Bureau rejects The Australian audit of temperature data — SkimNews
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- ACORN-SAT, the Bureau of Meteorology's main long-term dataset, draws quality-controlled readings from 112 weather stations to strip out artefacts such as station moves, and shows Australia has warmed by more than 1.5C since 1910.
- The Australian launched at least eight stories, follow-ups, cartoons and editorials over the past week on a "forensic audit" by Tom Berger, a former computer engineer whose own website lists him as a corporate entertainer for more than 30 years, and retired geochemist Geoff Sherrington, who in 2022 signed a declaration rejecting CO2's role in climate — but the report sets out no methodology, citing only statistical software and computer coding.
- Bureau of Meteorology said in a Thursday night statement the claims rested on "several misunderstandings" and that accusations of human intervention were "false and unsubstantiated"; its reply to Andrew Wilkie said fraud or deliberate manipulation had "no basis in fact", while all the raw data is public and ACORN-SAT's methods have been published in peer-reviewed journals after two independent reviews.
- Graham Lloyd, The Australian's environment editor, highlighted the audit's most striking example — August 1907 minimum temperatures at Sydney's Observatory Hill duplicated in the August 1867 record, before ACORN-SAT's 1910 start — while the bureau said duplication touched fewer than 200 of 7 million observations, all handwritten pre-1946 data likely mis-transcribed onto punch cards in the 1950s or 1960s, an effect "so small as to be statistically irrelevant", with no further duplicate months found across the network.
- Palmerville recorded 17 consecutive days of 31C maximum temperatures in 2004, which the audit called "data failure" and said was effectively impossible naturally; the Bureau of Meteorology said the audit failed to account for historical readings being recorded to the nearest degree and for lower temperature variability in the tropics.
- Andrew Wilkie, the independent Tasmanian MP who forwarded the report to the bureau "on behalf of Mr Berger", told Temperature Check the coverage was "quite feverish, and red meat to its audience" — one article drew about 1,000 comments — and that he had "no reason to reconsider my trust in the bureau".
- Tony Abbott called for an independent review while News24 and 2GB amplified the story, which the source says sent climate science denial blogs into a flutter; David Evans wrote that "secret climate business" at the bureau had to end, and attacks on the records have run for more than 15 years, described by scientists as harassment and by a former bureau boss as a "fever swamp".
Why it matters: The dispute is not about whether the Bureau made clerical errors — it conceded fewer than 200 duplicated observations out of 7 million — but about whether those errors show deliberate manipulation. With Tony Abbott, News24 and 2GB amplifying the story and the audit's methodology unpublished, the bureau's more-than-1.5C warming record emerges intact while the sceptic case rests on inference.
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