Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Climate change science relates fundamentally to two issues: feedbacks and data. The issue of data is critical. Without accurate data, the testing of various hypotheses relating to feedbacks becomes moot. It would appear that, to an extent, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and the Bureau of Meteorology, or BOM, play fast and loose with the data. I have recent correspondence with the BOM where they state, when questioned about temperatures in Australia, that the temperature data prior to 1910 was unreliable. While this may be true, it is also true that the IPCC, in their reports, use global average data that goes back to 1850. We are asked to the believe that the IPCC, of which the BOM is a very active participant, is rigorous in their science, data and fact-checking. So the question is: how do we reconcile unreliable Australian data prior to 1910 with supposedly reliable global data going back to 1850?

Let us assume that Australia prior to 1910 had the most unreliable data on the planet, inferior to that in Antarctica, the world's oceans, South America, Africa, much of Asia and so on. Even then, you still have this large chunk of the planet's area covered by Australia for which the data is unreliable. How then can global average temperatures going back 60 years prior to the 1910 Australian cut-off be reliable? I asked the BOM this very question, and they did not respond to it at all. Given this problem, I would ask the BOM when they advised the IPCC, in writing, that Australian temperature data prior to 1910 was unreliable, hence the IPCC global average temperature data prior to 1910 was similarly unreliable. What was the IPCC' s response to this information? These are critical questions. Taking data from 1910, there was a warming period from 1910 to around 1945 which was of similar magnitude and rate to that of the period 1975 to 1998, after which, contrary to the models used by the IPCC, and by the IPCC's own admission, there has been a hiatus—a halt to the warming. Leaving aside the unexplained cooling that occurred from 1945 to 1975, the simple fact is the warming from 1910 to 1945 cannot be blamed on CO2. What of the manipulation of data by the BOM? Stations such as Darwin, which cooled over the last century when raw data was used, suddenly appeared to have more than a degree of heating when massaged data was used.

I have read the transcript of a recent panel discussion that took place under the auspices of the American Physical Society, the body representing American physicists, on the drafting of an APS position statement on climate change. Those discussions led to some very interesting questions. I would urge anyone interested in climate science to read the transcript; it gives a very good idea of where the science is. They also make the point that accurate data is critical and that many sources of data, such as the oceans, are inadequate. The reason I mention this is that the lack of warming in over a decade is said by alarmists to be due to an unpredicted take-up of this missing heat in the oceans. Why did this mechanism only become operative in the last decade and a half, and not between 1975 and 1998? What is this mysterious mechanism? Why is the supposed heating not demonstrated by an acceleration of sea level rise, as would be expected? Why is there a lack of an upper tropospheric tropical hotspot that would be predicted by a positive water cycle feedback and related to a moist adiabatic process? Why is it that, over a long period of time, global temperature trends can only be explained and understood if feedbacks were negative? These are questions that need to be explained before we spend a fortune on mitigation policy. There needs to be a formal audit of the BOM's and CSIRO's data handling processes as a first step, to be conducted by the Bureau of Statistics.