Australia’s climate has warmed by more than 1.5C since 1910, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s main long-term temperature data.
If you were so motivated, you might think if you could discredit this data, then you would undermine the whole climate change story and even – perhaps – the rationale for cutting Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the past week, The Australian newspaper has launched a major reporting campaign based on a “forensic audit” that attempts to discredit the data, claiming it has found “widespread errors” that raise “questions about the integrity of records used for climate analysis”.
These are big claims indeed, that would require remarkable evidence.
Former prime minister and climate science denier Tony Abbott called for an independent review, while News24 (formerly Sky News Australia) and 2GB also promoted the story, which sent climate science denial blogs into a flutter.
On Thursday night, the bureau released a statement saying the claims were based on “several misunderstandings” and accusations of human intervention in the data were “false and unsubstantiated.”
The bureau’s temperature records have been a constant target for climate science sceptics for more than 15 years. So what is going on?
First, a primer.
When it comes to temperature records, the bureau makes the raw temperature data from its weather stations available to the public.
But the bureau’s main temperature dataset for measuring climate change – known as ACORN-SAT...
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