Well, it’s better late than never, I suppose: Tony Abbott is calling for an audit of the Bureau of Meteorology, following an investigation which exposed massive apparent data fraud in the BOM’s treatment of historical climate records.
Of course, Abbott had his chance to do exactly that, over a decade ago. As PM, Abbott discussed setting up an investigation of the BOM with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, back in 2015. Even then, investigations were reporting that the BOM was “wilfully ignoring evidence that contradicts its own propaganda”.
Abbott, as he did so often as PM, ultimately squibbed the chance. Now, with no political career at risk from the feral legacy media, he’s banging that drum again. Good luck getting the utterly climate-deranged Albanese government to listen.
Nevertheless, it’s the forensic audit Australians deserve more than ever before.
For years, anyone daring to question the sacred pronouncements of the bureau was unceremoniously branded a heretic, a tin-foil hat enthusiast or, worse, a ‘climate denier’. The official line was always that the raw figures were as pure as the driven snow, untainted by human malice or ideological fervour. Yet the recent forensic audit conducted by data deception specialist Tom Berger and veteran scientist Geoff Sherrington has detonated that pious fiction with the force of an unseasonal cyclone.
What the investigators uncovered was not a handful of harmless rounding discrepancies, but an unmitigated shambles of database tampering. Supposedly pristine ‘raw’ historical figures had large swathes of temperature readings shamelessly copied and pasted across entirely different decades and seasons. In one particularly farcical instance, digitised records for August 1867 were found to be a carbon copy of the readings from August 1907: a miraculous four-decade time-warp that somehow escaped generations of in-house quality control.
This devastating exposure prompted the former member for Warringah to finally rediscover his voice:
“A thorough audit of the BOM’s temperature records was something I wanted to do as PM but faced a lot of internal pushback. The BOM should itself commission such an audit if it wishes to maintain its credibility in the face of mounting evidence of unreliability.”
Ah, the familiar refrain of the modern conservative statesman: full of fighting words once the ministerial car has been returned to the garage. We now know from freedom of information releases that Abbott’s own department wanted to unleash a taskforce on the bureau back in 2014, only for then-environment minister Greg Hunt, the very model of modern spineless ‘moderate’, to throw himself across the tracks. Hunt whimpered that auditing our weather watchers might undermine ‘public trust’, as if discovering that your house has termites is far worse than pretending the timber is rock-solid until the roof collapses on your head.
Maurice Newman, who chaired Abbott’s business advisory council and spent years attempting to pierce the meteorological priesthood’s veil, was rather more forthright regarding the sheer magnitude of the scandal:
“You need a royal commission, it’s that serious. This is just beyond the pale. This is not some sort of hypothetical discussion. There are consequences, and the consequences are extremely important and they go to the economy (and) people’s livelihoods.”
When billions of dollars of national infrastructure, agriculture, energy policy and private investment decisions are dictated by long-term temperature trends, treating baseline observations like an errant schoolchild’s cut-and-paste homework assignment is intolerable. As carbon accountant Dr David Evans noted, the bureau’s smug ‘trust us’ approach would see any publicly listed corporation on the ASX hauled before the corporate regulator.
Instead, the high priests of the weather demand an exemption from basic accounting standards. Scientist Jennifer Marohasy has rightly pointed out that in an era where forecasting relies on sophisticated computing and machine learning, feeding compromised, synthesised history into algorithms is a recipe for blind chaos.
Naturally, the response from the Albanese ministry has been the customary bureaucratic shoulder-shrug. Environment Minister Murray Watt’s office practically yawned, hiding behind the bureau’s boilerplate excuse that these were merely isolated transcription hiccups across millions of data points that will be quietly swept under the carpet. This is the very same administrative juggernaut that recently burned through $96 million of public money to produce a website redesign so utterly shambolic it had regional emergency services howling with rage.
The reality is that the climate industry cannot afford an independent forensic audit of its holy books, because the entire Net Zero circus relies upon the infallibility of the historical trend. If the raw records are thoroughly compromised by human meddling and institutional incompetence, the grand narrative unravels.
The Australian public deserves nothing less than a full, unsparing royal commission into the BOM – though under our current political masters, we are far more likely to see snow falling in the Simpson Desert.
