make data unusable. In the case of the BOM data, the adjustments made are well documented. There may be some issues around individual weather stations, but there are hundreds of thousands of data points that mean the overall picture will remain reasonably sound.

Jennifer,
You are playing in the sand. No proofs there.

Look at NASA records. Satellites show about 1 watt of of heat per square meter warming, 24 hours a day - and that is billions of square meters.

Each of 3670 Argo buoys spend 9 days about a km below ocean surface, then descends to 2 km, then rises to the surface to report ocean temperature to a satellite, and then repeats...

And Prof Muller, funded by Koch brothers to gather surface temp data to disprove global warming, but found his analysis replicated that of climate change researchers. He did develop an excellent database of world surface temperatures. He even analyzed heat island records, finding they also verified the world is warming.

So, satellite, surface and deep ocean measurements all positively show global warming. You, on the other hand, seems perfectly qualified to be an orchardist, or cherry picker. Trying to pillory dedicated scientists in BoM and CSIRO - why? And pretending to have relevant qualifications for insightful comment on climate research is, umm, sad.
Tony

Agronomist, I've been to many places eyes-wide-open; and I'm sure you have no idea when or how often or how recently I've been past the Ruthreglen met-lawn. People also know who I am because I rarely post anonymously.

Rutherglen is a lovely research centre. Great people work there and over the last 100-years they have made major contributions to the progress of agriculture within north-eastern Victoria and southern NSW. Many people have come and gone; and I don't have to have been stationed there know about its work.

Agronomist, you can't grow grass or crops without understanding the regional climate.

Did you work out why the relationship between annual minimum temperature and annual rainfall is the reverse of what you would normally expect?

I sense you are attacking the man here, not the issue. The issue is the soundness of the ACORN data for predicting long-term temperature trends.

I have looked at the same data you can access. You could analyse it in a variety of ways and we could usefully discuss our differences.

We could also agree just by looking at the data that there was a station move around 1965; and that the ACORN catalogue, on which the presumption of data being continuous was based, is wrong. Even BoM are conceding that. However, it is possibly one of numerous ACORN errors. You could also see from Rutherglen's data that around 8.6% of the daily data data are missing; and that missing data affects annual averages early in the record; and after 1965. They contribute to "trends" being spurious.

You could analyse the data each side of the shifts and work out for yourself, that there are no valid trends. That the data are uncorrelated with time; that they consist of random numbers, dancing along a time-line, with a break and step in the middle.

You could evolve to the next level and become an inquiring data analyst; then you won't have to depend on unsubstantiated false claims about data, that you possibly know about in more detail than I.

Cheers,

Dr. Bill

Good morning Dr Bill,

Andy Pitman and Lisa Alexander from the ARC's Climate Change Research Centre best sum up the recent accusations that have been made against the BoM.

“Far from being a fudge to make warming look more severe than it is, most of the Bureau’s data manipulation has in fact had the effect of reducing the apparent extreme temperature trends across Australia. Cherry-picking weather stations where data have been corrected in a warming direction doesn’t mean the overall picture is wrong.

Data homogenisation is not aimed at producing a predetermined outcome, but rather is an essential process in improving weather data by spotting where temperature records need to be corrected, in either direction. If the Bureau didn’t do it, then we and our fellow climatologists wouldn’t use its data because it would be misleading. What we need are data from which spurious warming or cooling trends have been removed, so that we can see the actual trends.

Marshalling all of the data from the Bureau’s weather stations can be a complicated process, which is why it has been subjected to international peer-review. The Bureau has provided the details of how it is done, despite facing accusations that it has not been open enough.

Valid critiques of data homogenisation techniques are most welcome. But as in all areas of science, from medicine to astronomy, there is only one place that criticisms can legitimately be made. Anyone who thinks they have found fault with the Bureau’s methods should document them thoroughly and reproducibly in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This allows others to test, evaluate, find errors or produce new methods.

This process has been the basis of all scientific advances in the past couple of centuries and has led to profoundly important advances in knowledge. Abandoning peer-reviewed journals in favour of newspaper articles when adjudicating on scientific methods would be profoundly misguided.”

Dr Dave

Graham Readfearn deconstructs this whole affair...

"The Australian Newspaper’s War On The Bureau of Meteorology"

http://www.readfearn.com/2014/09/the-australian-newspapers-war-on-the-bureau-of-meteorology/

"In the space of a two weeks, The Australian newspaper has published 10 stories attacking the Bureau of Meteorology with claims the government agency has been fiddling its temperature data to show more warming than actually exists.

BoM scientists have been doing this, according to the chief protagonist of the story climate sceptic Jennifer Marohasy, because it fits more neatly with the narrative that the world is warming.

It’s a conspiracy.

Now ten stories is a lot of reading, so allow me to summarise what’s been going on for you.

The Australian newspaper has published the claims of climate science sceptics that government scientists are fiddling temperature data with the express purpose of making things appear warmer than they are and that BoM is being secretive.

The Australian newspaper doesn’t tell readers that almost every single claim being made has been discussed at length in previous journal papers and technical reports, published or written by BoM, leaving only the thinly veiled suggestion of a conspiracy, which nobody has any evidence for because it’s not there.

As I’ve explained before, Marohasy is a former free market think tank researcher who is now at Central Queensland University with her work paid for by the foundation of a climate science sceptic.

None of the claims made by Marohasy have been published in a peer reviewed journal, despite the fact that since January she has found time to write repeatedly to government ministers, has spoken at the Sydney Institute and flown to a conference for climate sceptics in Las Vegas – all the while making the same accusations."

The Conversation article to which he refers:

http://theconversation.com/how-to-become-a-citizen-climate-sleuth-31100

"Bureau of Meteorology Media Statement #2 - Climate Records"

http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20140905.shtml

DavidK

The pattern we keep seeing here is that the warmists enter all full of bustle and presumptuousness - like you did - assuming your belief system is true, talking down to everyone else about the meaning of "science", and spraying ad hominem and appeal to absent authority when challenged.

Now I maintain that their belief system is irrational and therefore cannot be scientific. If one can prove the argument is fallacious, and you can't disprove it, that's the end of the matter as far as the science is concerned.

So what keeps happening is - once we have parried all their fallacious bluster - and ask critical questions that disprove either the skeptics or the warmists on the general issue, the warmists go quiet, slink off, and pretend they weren't ever on the scene. Then they pop up somewhere else later on re-running all the same presumptuous assertions they are unable to defend.

Tony153 and Poirot are fresh from having done just that here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16612&page=0#291546
running away after going quiet, and now here they appear again, re-running the same belief system which we - and they - have now just demonstrated to be baseless and dishonest.

And then in answer to my challenge, you didn't either accept, or admit you're wrong, did you?

You evaded, didn't you?

But I didn't, did I? I directly answered your challenge and admitted I was wrong on point.

So ... do you accept my challenge, or not?

If not, mere temperature measurements - or rather manipulations - cannot and do not establish the relevance of anything you have said on this topic to any topic of policy or society, and have just conceded the general issue.