Scientists All At Sea With Alarmist Barrier Reef Warning

A new scientific paper, received with great fanfare among inter­national media and Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC, claims half the corals of the Great Barrier Reef are dead.

The paper is by academics at James Cook University's ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.  It is a scary headline.  But is it true?

This finding is not based on any tried and proven method.  Rather, the researchers from James Cook University have come up with a new method of statistical analysis based on a complicated "proxy" to estimate "colony size".

The study itself was undertaken in 2016 and 2017, just after a coral bleaching event at cyclone-damaged reefs.  If they had used traditional methods and longer time frames, it would likely be found that there is actually nothing wrong with the Great Barrier Reef.

Great Barrier Reef photographer Julia Summerling wrote recently about how a section known as North Direction Island, saying that the island's corals were "savaged beyond recognition" due to Cyclone Ita in 2014, cyclone Nathan in 2015, and a coral bleaching event in the summer of 2016.  So it was probably not the most representative time to be sampling.  But the headlines are based on proxy measures from just a few reefs at that time.

She now says those areas have since recovered.  "What I saw — and photographed — I could hardly believe.  Young dinner-plate-sized corals were crammed into every available space on the limestone plateau as far as I could see, bristling with iconic fish life, from maori wrasse and coral trout to bumphead parrotfish and sweetlips.  I swam a long way on the dive, checking to see how far the coral shelf stretched.  The further I swam, the denser the coral fields became".

For a new film, in January this year I visited the Ribbon reefs with Emmy award-winning photographer Clint Hempshall to follow the edge of Australia's continental shelf to find and film coral bleaching.  It was meant to be one of the worst-affected regions — 60 per cent dead from bleaching, which the same scientists say is caused by climate change.  But we could not find any significant bleaching.  We mostly found jewelled curtains of coral, appearing to cascade down underwater cliff faces.  So colourful, so beautiful, all in crystal clear and warm waters.

The problem for Professor Terry Hughes, who co-authored the research, is that his study was undertaken in 2016 and 2017 then extrapolated out to cover other years.  All of the research and subsequent media attention points to a narrative that the Great Barrier Reef is at risk of imminent collapse from climate change.

It was for questioning this claim, and the quality of science behind it, that Dr Peter Ridd was eventually sacked from James Cook University.  Part of those claims by Ridd were that a lot of the science coming out of JCU's ARC Centre for Excellent in Coral Reef Studies "is not properly checked, tested or replicated, and that is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions, and the fact is I do not think we can anymore".

Neither James Cook University, nor Hughes, have ever rebutted Ridd's criticisms of the research.

This is what objective observers need to put into context when examining Hughes's most recent claims.  Ridd also said:  "I think that most of the scientists who are pushing out this stuff, I think that they genuinely believe that there are problems with the reef, I just don't think they are very objective about the science they do.  I think they're emotionally attached to their subject and you can't blame them the reef is a beautiful thing".

One quick glance at Hughes's Twitter account and you will find he is critical of the Morrison government's gas-led recovery, cheerleading for a royal commission into the Murdoch media and constantly criticises the Adani Coal mine.

The new paper by James Cook University scientists claims both the incidence of coral bleaching and cyclones is increasing, but there is no evidence to support ­either contention.  The available data from 1971 to 2017 indicated there has actually been a decrease in both the number and severity of cyclones in the Australian region.

Coral-bleaching events tend to be cyclical and coincide with periods of exceptionally low sea levels.  As discussed in a new book, Climate Change: The Facts 2020, there were dramatic falls in sea levels across the western Pacific Ocean in 2016.  These were associated with an El Nino event.

Until recently, coral calcification rates were calculated based on coring of the large Porites corals.  There are well-established techniques for coring the Porites corals and then measuring growth rates.  So why do Hughes and his colleagues stray from these tried and tested methods?

Since 2005, the Australian Institute of Marine Science has stopped using this technique to measure how well corals are growing at the Great Barrier Reef.  The few studies still using the old technique suggest that, as would be expected, as water temperatures have increased marginally, coral growth rates have also increased.

But rather than admit this, key Great Barrier Reef research institutions have moved from such ­direct measures to new and complicated "proxies".  They thus have more flexibility in what they find because the measurement is no longer one that represents coral growth rates or coral cover.

As proxy votes are something delegated, this gives the researchers at JCU the potential to generate what might be considered policy-based evidence.  And yet without question, the media reporting of the most recent research is that "there is no time to lose, we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions”.

Far too frequently, climate science has demonstrated noble cause corruption — where the ends justify the means.  We will only know exact coral calcification rates, and changing trends in coral cover, when our once esteemed research institutions return to more traditional methods of measuring such important indicators of coral health and growth.

We need a return to real science that is based on real observations and real measurements and then we may find written in journals what we see in the real world when we jump off boats and go under the sea.

Unprecedented Panic Over Bushfire Impact

The word "unprecedented" is often applied to des­tructive climate-related events, as though they could not have been predicted, and have never happened before.  Last summer's bushfires were no different.  But were they really unprecedented?

This narrative creates anxiety because it follows that there really is a climate emergency and that we have pushed nature out of ­balance.

Appearing as a witness to the Royal Commission into bushfires earlier this year, Andrew Johnson, the head of the Bureau of Meteorology stated confidently that parts of Australia had experienced a rapid decline in rainfall.  He used this to state "unequivocal" and "there's no doubt" that climate change was having some sort of an impact on Australia's bushfire seasons.

One can assume he was referring to the southeast of Australia because vast areas of eucalyptus forest burnt in the southeast last summer.  Yet you only have to look at the official statistics from the Bureau of Meteorology's own website for this region to see that annual rainfall is variable, and while the 1950s and 1970s were wetter than recent years, there is no evidence of long-term decline in rainfall.

Whichever way the statistics are scrutinised, there is no evidence of a long-term decline in rainfall in the southeast of Australia for the summer period just past, or even considering the data for all of Australia for all months since 1900.

The wildfires that burnt so much of Australia during the summer of 2019-20 have been repeatedly described as unprecedented and blamed on climate change.  But without supporting statistics.

In reality, areas as extensive and fires as ferocious have burnt Australia since at least 1851.

Rainfall data indicates it is getting wetter (not drier) in southeastern Australia, the region worst hit by the recent fires.  While the official statistics show unambiguously that summer rainfall has been increasing, not decreasing as claimed in the mainstream media, it is difficult to know if air temperatures are increasing, or not, because of all the changes to how Australia's Bureau of Meteorology measures temperature.

The change from mercury thermometers to electronic probes in 1996, and the more recent change from numerical averaging to just taking one-second spot readings since 2012, makes it impossible to construct meaningful continuous historical temperature series.  In other parts of the world where electronic probes are used to measure air temperature, the instantaneous one-second readings are averaged over at least one minute, and in the US over five minutes.

Vast areas of open eucalyptus forests did burn in southeast Australia this last summer.

These wildfires incinerated millions of hectares of important habitat for rare and endangered animal ­species, and koalas in East Gippsland.  The impact on local human communities has also been devastating, with so many lives lost and so much property destroyed.

As much as 5.4 million hectares burned in NSW this past summer.  This was used to claim the fires were unprecedented in extent and further proved the climate change link.  Except that somewhere in the vicinity of 7.2 million hectares burned during the summer of 1951-52.

A CSIRO report titled the "Bushfire History of the south coast Study Area" details fires at Bega, Nowra, Mt Dromelly and other parts of southern NSW in 1951.

Fires consumed that same coastal strip again in 1994.  So rather than ­unprecedented, regular in occur­rence would be a more accurate way of ­describing bushfire events in ­Australia.

Severe bushfires like the fires ­experienced this past summer are weather-related, in that they are usually preceded by high temperatures, low relative humidity, strong winds and a rainfall deficit.  But a key fact often forgotten at places like the ABC is that there must also be critically high fuel loads for fires to take hold.

Fuel is live and dead vegetation ­accumulates over time.  When fuel loads are kept low though regular hazard reduction burning, fires are unlikely to kill all the understorey plant species or the tree layer.

The area of forest in the southeast of Australia has been expanding even as public support for the necessary hazard reduction burning has been waning.

Support has been waning because hazard reduction burning involves ­active management, which is generally considered incompatible with wilderness values.  The concept of wilderness derives from the idea of a balance of nature, which does not actually have a basis in the ecological sciences.  It is a myth:  a widely held but possibly false belief or idea.

Excluding appropriate fire regimes from open eucalyptus forests will not keep them in their current state, ­rather it can have the effect of simply making them more prone to severe fires that will eventually destroy them.

Across Australia, a better understanding of traditional Aboriginal burning methods, and the types of vegetation that existed before European settlement, could result in more support for the active management of wilderness areas, including for more hazard reduction burning.

A focus on hazard reduction burning to keep landscapes generally more open and thus safer for people and wildlife, would be more useful than blaming climate change — at least until there is better quality ­assurance of actual temperature measurements.

Those pushing the line that our ­recent bushfires have been unprecedented should check the facts.

Great Barrier Reef Platitudes: More Dangerous Than Sharks

It has always been the case that the individual is expected to conform and that there is hierarchy within myths.

Myths are of course traditional stories, often explaining a natural phenomenon typically involving supernatural beings or events.  Of course, most people, most of the time, are so emersed (and kept so busy) within the established hierarchy and the myth, that they see it as their only reality.  But it may not actually work for them (it could even be making them unhappy) especially if they want to be adventurous, and if they want to know the truth and be successful.

This is especially the case if they want to profit from the environment because at this point in our history anyone who interacts in a robust way with the natural environment, for example, a farmer or fisherman, is likely to be immediately portrayed as harming the natural environment.  Never mind that fundamental to our existence is food, that it still all comes from nature ― whether farmed or hunted or gathered.

The Great Barrier Reef is a case in point.  At the top of the established hierarchy are the scientists.  They are telling us all that the reef is under so much stress from rising ocean temperatures, catastrophic cyclones and declining water quality and it's our fault.  Rising ocean temperatures have apparently caused the destruction of so many reefs especially through coral bleaching, which is when the corals expel their symbiotic zooxanthellae and become a stark white colour.

Because the scientists are at the top of the hierarchy, whatever they say tends to be parroted by others.  Yet it makes no sense to undertake aerial surveys at 300 metres altitude from a plane window as a way of assessing the health of coral reefs that are growing vertically down cliff faces.  Yet this is what they do, how the most widely reported assessments of reef health are conducted.

Scuba divers, and dive operators, record and log water temperatures and they go under-the-waves including over vertical edges and under dark ledges where so many colourful corals can be found.  So, Scuba divers have firsthand experience of water temperatures and the state of the corals.  What few realise, is that many of dive operators are also dependent on established hierarchies for their permits to operate, to visit the marine parks where the best corals grow.

When those with first-hand experience turn-off their televisions and stop and think, they mostly know it to be a lie that ocean temperatures are rising catastrophically, and that the corals in the marine parks are in decline.  Their experience is otherwise.

If there is any statistic that gives me cause to worry it is shark numbers.  It is well documented that hundreds of sharks are killed each year in nets and on drumlines all along the Queensland coast.  Scuba divers who have spent whole careers under-the-sea, including Val Taylor, write that the sharks are not coming back ― that numbers are not what they used to be even in the most protected green zones within the marine parks.

In the end, if we really care about nature (the sharks and the corals) there needs to be much less hierarchy, and much more discussion between divers, fishers, farmers and scientists about the real issues that need addressing, and with all the evidence admitted.

At present, there is a tendency for contrary evidence to be expelled like zooxanthellae from bleached reefs.

Except, that while most of the corals that expelled their zooxanthellae back in April 2016 have taken it all back and recovered ― the situation within key Great Barrier Reef research institutions is to permanently expel contrary evidence and squash any, and everyone, who refuses to parrot their extraordinary claims.

What is not realised by most, is that just as the institutions expel wayward scientists, they also have the power to take away the licences of dive operators ― such are the current hierarchies.

The white-tipped reef shark at the top of this blog post was taken at the Vertical Gardens Dive Site in January 2020.

Information Commissioner To Investigate SBS Over Deleted Bushfires Article

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has looked at my submission and decided to commence a review into the rejection of my Freedom of Information request seeking information from SBS as to why they deleted an old Australian Associated Press article from their website titled:  "Fires not due to climate change:  expert — covered here back in March.

The 2013 article resurfaced in November 2019 and was shared around social media by many Australians in the wake of opportunistic alarmism from the green politicians and left wing media that the bushfires at the time were the result of climate change.  But on November 12, it was inexplicably taken down from the SBS website.

The article featured the considered opinion of retired Monash University researcher and former CSIRO scientist David Packham OAM, who said linking bushfires to climate change is "absolute nonsense" and reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush is urgently needed to reduce the intensity of bushfires.  

A day or two later, after media scrutiny as to why it was deleted, the SBS put the article back online but featured a new preamble.  The substance of the new paragraphs was to confirm that Packham still held the same views then as he did in 2013.  In response, Packham said "The most important (factor) is the dryness of the fuel, which comes from hot dry weather ... the theory is as solid as the universal theory of gravitation." 

One could be mistaken for thinking that the SBS felt that the link between climate change and bushfires was now unimpeachable and that this update would discredit Packham. 

A manual search I conducted found that SBS had never before updated old AAP articles on its website.

Public broadcasters have an extra duty of care to be impartial.  Taking down an old article, not even authored by them, because it doesn't fit the established groupthink, appears to be an act of bias worth investigating.

It is interesting to note the SBS is a member of the 'Your Right to Know' campaign, which argues for "A suite of changes to FOI law to reduce and restrict the significant delays, obstacles, cost and exemptions that allow government agencies to prevent disclosure." 

These are the very tools the SBS has been employing to avoid oversight in regards to this issue.  It advocates for the very kind of transparency and accountability in areas of government that it will not accept for itself.

A detailed legal reasoning behind my appeal to the OAIC is available here.

Peter Ridd Challenge Goes To the Heart Of A Free Society

Peter Ridd has decided to fight last week's decision in favour of James Cook University, and the case is of such public importance that the High Court simply must allow the appeal to be heard.

The Ridd case is much more than a mere workplace relations dispute between an academic and his employer.  It is even bigger than a dispute about climate change.

It is about the free speech crisis at our universities, and goes to the heart of the "cancel culture" epidemic engulfing the Western world.

Ridd is a Townsville-based marine geophysicist and Great Barrier Reef expert, whose 30-year academic career effectively ended when he started disputing the conventional wisdom that climate change was "killing" the reef.  He subsequently took the university to court, winning $1.2m in compensation for his unlawful sacking.  Last week, the Federal Court overturned that win in a 2-1 decision.

In deciding whether to grant special leave for the appeal, the High Court will consider whether the case involves "a question of law that is of public importance".  The Ridd matter easily meets this threshold.  It would be the first time the High Court has been called upon to consider the meaning of "academic and intellectual freedom", which is used in enterprise agreements covering staff at almost all Australian universities.

The court's decision will therefore have very real consequences in terms of university governance, and the extent to which administrators tolerate controversial (and, often, commercially inconvenient) opinions from the professoriate.

Should "intellectual freedom" be limited by the whims of university administrators, as JCU is arguing?  Or should it be wide enough to allow for the kind of controversial, but honestly held opinions for which Ridd was ultimately sacked?

The Federal Court's answer to that question is deeply disturbing.  In its judgment last week, the majority seemed to suggest that free speech on campus is past its use-by date.

"There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts of academic freedom," scoffed justices Griffiths and Derrington.  For good measure, the majority judgment quoted — arguably out of context — from an academic textbook outlining "a host of new challenges", like "the rise of social media" and "student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces".

If nothing else, the Federal Court has exposed just how much our public institutions have been corroded by modern cancel culture.  The free speech crisis at our universities has been apparent for years, but now the hypersensitivity of woke undergraduates is being taken seriously by our penultimate court.  It sets a precedent, and a dangerous one.  While The Australian does not suggest the judges acted improperly, it is worrying that the idea the boundaries of free speech should be defined by self-appointed cultural arbiters and anonymous Twitter mobs is on the verge of formal legal recognition.

This is not about the polite notion of so-called "acceptable limits" to free speech.  It is a radical departure from how our society treats knowledge.  Former opinion editor Bari Weiss recognised this dynamic in her sensational resignation from The New York Times recently:  "I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history," Weiss wrote.  "Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing moulded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

You could replace the words "journalism" and "history" with almost any intellectual discipline.  Woke revisionism has trashed the humanities faculties almost beyond repair.  Now it is creeping into the "hard sciences".  That is how we have arrived at a situation in which a respected academic such as Ridd is put through hell for offering a critique of the "settled science" of climate change.

If our judicial system lets JCU get away with it, every academic in the country — present and future — will be forced to choose between speaking the truth and putting bread on the table.

And for students, the Ridd case will mean the difference between tertiary education as a rigorous intellectual pursuit that invites critical thinking, or as rigid dogma that must be internalised and regurgitated in order to secure an expensive piece of paper with one's name on it.

Intellectual freedom and free speech are not antiquated notions.  They are ancient and important rights, and "public institutions" that dispense with them are not public at all.

The issues raised by the Ridd matter must at least be considered by the highest court in the land.  The implications for our most basic freedoms give every Australian a stake in its outcome.

The Federal Court Delivers A Devastating Blow Against Free Speech

The Federal Court has devastating blow against mainstream Australians, against freedom of speech and against freedom of speech on climate change by overturning the earlier decision in the Federal Circuit Court which held that Dr Peter Ridd was unlawfully dismissed by James Cook University.

Alarmingly, this decision shows that contractual provisions guaranteeing intellectual freedom do not protect academics against censorship by university administrators.  The time has come for the Morrison Government to intervene.

This has been Australia's David vs Goliath battle, with Peter Ridd on one side, backed by thousands of ordinary Australians, and JCU on the other side who secured some of the most expensive legal representation in the country in Bret Walker SC to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff.

Dr Ridd, a professor of physics at JCU, was sacked by the university for misconduct for questioning the climate change science around the Great Barrier Reef and for public statements made on the Jones & Co Sky News program.

He is now apparently considering his legal options in relation to a challenge in the High Court of Australia.  If he does decide to take up that fight, I ― as well as thousands of mainstream Australians ― will continue to support his fight for freedom of speech on climate change.

JCU has engaged some of the most expensive legal representation in the country to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff, despite crying poor about university funding in the wake of coronavirus.  It creates a massive chilling effect for any academic engaging in public debate in Australia.

The University's shameful actions prove without doubt there is a crisis of free speech at Australian universities.  Many academics are censured, but few are prepared to speak out and risk their career, particularly if faced with the prospect of legal battles and possible bankruptcy.

The case has identified a culture of censorship when it comes to challenging claims surrounding climate change and the Great Barrier Reef.  JCU to this date has never attempted to disprove claims made by Dr Ridd about the Great Barrier Reef.

Revealed: The True Hottest Day Ever Recorded In Australia

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology deleted what was long regarded as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia, Bourke's 125°F (51.7°C) on Sunday, January 3, 1909.  This record* was deleted, falsely claiming that this was likely some sort of "observational error", as no other official weather stations recorded high temperatures on that day.

However, the Liberal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, has visited the Australian National Archive at Chester Hill in western Sydney to view very old meteorological observation books.  It has taken Kelly some months to track down this historical evidence.  Through access to the archived book for the weather station at Brewarrina, which is the nearest official weather station to Bourke, it can now be confirmed that a temperature of 123°F (50.6°C) was recorded at Brewarrina for January 3 1909.  This totally contradicts claims from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that only Bourke recorded an extraordinarily hot temperature on that day.

Brewarrina Meteorological Observations Book, January 1909.  Note 123F recorded at 9.00 am on January 4, 1909.

Just today, Friday 10th July 2020, Mr Kelly MP obtained access to this record for Brewarrina, the closest official weather station to the official weather station at Bourke.

He has photographed the relevant page from the observations book, and it shows 123°F was recorded at 9.00 am on the morning of Monday, January 4 1909 ― published here for the first time.  This was the highest temperature in the previous 24 hours and corroborates what must now be recognised as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia of 125°F (51.7°C) degrees at Bourke on the afternoon of Sunday, January 4 1909.

The Meteorological Observations Book for Bourke for January 1909 records 125°C for January 3.  Photograph taken on 26th June in 2014 at Chester Hill.

That the Bureau of Meteorology denies these record hot days is a travesty.  Is it because these records contradict their belief in catastrophic human-caused global warming?

The temperature of 50.6°C (123°F) recorded back in 1909 which is more than 100 years ago, photographed by Kelly last week at the National Archives in Chester Hill, is almost equivalent to the current official hottest day ever for Australia of 50.7 degrees Celsius at Oodnadatta on 2nd January 1960.  These are in fact only the fourth and third hottest days recorded in Australia, respectively.

Not only has Kelly tracked-down the meteorological observations book for Brewarrina, but over the last week he has also uncovered that 51.1°C (124°F) was recorded at White Cliffs for Wednesday, January 11 1939.  This is the second hottest ever!

The evidence, a photograph from the relevant page of the White Cliff's meteorological observations book, is published here for the first time.

This photograph from the White Cliffs Meteorological Observation Book shows the second hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment in a Stevenson screen.

Until Kelly's efforts, this second hottest-ever record was hidden in undigitised archives.

It is only through his persistence the temperatures at all the official weather stations in the vicinity of Bourke that this and other hot days have been discovered.

If we are to be honest to our history, then the record hot day at Bourke of 51.7°C (125°F) must be re-instated and, further, the very hot 50.6°C (123°F) recorded for Brewarrina on the same day must be entered into the official databases.

Also, the temperature of 51.1°C (124°F) recorded at White Cliffs on January 12, 1939, must be recognised as the second hottest ever.

For these temperatures to be denied by the Bureau because they occurred in the past, before catastrophic human-caused global warming is thought to have come into effect, is absurd.

At a time in world history when Australians are raising concerns about the Chinese communist party removing books from Libraries in Hong Kong, we should be equally concerned with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology removing temperature records from our history.

If global warming is indeed the greatest moral issue of our time, then every Australian regardless of their politics and their opinion on greenhouse gases and renewable energy must be honest to history and these truths.

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* This temperature (125°F/51.7°C on the 3rd January 1909) was recorded at an official Bureau weather station and using a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen.  Hotter temperatures were recorded in 1896 but the mercury thermometers were not in Stevenson screens, which is considered the standard for housing recording equipment.

A Simple Stimulus Step That Won't Cost A Cent: Stop Green Lawfare

Over $65 billion of investment, mostly in regional Australia, has been put at risk by a small group of environmental and inner-city activists who have exploited a special legal provision to engage in frivolous and vexatious legal activism without delivering a discernible environmental benefit.

Research recently released found that green groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society have used a legal provision in Commonwealth environmental law to hold up major projects in court for a cumulative total of 10,100 days since the year 2000.

Section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act specifically empowers green groups to challenge projects that have been approved by the federal environment minister.

With Australia facing the economic impact of coronavirus, it is now more important than ever to remove barriers to investment.

Since 2000 there have been 28 projects targeted through this provision, including coal mines, dams, vegetation management, and public infrastructure.  Prominent projects include the original $16.5 billion Adani coal mine, a $2.3 billion pulp mill in Tasmania, and a $767 million coal mine at Maules Creek in New South Wales.

Despite the costly delays, the vast majority of these cases have not led to environmental improvements.  According to my research, only three out of 51 cases since 2000 ― or six per cent ― have resulted in significant changes to environmental approvals.

The success of legal challenges is not the primary concern of green groups.  Their aim, as outlined in the 2011 Greenpeace document Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom is to "stop projects outright", "increase costs", and "raise investor uncertainty".  By holding up projects in court, even without winning the case, they deter investment in the resources sector with the prospect of costly delays and increased legal risk.

For investors in the resources industry, the punishment is in the process.

The pursuit of environmental ends with no consideration of costs or care for those forced to bear those costs is characteristic of the green movement.

The movement is based largely in the inner cities, far away from those Australians who their policy prescriptions hurt the most.  In the 2019 federal election, over 80 per cent of the Greens' primary vote came from non-rural electorates, and their share of the vote was twice as high in the inner city compared to regional Australia.

Mining projects have been opposed at the cost of jobs in regional Australia and to the detriment of regional communities.  Continued restrictions on logging are destroying a once vibrant forestry industry.  Farmers suffering through severe drought have been forced to sit by hopelessly as they watch an abundance of water flow by out to sea due to onerous restrictions on irrigation and red tape preventing the construction of industry saving dams.

Landowners have faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for the crime of trying to save their homes from bushfire by clearing trees.  For example, a Queensland grazier was fined $1 million in 2017 for clearing a fire break on his property previously ravaged by bushfire.  Fires have raged at a ferocity enabled by an abundance of fuel that environmentalists have ensured has not been adequately managed.

And of course, the green movement has opposed coal and gas generated power that delivers affordable and reliable energy.  A jump in electricity and gas prices may not be felt as strongly by Green voters who have a median household income $14,000 higher than the general public, according to research from Roy Morgan.  But for many people it is the difference between their small business turning a profit, being able to spend money on the kids, or the ability to heat their homes in winter.

Many of these struggles are simply not felt by inner-city elites.  It is all too easy to advocate "action on climate change" and radical environmental policies when you are not the one bearing the cost.

The resources and agriculture sectors are an integral part of the Australian economy and the lifeblood of regional Australia.  They represent 20 per cent of private capital investment and 75 per cent of the value of Australia's top 25 exports.  Outside the big cities, agriculture and mining are major employers and support the services and retail sectors that are built up around them.

While all Australians want positive environmental outcomes, duplicated layers of complex regulation combined with legal activism are imposing an unnecessary burden on regional Australia for no discernible environmental gain.

Green activism, enabled and emboldened by lax legal loopholes, poses an existential threat to the resources sector, regional communities, and the Australian way of life.  Repealing Section 487 should be the first step in reining in the excesses of the green movement.

University O-Week Censors Excel Themselves

"Free speech crisis?  What crisis?"  Uttered in freaky unison, this frequen­t denial from university vice-chancellors has allowed them to resume normal programming.

That consists of VCs putting their heads in the sand rather than confronting those trying to nobble intellectual diversity on campus.  It includes VCs sending long emails about how proud they are of their diversity programs, with no sense of the irony that diversity of opinion is not part of that program.  And it means VCs devoting more energy to attracting foreign stud­ents than defending freedom of expression.

How much longer can univer­sity leaders ignore the accelerating rhythm to raids on free speech at Australian universities?  Today, the most brazen opponents of free speech within universities are those who control student unions.  Funded by other students' money, the leaders of student unions use their union muscle to control what other students hear, read and learn.  Not content with running social events, defending students' rights or holding university management to account, a small group of students have assumed a new role as campus censor.  And they imagine that if they provide a band and a BBQ, they can flex their polit­ical arm without reproach.

On Tuesday afternoon, the student association at Melbourne's Monash University, which runs Orientation Week stalls, BBQs and other events aimed at offering students "a diverse introduction to Monash", rejected an application from Generation Liberty to be part of the program's activities.

Generation Liberty is a program run for young Australians, includi­ng university students, introduc­ing them to ideas, arguments, and perspectives that they may have missed at school or university.  The program is a big hit;  its growth, especially over the past 12 months, points to a real hunger for knowledge not addressed by schools and universities.

In an email, events officer Michel­e Fredregill from the Monash­ Student Association told fellow Monash student Luca Rossi, a Generation Liberty co-ordina­tor at the university:  "We have carefully reviewed your booking request and discussed it internally.  Regretfully we must decline your booking application on the basis of our terms and conditions.  Generation Liberty's positions on issues such as climate change do not align with MSA's."

This is what happens when zealotry is threatened by facts.  There is nothing in the terms and conditions to justify denying Genera­tion Liberty's application to be part of O-Week, which kicks off on Monday.

In any case, a student union, or any other body, cannot use "Ts & Cs" to contract out of obligations under Victoria's Equal Opportunity Act 2010 not to discriminate against a person on the basis of their political beliefs or activities.

More sinister is MSA's reference to not aligning with "Generation Liberty's positions on issues such as climate change".  Generation Liberty has no "position" on climate change.  Gen Lib produces research­ based on facts:  the rest is left up to who is reading, listening or watching papers, podcasts or YouTube videos.

Rossi, 19, has hit back at this MSA censorship.  "As a student at Monash, it is insulting for your ­student association, who supposedly represents you, to basically say you can't be trusted with your own thoughts, we have to think for you."

The Monash law/arts student features in a series of Gen Lib YouTube videos launched late last year called What I Wasn't Told.

At last count, What I Wasn't Told … About Climate Change had attracted just shy of 200,000 views.  The video includes links for the curious to read the research that justifies every statement.

Rossi says had Gen Lib been given the chance to join O-Week, "we would have set up a stall, handed out some stickers and badges, and if some students want to have a chat with us, then we give them the idea of freedom.  And that's it."

What exactly are the officeholders of the student union at Monash afraid of?  That some ­inquisitive students might grab a vegan burger from the MSA BBQ, then wander over to the Gen Lib stall and pick up a free sticker ­carrying the Jordan Peterson quote "In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive"?

Or maybe they fear the badge carrying these words from Ricky Gervais:  "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

Another badge says:  "Make ­Orwell Fiction Again."

The only steadfast position taken by Gen Lib is a belief in open inquiry and students thinking for themselves.  Clearly this belief in intellectual diversity does not align with the MSA.

Rossi, one of 16 Gen Lib campus co-ordinators at 15 Australian universities, is frustrated by the lack of transparency, too.  "It's shady," he says, alluding to the decision by MSA president James McDonald to fob it off as an "operations issue" in answer to Rossi's request for more details as to why the student union rejected Gen Lib's application.

"It's basically as little transpar­ency as possible:  'You're not allowed­ to be here because we don't agree with your views.  Now please go away'," says Rossi.

Alas, passing the buck about incursio­ns into intellectual diversity happens at the highest levels about an issue that should be embedded in the DNA of every serious ­university.

When the student guild at the Queensland University of Technology refused Gen Lib's applic­ation to be part of Market Week last month, vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil learned about it from the media and responded by ­saying QUT was committed to "a variety of contesting viewpoints".

But when this asserted belief in contesting viewpoints has not filtere­d down to the student guild, it is clear that intellectual diversity is not embedded in QUT's culture.

The dirty little secret is that stud­ent unions are baying campus censors, too.  And it takes only a handful of students who control events such as Market Week at QUT and O-Week at Monash to undermine intellectual diversity for the rest of the student population.  My research compiled last year revealed that 59 per cent of students believe they are sometimes prevented from voicing their opinions on controversial issues by other students.

For student unions, freedom of speech is a controversial issue.

It is a stark failure of logic and leadership when VCs try to dodge responsibility by saying stud­ent unions are "independent" from university administration.  Student unions hold functions on campus, they are meant to represent other university students, and student unions are partly funded by ­compulsory student services and amenities fees paid by every stud­ent, except international ones.

Who then, if not university ­administrators, will hold these stud­ent censors to account?

It is not unreasonable for VCs, acting on behalf of all students, to require students within student unions or guilds to commit, in practice, to freedom of expression, open debate and intellectual diversity.  That starts with O-Week ­activities.

Instead, there is a failure of accounta­bility right up and down the line.  Just over a week ago, new Tasmanian Liberal senator Claire Chandler questioned professor Nick Saunders, chief commissioner of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the body charged with holding universities to their part of the funding deal — universities receiv­e federal funding from taxpayers in return for delivering intellec­tual inquiry on campus.  Saunders said the regulatory body has no authority to rein in censorship by student unions.

Chandler tells Inquirer:  "One of the real policy questions that has to be answered here is:  does a university's obligation to promote free speech on campus extend to student unions … given that these unions are getting funding from universities, through services and amenities fees that are compulsory?"

Of course it should.  More than that, it is time to restart the battle over compulsory fees that prop up these student censors.  Whereas the Coalition government abolished­ compulsory student unionism in 2005, the Gillard governmen­t reintroduced them in 2010 in the form of the services and amenities fee.  Ten years later, stud­ent unions are using these compulsory fees to fund their censorship­ of ideas and people on campus.

Chandler, who is passionate about universities fostering ­genuine intellectual freedom to sharpen young students' minds, says that if the model code recommended by former High Court chief justice Robert French in his review of free speech at Australian universities doesn't capture oblig­ations of student unions to free speech, then this "gap" needs to be addressed.

Fill the gap, by all means, but a code will not necessarily change a culture.

I saw a similar problem with the ABC board five years ago.  There was, and remains, a deeply embedded culture among journalists, producers and higher levels of the tax-funded media behemo­th opposed to the intellectual diversity that is explicitly requir­ed under its charter.

Internal codes which purported to commit the ABC to their legislative charter made no difference up against that culture.  Instead­, even egregious cases of bias by journalists were routinely met with management claims that editorial policies are too vague, dodging any finding of a breach of the policy.  Management would suggest the ABC board redraft the policies, a useless "make work" exercise­, to remove areas of grey.

When another glaringly obvious episode arose of bias, often from the same journalist — recidiv­ists were not hard to find — the board would receive the same response.  It's all rather grey so we can't do anything.  In other words:  go away, our ABC culture trumps a code and even a legislative charter mandating intellectual diversity.

The same scenario will unfold across Australian universities.  Even the most beautifully crafted free-speech code will count for nothing until there is meaningful cultural change.

And that will not happen until the Morrison government moves to reduce funding to universities that do not implement cultural change.

Over to Education Minister Dan Tehan to walk the talk, rememberi­ng too that academic freedom was thrown under the bus when James Cook University decided­ to sack professor Peter Ridd on a bogus code of conduct claim.  JCU has committed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend that action in courts, rather than defend intellectual ­diversity.

In the meantime, we are left to ponder the state of a higher educatio­n where codes, laws, regul­ators and the media are needed to remind VCs and student union­s about the core business of a ­university.

SBS Is Mocking "Your Right to Know"

In October last year, the SBS joined the Your Right to Know Coalition, a push from the major media outlets to put pressure on parliament to improve freedom of information and other laws so that Australians can know more about what their government is doing.

And how does the nation's second-largest public broadcaster measure on transparency?  Based on a recent freedom of information request submitted to SBS it seems that the Right to Know is a right designed only for those Australians who are employed in Big Journalism, rather than the millions of Australians who are concerned with what the public sector do with their money.

This particular instance of SBS opacity dates back to October of 2013 when the SBS published on its website an article with the headline "Fires not due to climate change:  expert".

The article was a news report written by the AAP, a news aggregation service, and featured the considered opinion of retired Monash University researcher David Packham, who said linking bushfires to climate change is "absolute nonsense" and reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush is urgently needed to reduce the intensity of bushfires.

The article resurfaced in November 2019 and was shared around social media in the wake of opportunistic alarmism from the green lobby that the bushfires at the time were the result of climate change.  But on November 12, it was inexplicably taken down from the SBS website.

A day or two later, the SBS put the article back online but featured a new preamble.  The substance of the new paragraphs was to confirm that Packham still held the same views then as he did in 2013.  In response, Packham said "The most important (factor) is the dryness of the fuel, which comes from hot dry weather … the theory is as solid as the universal theory of gravitation."

One could be mistaken for thinking that the SBS felt that the link between climate change and bushfires was now unimpeachable and that this update would discredit Packham.

In response to these bizarre actions by SBS, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for "Copies of correspondence or emails or documents created, sent or received by SBS staff in relation to the deletion of the October 22, 2013 article titled 'Fires not due to climate change:  expert' between 9 November 2019 and 13 November 2019."

On December 12, 2019, SBS then sent me a letter of refusal, stating that the SBS is exempt from the operation of the Freedom of Information Act in relation to documents that are created "in relation to its program material and its datacasting content."

In other words, the SBS was arguing that its website was a "program" and that because of this, any correspondence about a decision to edit or remove an article from its website was program material and not available under freedom of information laws.

On January 8 I challenged this position in a request for an internal review of the decision.  The reason for the rejection falls at the very first hurdle.  An article on a website is not a program in the ordinary or legal sense of the word.

A definition given by the Oxford Dictionary of English defines 'programme' or 'program' in the broadcasting context as 'a presentation or item on television or radio, especially one broadcast regularly between stated times.'

SBS has rejected this argument and reasserted that an article on the SBS's website is a program.  It argued that the word "program" should be read in a wider context.  Since the SBS charter includes as a principal function digital media services, the argument goes, it must therefore follow that digital media services are a program.

As we noted, this is inconsistent with the express definition in the Special Broadcasting Service Act — the main act of parliament regulating the SBS — which restricts the meaning of program to mean something broadcast on television or the radio.  This definition is also implied in the Broadcasting Services Act.

Despite their insistence, the SBS has not been given the power to decide which of its activities are programs and which are not.  The public broadcasters are bound by the legislation which establishes them.

Even in the unlikely event that a web news article could be defined as a program, it does not then lead to the conclusion that any document about it is exempt from FOI laws.  The program material exemption is itself limited to a certain range of documents.  At its broadest, it would capture documents which are "created or acquired for the purposes of such as those that are created to be used in a program or for the purpose of creating the program, whether or not incorporated into the complete program."

Nothing in the existing definition of program material would capture correspondence about why an AAP authored article would be taken down for special editing over six years after its first publication.

The SBS is a commercialised entity operating in the media marketplace.  As such an exemption for program material may be explained by the need to protect material which the SBS as a statutory corporation might have a proprietary interest in.

In other words, the legislation will not force the SBS to release its intellectual property to its competitors and other third parties, and the legislation provides for this by way of exemption from FOI laws.

It is not intended as a carte blanche exemption from releasing any document to taxpayers who, as unwilling donors of the SBS, have a special interest in overseeing how government entities such as the SBS are operating.

Which makes the SBS's support of the Your Right to Know campaign entirely hypocritical.  When the SBS signed on to the campaign, it was arguing for "A suite of changes to FOI law to reduce and restrict the significant delays, obstacles, cost and exemptions that allow government agencies to prevent disclosure."

These are the very tools the SBS now employ to avoid oversight.  It advocates for the very kind of transparency and accountability in areas of government that it will not accept for itself.

I have appealed the SBS's refusal decision to the Information Commissioner to ensure that 'Your Right to Know' is more than just 'Their Right to Know'.

Climate Wars Are The Aussie Brexit

Climate change is to Australia what Brexit is to Britain.  That's because, just like on Brexit, perspectives on climate policy are as much about one's views on the future of the economy and society as they are on with the merits of the issue itself.

Because most of the inhabitants of the Canberra press gallery bubble can't see past the froth on their cappuccino, Tuesday's vote for the parliamentary leadership of the federal National Party has been presented as basically the product of Barnaby Joyce's ego and personality.  Maybe.  But something much bigger was at stake.

Under one leadership candidate, the Nationals would continue to follow the Liberals' climate change policies, which place a priority on adherence to the Paris Accord.  Pursuant to the accord, Australia has agreed to impose the deepest per capita cuts to CO2 emissions in the developed world.

Under the other candidate, the Nationals' position on climate change would instead have prioritised cheaper energy and industrial development.  A majority of the National Party MPs and senators voted for the first candidate.

These two positions reflect vastly different assessments of the politics of climate change and vastly different worldviews.  It seems that to several Liberal MPs (and presumably a few National MPs, too), if the Coalition somehow did more on climate change, many of the political challenges posed by climate change would go away.  This might be true, but history has demonstrated that more action on climate change never seems to be enough to satisfy those demanding further reductions in emissions.

Furthermore, the evidence that the public is demanding action on climate change is more nuanced than commonly assumed.

The evidence for this is not only the outcome of last year's federal poll, which was presented by many as the climate change election.  There's also data from surveys such as that by JWS Research reported in this newspaper in November:  when respondents were prompted on what they thought were the three most important issues the government should focus on, the environment and climate change was ranked fourth, behind cost of living, hospital, healthcare and ageing, and employment and wages.

INCREDIBLY REVEALING

When respondents were unprompted, 34 per cent nominated the environment and climate change, 28 per cent named healthcare and 22 per cent said employment and wages.  It is incredibly revealing that despite all of the attention devoted to climate change in nearly every single walk of life in this country, only about one-third of people rank it as one of the top three issues on which the government should focus.

When for example, former United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres said climate change policies provided "the chance to re-create the economy, to re-create the world", it's not unreasonable for those who believe the world could be better but who don't think it should be re-created, to take people like Figueres at their word and push back.

"THE PARTY FOR WORKERS"

This is the point that Nationals senator and former resources minister Matt Canavan made this week when he talked about the future of the Nationals as "the party for workers ... workers in coalmines, workers in shipyards and workers in factories".

Canavan was one of the four people most responsible for the Coalition's federal election victory in May — the others being first and foremost Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the Liberals' federal director Andrew Hirst.  Canavan's work went largely unnoticed in Sydney and Melbourne but he was the one who turned the debate about the future of Australia's coal mines into a vote for or against economic development in regional Australia.  A large part of the reason the Coalition won 23 seats in Queensland to Labor's six is because of Canavan.  One outcome of the Nationals' leadership vote this week is that he is now on the backbench.

A re-created zero-emissions economy consistent with the vision of someone like Figueres has little place for workers in factories and definitely doesn't have room for coalminers.

At least for the British, as of Friday last week when Britain officially left the European Union, Brexit for the moment is settled.  In Australia though, there's no end in sight to the so-called climate wars.

Don't let the truth of these terrible weeks be forgotten or rewritten

The infernos of January 2020 will be remembered for destroying so much of south-eastern Australia.  I weep for their victims.  So many people and so much wildlife in so much pain.

In terms of area of land burnt, these last few weeks may be recorded as unprecedented.  This has everything to do with our mismanagement of the landscape, including the lack of hazard reduction burning especially in eucalyptus forests.

We were warned in the report from the 1939 Royal Commission by Judge Leonard Stretton, and in the more than 18 major inquiries since, forests are potentially dangerous and explosive places.  Fuel loads must be kept within acceptable limits.

Blaming the recent fires on climate change is to rewrite our temperature history, something the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been doing for some time.  This has involved the:

1. remodelling of measured values
2. addition of hotter locations to only the most recent years in the compilation of a national average trend
3. transition to electronic probes that are designed to record hotter for the same weather, and
4. deleting of the hottest day in the official record, which was January 3, 1909.

These misdeeds have all been comprehensively documented, yet the current government turns a blind eye, while referring the matter of a firefighter who claims an Indigenous heritage to the Australian federal police.  It is as though we are ruled over by a political elite more interested in continuing subsidies to electricity companies, and continuing funding to corrupt coral reef researchers — both of which have a vested interest in catastrophe — rather than listening to practical solutions to these and other major environment issues currently confronting Australia.

BUSHFIRE HISTORY:  REMEMBERING JANUARY 1939

The "Report of the Royal Commission to inquire into the causes of and measures taken to prevent the bush fires of January 1939 and to protect life and property and the measures to be taken to prevent bush fires in Victoria and to protect life and property in the event of future bush fires“ begins:

In the State of Victoria, the month of January of the year 1939 came towards the end of a long drought which had been aggravated by a severe hot, dry summer season.  For more than twenty years the State of Victoria had not seen its countryside and forests in such travail.  Creeks and springs ceased to run.  Water storages were depleted.  Provincial towns were facing the probability of cessation of water supply.  In Melbourne, more than a million inhabitants were subjected to restrictions upon the use of water.

Throughout the countryside, the farmers were carting water, if such was available, for their stock and themselves.  The rich plains, denied their beneficent rains, lay bare and baking;  and the forests, from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder.  The soft carpet of the forest floor was gone;  the bone-dry litter crackled underfoot;  dry heat and hot dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture.  Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy.  But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine.  They had not lived long enough.  The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.  And so it was that, when millions of acres of the forest were invaded by bushfires which were almost State-wide, there happened, because of great loss of life and property, the most disastrous forest calamity the State of Victoria has known.

These fires were lit by the hand of man

Seventy-one lives were lost.  Sixty-nine mills were burned.  Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged.  Townships were obliterated in a few minutes.  Mills, houses, bridges, tramways, machinery, were burned to the ground;  men, cattle, horses, sheep, were devoured by the fires or asphyxiated by the scorching debilitated air.  Generally, the numerous fires which during December, in many parts of Victoria, had been burning separately, as they do in any summer, either "under control" as it is falsely and dangerously called, or entirely untended, reached the climax of their intensity and joined forces in a devastating confluence of flame on Friday, the 13th of January.

On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight.  At midday, in many places, it was dark as night.  Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings.  Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished.  Throughout the land there was daytime darkness.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAZARD REDUCTION BURNING

Just last week, at the height of the January 2020 bushfire emergency, Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton referred a complaint against a firefighter, who allegedly falsely claims Aboriginal heritage, to the Australian federal police.  I have no opinion on Bruce Pascoe's lineage, but I do know that the people he identifies with have real solutions to our recurrent bushfire tragedies.  Their culture has a long history of land management through the expert use of fire as a tool to create visually pleasing and practical mosaics resistant to the spread of wildfires.

Pascoe's book Dark Emu draws from the more technical work by Bill Gammage entitled The Biggest Estate on Earth.  This essential reader explains how Aborigines actively and skilfully managed the land in a far more systematic way than has ever been acknowledged.  And I know, from my time spent reading original sources at the South Australian Museum about the Yaraldi of the Lower Murray River, that there were also complicated systems of governance, with a focus on a sustainable harvest and the storage of food.

Judge Stretton's 1939 report also noted:

When the early settlers came to what is now this state [of Victoria], they found for the greater part a clean forest.  Apparently, for many years before their arrival, the forest had not been scourged by fire … Their canopies had prevented the growth of scrub and bracken to any wide extent.  They were open and traversable by men, beasts and wagons.  Compared to their present condition, they were safe.

While quick to refer Pascoe, who is best known for his unorthodox and controversial perspective on Aboriginal history, to the federal police, Dutton and his government have over a very long period of time turned a blind eye to the rewriting of Australia's historical temperature record by Blair Trewin and David Jones of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.  The work of Trewin and Jones underpins the notion of an unprecedented climate emergency when the real issues are perhaps the management of fuel loads in forests and current resourcing.

Indeed, now absurdly corralled by the climate change meme, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is actively promoting the need for yet another Royal Commission as though this will prevent future bush fire tragedies.  Yet recommendations of previous Royal Commissions have never been implemented.  For example, a hazard reduction burn across at least 390,000 hectares each year was recommended for the state of Victoria.

It is because “The Elites” don't trust the work of practical land managers, whether that be thinning young forests to ensure that a proper over-storey canopy develops, or adopting straightforward hazard reduction burning programmes.  Climate change may be a convenient scapegoat, but it will not protect our land into the future.

HOTTER AND DRIER SUMMERS

On Sunday morning the Prime Minister said on national history a royal commission into "the killer bushfire season" is necessary and reiterated claims that the nation is facing a "new normal", with more severe natural disasters on the way;  he said he would be seeking more powers to allow the Australian Defence Force to respond more quickly.

Bill Gates has famously said that if you can't measure it you can't manage it, and that fundamental to improvement is the capacity to accurately measure.

Yet we have a situation where key statistics are either remodelled or ignored.

Mr Morrison mentioned hotter and drier summers in his television address.  The historical record shows that the landmass of Australia is not drying out.  Last year, 2019, was exceptionally dry.  But the long-term trend is not towards a drier continent but rather we have on average had consistently wetter years since the 1970s, as shown in Figure 1.

It is also the case that summers are not getting drier, as shown in Figure 2.

According to the Bureau, recent summers have been hotter, but such claims would not pass scrutiny if assessed, for example, for inclusion in the Guinness Book of records.  This is because of all the changes to the way temperatures are now measured.

The Rutherglen agricultural research station has one of the longest, continuous, temperature records for anywhere in rural Victoria.  Minimum and maximum temperatures were first recorded at Rutherglen using standard and calibrated equipment back in November 1912.  Considering the first 85 years of summer temperatures — unadjusted, as in not homogenised — the hottest summer on record at Rutherglen is the summer of 1938-1939.

At Rutherglen, the first big equipment change happened on 29 January 1998.  That is when the mercury and alcohol thermometers were replaced with an electronic probe — custom built to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's own standard, with the specifications still yet to be made public.

According to Bureau policy, when such a major equipment change occurs there should be at least three years (preferably five) of overlapping/parallel temperature recordings.  Except the mercury and alcohol thermometers (used to measure maximum and minimum temperatures, respectively) were removed on exactly the same day the custom-built probe was placed into the Stevenson screen at Rutherglen, in direct contravention of this policy.

The policy implications are significant, far more significant than Pascoe paraphrasing some text from the early explorers to make a point while claiming an Aboriginal heritage.

In 2011, the Bureau made further changes to how it measures temperatures in that it stopped averaging one-second readings from the probe at Rutherglen over one minute.  The maximum temperature as recorded each day at Rutherglen is now the highest one-second spot reading from the custom-built probe.  That is correct — spot reading.

Across Australia, non-standard methods of measuring (spot readings) from non-standard equipment (custom-built probes) make it impossible to establish the equivalence of recent temperatures from Rutherglen — or any of the Bureau's other 695 probes in automatic weather stations — with historical data.

REWRITING OUR TEMPERATURE

It was at the Sydney Institute in 2014 that I first began to detail the extent to which the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has rewritten our temperature history to create the impression of catastrophic global warming using the technique of homogenisation.  This is in addition to the issues with calibration.

Back in 2014, I showed how temperatures are changed in the ACORN database, and not by a small amount.  I showed that the recorded values — the actual measurements — are often changed by more than a degree from the original measurements to remove the cooling trend from at least 1940 to 1960.  Cooling the past makes the present appear hotter.

If we consider, as an example, Bourke in western New South Wales, the temperature as measured using a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson Screen at the official recording station was 38.9 degrees Celsius.  This value was changed to 38.4 in the first official ACORN database, and then dropped-down by a further 0.3 degrees when the Bureau published version two of ACORN.

This is in addition to the more recent issues that I have uncovered, issues caused by the transition to electronic probes without due regard to calibration.  In the case of Mildura, I have shown that the official electronic probe is regularly recording 0.4°C hotter than the mercury thermometer in the same shelter.

Then there is the issue of how all the temperature series are added together.

Concerned that the Bureau made many errors in its calculation of the mean Australian temperature, Merrick Thomson, a retired accountant, asked questions in a submission to a government enquiry some years ago, specifically:

1. Why was the mix of stations changed with the transition to ACORN, and why was this not explained and declared, particularly given that it has resulted in a large increase in the annual temperature for Australia.  He calculates this was 56°C.
2. What criteria is used to determine whether or not a station becomes part of the national network, and specifically, why was the very hot location of Oodnadatta added to the national network in 2011?

His submission was never acknowledged, and his questions never answered.

So, when the Bureau announced that last year was the hottest on record we can have absolutely no confidence that this is true.  The charts they show and values they present are totally contrived.

I recently explained to Chris Smith on Sky News that the hottest day ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment at an official recording station is 51.6°C at Bourke in January 1909.  I also explained that this legitimate record has been expunged from the record by Blair Trewin at the Bureau.

Over the last six years, I have provided more and more evidence — some of it reported by Graham Lloyd and published in The Australian — which shows Blair Trewin, under the direction of David Jones, is falsely rewriting our temperature history.  But nothing has ever been done about this.  Rather, successive state and federal governments have let the belief in human-caused catastrophic global warming grow while neglecting the forests.

I have it on good advice that the detail of my accusations against the Bureau have been discussed in Cabinet, including in the presence of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison.  At that time then prime minister Tony Abbott was apparently keen to have some sort of inquiry into the industrial-scale remodelling by Jones and Trewin through the process of homogenisation, but it is said his efforts were thwarted by Greg Hunt and Julie Bishop.

ELITE WISDOM VERSUS PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

For decades respected Aboriginal elders have been invited onto local bushfire management committees, only to find government-appointed chairpersons refusing to even record their advice.  In the Dreaming active land management is so important, while a particular zeitgeist and red tape now most deliberately prevent it.

Then there is the issue of adequate resourcing.  So much money is provided to science managers to fake news about the Murray River, the Great Barrier Reef and human-caused catastrophic climate change.  Yet the real and pressing issues concerning management of weeds, feral animals, and fuel loads in forests is mostly ignored.  Meanwhile, artificial constraints on commercial opportunities for the sustainable harvest of so much of our natural bounty, including kangaroos and crocodiles, are indirectly imposed by Hugh Jackman and other Hollywood celebrities who support campaigns led by Terri Irwin.

Grahame Webb has spent a lifetime overseeing the successful resurgence of crocodile numbers in the Northern Territory, only to now be prevented from realising any commercial gain for his Aboriginal colleagues because of successful campaigning by Hollywood Elites.

As Bruce Pascoe writes in Black Emu:

Strangely, though, when Ross Garnaut, who prepared the climate-change policy for the Rudd Government in 2008, championed kangaroo farming as a way of conserving the land and cutting greenhouse gases, because cattle are greater polluters than motor cars, the press could hardly contain their contempt.

I've discussed the need to not only restore the historical temperature record, but also the need to restore the estuary of our longest river system, with Minister Simon Birmingham.  But he tells me that there is no advantage in it for South Australia.  Also, he has told me that the Australian Greens — steered on this issue by his fellow South Australian Sarah Hanson-Young — would never support such an initiative.

I met with Hanson-Young back in 2011.  She told me that while she sees some merit in the Murray River having an estuary, South Australian Greens and Liberals "will hold the line" together on the issue.

It is the case that here in Australia, just a few rule over us, and at the behest of their politics that has scant regard for the natural environment, and little more for the economy.

Contrary to the impression given by our ABC, quiet Australians of diverse lineage are not being heard, while the mostly white leadership across The Greens, Coalition and Labor parties together decide how key issues will be managed.

Worse, it is a fact that practical individuals who operate outside the current zeitgeist are hounded by our elites and our government.

The terrifying infernos of recent weeks are a wake-up call.  It is time that the Prime Minister and all the Ministers in the current Australian government showed some real leadership.

They know the real issues, and they understand the politics.  So, it is past time they climbed out from under the thumbs of the catastrophists embedded in our most important government-funded institutions.

Stop taking orders from them, and start referring them to the AFP.  Their misdeeds are significant.

Tragic, But Unprecedented? Not Yet

The word unprecedented is applied to almost every bad thing that happens at the moment, as though particular events could not have been predicted, and have never happened before at such a scale or intensity.  This is creating so much anxiety, because it follows logically that we are living in an uncertain time:  that there really is a climate emergency.

The historical evidence, however, indicates fires have burnt very large areas before, and it has been hotter.

Some of the catastrophe has been compounded by our refusal to prepare appropriately, as is the case with the current bushfire emergency here in Australia.  Expert Dr Christine Finlay explains the importance of properly managing the ever-increasing fire loads in an article in The Weekend Australian.  While there is an increase in the area of national park with Eucalyptus forests, there has been a reduction in the area of hazard reduction burning.

The situation is perhaps also made worse by fiddling with the historical temperature record.  This will affect the capacity of those modelling bushfire behaviour to obtain an accurate forecast.

We have had a horrific start to the bushfire season, and much is being said about the more than 17 lives lost already, and that smoke has blown as far as New Zealand.  Unprecedented has been the claim.  But just 10 years ago, on 9 February 2009, 173 lives were lost in the Black Saturday inferno.  On January 13, 1939 — Black Friday — two million hectares burnt with ash reportedly falling on New Zealand.  That was probably the worst bushfire catastrophe in Australia's modern recorded history in terms of area burnt and it was 80 years ago next week.

According to the Report of the Royal Commission that followed, it was avoidable.

In terms of total area burnt:  figures of over 5 million hectares are often quoted for 1851.  The areas now burnt in New South Wales and Victoria are approaching this.

Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia.  But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter.  In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since, as the table below shows.

The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria.  It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau of Meteorology has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.

Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic device with a sheath of unknown thickness.  In the United States, similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five minutes and then the measurement recorded.

The year before last, I worked with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology (BMKG), and understood their difficulty of getting a temperature equivalence between mercury thermometers and readings from electronic probes at their thousands of weather stations.  The Indonesian Bureau has a policy of keeping both recording devices in the same shelter and taking measurements from both.  They take this issue very seriously and acknowledge the problem.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a policy of a three year period of overlap, yet the metadata shows that for its supposedly highest quality recording stations (for example Rutherglen), the mercury thermometer is removed the very same day an electronic probe is installed.  This is a total contravention of the Bureau's own policy, and nothing is being done about it.

I explained much of this to Australia's Chief Scientist in a letter some years ago — neither he nor the Bureau, deny that our current method of recording temperatures here in Australia is not covered by any international ISO standard.  It is very different from methods currently employed in the United States and also Indonesia, and as recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation.

Then there is the issue of the remodelling of temperatures, I explained how this affects trends at Rutherglen in a blog post early last year.

The remodelling, that has the technical term of homogenisation, is a two-step process.  With respect to the temperature maxima at Rutherglen, the Bureau identified a "statistically significant discontinuity" in 1938-1939.  Values were then changed.

It is somewhat peculiar that the Bureau did not recognise, in its process of remodelling the historical data for Rutherglen, that the summer of 1938-1939 was exceptionally hot because of drought, compounded by bushfires.  Rather David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau used the exceptional hot January of 1939 as an excuse for remodelling the historical temperature record at Rutherglen, with the changed values subsequently incorporated into international data sets.

These made-up values are then promoted by the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This propaganda is then tweeted by Hollywood superstars like Bette Midler to The Australian Prime Minister.

After a recent Sky News Television interview I did with Chris Smith several people have contacted me about the hottest day ever recorded in Australia.  They have suggested it is January 16, 1889, when it was 53.1 degrees Celsius at Cloncurry in Queensland.  A problem with this claim is that the temperature was not measured from within a Stevenson screen, though it was a recording at an official station.  A Stevenson screen (to shelterer the mercury thermometer) was not installed by Queensland meteorologist Clement Ragge at Cloncurry until the next month, until February 1889.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment (a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen) at an official recording station is 51.7 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Bourke Post Office on January 3, 1909.

As the saying goes, we are all entitled to our own opinion — not our own facts.

Academic Agitators Rely On The Public Purse

On Sunday the ABC published an article stating that masculinity is the biggest obstacle to climate ­action.  The highly offensive piece, which was steeped in misandry and titled "Is fragile masculinity the biggest obstacle to climate action?", was written by University of Sydney academic Megan Mackenzie.  It was published exactly the way you would expect:  with a triple barrel of taxpayer funds.

First, Mackenzie is employed at Sydney University, which is a taxpayer-funded institution.  According to its annual report last year, the university pocketed a total of $710.3m in Australian government grants, plus an extra $45.5m in NSW government grants.  This is hardly an insignificant amount of taxpayer dollars.

Second, Mackenzie's research work also has been generously funded by the taxpayer.  In 2014, she received an Australian Research Council grant worth $434,692 to fund a project entitled Women in Combat:  A Comparative Analysis of Removing the Combat Exclusion.

Third, her article has been published by the ABC, which is, of course, another taxpayer-funded institution funded to the tune of more than $1bn a year.

While Mackenzie has completely bought into the notion that white men are the embodiment of evil, she needs to remember that a large number of Australian taxpayers who are funding her research are hardworking white men against whom she rallies.

It is wrong for researchers such as Mackenzie to continue to take benefit from the money of people who they consistently and openly deride in the public forum.

Last year, Sydney University hosted American professor, author and "renowned anti-racism educator" Robin DiAngelo on campus so she could harangue white people about how racist they were.  Taxpayer money is being used without the slightest hint of questioning, self-reflection or consideration for the taxpayers themselves.  If academics such as Mackenzie were to attempt to make a living from propounding identity politics, radical gender theory and eco-poetics, they would not survive in this world.  This is because there is no market among the general populace, who naturally have little desire to pay someone to insult them.  The harsh reality for those employed in the humanities is that without funding via other people's money, they would struggle to earn their keep.

What Sydney University academic Mackenzie has done is to connect two diametrically opposed topics that currently obsess the elite of this country:  gender and climate change.

This is something at which the university appears to excel.  Readers will now be familiar with its FutureFix program, in particular the Multi­species Justice project, which is described by the univer­sity as "a post human reconceptualisation of justice via a multi­species lens" and that looks at how "justice across the human and natural world (would) look like and entail".  Moreover, a lecturer also proposed that we need to consider seriously the "arguments for the formal inclusion of animal interests in democracies".

The university even has its own all-encompassing Environment Institute, which covers everything from the Great Barrier Reef to justice and culture.  In October, the institute hosted a two-day symposium titled Unsettling Ecological Poetics, during which various participants from universities around Australia gathered to read poems about climate change, sustainability, radical feminism, racism and LGBTQ+ issues.

The move to combine disciplines is part of a growing worldwide trend to create new and exciting interdisciplinary studies.  In a recent article for The Conversation, a couple of academics from the University of California stated the case for combining climate change science and the humanities with their article "Why science needs the humanities to solve climate change".

There is little doubt that Australian universities are in crisis.  This is because academics such as Mackenzie have completely rejected the cornerstones of Western civilisation and, in doing, so are cutting themselves and students off from truth, reason and knowledge.  The reason student numbers are falling in the ­humanities is because academics appear to be indulging in their own interests without consideration for anything else.

These cloistered academics are completely out of touch with mainstream Australians, but even in the face of resounding defeat they refuse to see it.  They belong to the elite who were voted out in May by mainstream Australians and rejected en masse by the British public last week.

Yet the government continues to fund agitators who are filled with the zeal of the righteous, and who not only believe their own propaganda but also insist everyone else must believe it, too.  By giving money to institutions such as the university, the ARC and the ABC, the Coalition is funding a progressive ideology that is contrary to tradition, contrary to what people believe and contrary to the truth.  The Coalition might keep winning elections, but as long as it keeps funding left-wing institutions that promulgate insidious identity politics it will continue to lose the battle of ideas.

Bureau ''Cooling The Past To Declare Record Heat''

In September 2017, the Bureau declared the hottest ever September on record for the state of Victoria based on temperature data from Mildura.

I've since shown that this was helped along by the Bureau replacing a mercury thermometer with an electronic probe that can record a good 0.4 degrees hotter for the same weather.

There is not only the issue of the Bureau not providing any information on how the electronic probe was calibrated, but as I've explained to the Chief Scientist, there is also the issue of averaging:

There is a lot of natural variability in air temperature (particularly on hot sunny days at inland locations), which was smoothed to some extent by the inertia of mercury thermometers.  In order to ensure some equivalence between measurements from mercury thermometers and electronic probes it is standard practice for the one-second readings from electronic probes to be averaged over a one-minute period, or in the case of the US National Weather Service the averaging of the one-second readings is over 5 minutes.

The Australian Bureau began the change-over to electronic probes as the primary instrument for the measurement of air temperatures in November 1996.  The original IT system for averaging the one-second readings from the electronic probes was put in place by Almos Pty Ltd, who had done similar work for the Indian, Kuwaiti, Swiss and other meteorological offices.  The software in the Almos setup (running on the computer within the on-site shelter) computed the one-minute average (together with other statistics).

This data was then sent to what was known as a MetConsole (the computer server software), which then displayed the data, and further processed the data into "Synop", "Metar", "Climat" formats.  This system was compliant with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards.  The maximum daily temperature for each location was recorded as the highest one-minute average for that day.  This was the situation until at least 2011.

I have this on good advice from a previous Bureau employee.

It is likely to have been the situation through until perhaps February 2013 when Sue Barrell from the Bureau wrote to a colleague of mine, Peter Cornish, explaining that the one-second readings from the automatic weather station at Sydney Botanical Gardens were numerically-averaged.  At some point over the last five years, however, this system has been disbanded.  All, or most, of the automatic weather stations now stream data from the electronic probes directly to the Bureau's own software.  This could be an acceptable situation, except that the Bureau no-longer averages the one-second readings over a one-minute period.

Indeed, it could be concluded that the current system is likely to generate new record hot days for the same weather, because of the increased sensitivity of the measuring equipment and the absence of any averaging/smoothing.  To be clear, the highest one-second spot reading is now recorded as the maximum temperature for that day at the 563 automatic weather stations across Australia that are measuring surface air temperatures.

Just yesterday, the Bureau fed that "hottest ever" meme with a claim that analysis of data from about 700 weather stations across the country showed Wednesday was the hottest day recorded in Australia, with the nationally averaged maximum daytime temperature reaching 41.9°C.

That was apparently a full degree higher than the previous record of 40.9°C set on Tuesday, which itself broke the mark of 40.3°C from January 2013.

But how exactly are the temperatures being measured, and which stations are being combined?

The Bureau has deleted the hottest day ever recorded with a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen, which was 51.6°C at Bourke in 1909.

Then there is the issue of the Bureau cooling the past.

For example, it is a full 1.4 degrees cooler in Darwin on 1st January 1910 in the official ACORN-SAT version 2, temperature data base, relative to the actual temperature recorded back then in a Stevenson Screen with a mercury thermometer.

I have also documented how the Bureau put a limit on how cold a temperature can be recorded.

Not to mention closing stations in high altitude regions that may record colder temperatures.  So the 700 weather stations used to calculate the hottest day on Wednesday may be skewered warmer since the closure of stations in the coldest places:

During June and July 2017, blizzard conditions were experienced across the Australian Alps, but we will never know how cold it actually got.  Because a MSI1 card reader prevented the equipment — able to record down to minus 60 — from recording below minus 10 at Thredbo and probably also at many other locations.

It is also impossible to know how cold this last winter was relative to 1994 because the weather station at Charlotte Pass was closed in March 2015 — it is no longer in operation.

I've written to the National Audit Office about only some of these issues and that was some years ago now.