Australia warmer than we imagine; Monash professor

Professor Neville Nicholls.

Former prime minister’s business advisor Maurice Newman fired another attack at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on Monday, arguing in The Australian that the weather bureau needs to be investigated for fiddling with the climate data that show Australia is getting warmer.

Technically known as “homogenisation”, the practice of removing biases from historical climate data has been well defended. In fact, you can do it yourself.

In his latest salvo, Newman claims that estimates of surface temperature trends by weather bureaus “diverge increasingly with satellite and radiosonde datasets”, and thus call into question the “integrity” of the surface data and the processing of those data.

Read the thoughts by Professor emeritus Neville Nicholls of the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University on The Conversation - “The weather bureau might be under estimating Australian warming: here’s why.”

Mainstream media attention leaves scientists somewhat bemused

Scientists working quietly and diligently at what is they do are frequently bemused when their work suddenly finds its way into the mainstream media.

And of course that is not always for the correct reasons for while their work is aimed at finding and stating the truth, some accuse them of having nefarious reasons for declaring what they find.

Professor emeritus, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University, Neville Nicholls, writes about that on the latest issue of The Conversation.

His story, headed: “Global warming trend unaffected by ‘fiddling’ with temperature data” discusses how the results have been “fiddled” with to confirm various theories about global warming.