BoM: Bureau of Magicians

Even more than in the divination of climate trends 100 years hence, there is a definite art and subtlety to the writing of bureaucratic reports – the just-released BOM Technical Advisory Forum update providing the perfect example. Tasked with examining how and why the Bureau goes about tickling temperature records – “homogenisation” is the preferred term – the eight-member panel of prominent statisticians has deemed circumspection a vital professional courtesy while damning with faint praise and some very pointed suggestions.

Take the following paragraph, for example (emphasis added).

The Forum concludes that ACORN-SAT is a complex and well-maintained dataset. In fulfilling its role of providing advice on the ongoing development and operation of ACORN-SAT, the Forum also concludes that there is scope for improvements that can boost the transparency of the dataset and increase its usefulness as a decision-making tool.

Translated, the Bureau has been placed at the sharp end of an explicit instruction to stop making stuff up and, when it does, to explain why such inspired guesswork is necessary.

Then there is this:

The Forum investigated the nature of the operator intervention required and the bases on which such decisions are made and concluded that very detailed instructions from the Bureau are likely to be necessary for an end-user who wishes to reproduce the ACORN-SAT findings.

Translated, if the Bureau’s solons feel the need to play God and transform cooling trends into warming ones, then the rules and guidelines by which such judgments are made must be freely available to anyone else who feels like putting that data to the test.

Further analysis from Jo Nova , who notes that if such hard-and-fast standards exist they were not produced for the panel’s guidance and consideration.

And a more detailed reaction from Jen Marohasy, who laments that the panel did not take up her investigation of the fiddled temperature data for Rutherglen, which reversed a cooling trend and thereby, as seems always the case with Bureau pronouncements, lent credence to the warmist cause:

Indeed, it has become apparent over the years that the entire focus of the work of the small ACORN-SAT unit is not the provision of higher quality individual temperature series, but the remodeling of the raw data, and the compilation of a select few station, to suggest that it is getting hotter and hotter across the Australian landmass with such announcements made with great fanfare by the Bureau’s David Jones at the beginning of each year.

Marohasy’s analysis of the Forum’s report can be read in full via the link below.