Jokers destroying dissent – even in the event you name it a debate – do you agree with that?
From Jennifer Marohasy’s blog
Jennifer Marohasy
In 2014, when Tony Abbott was Australia’s Prime Minister, and after a series of scathing articles in the Australian newspaper showing the extent to which the Bureau of Meteorology has reconfigured historical temperature series and exaggerated warming, there was an opportunity to look back.
There was a real opportunity for an overhaul of the way the office not only changes the recorded temperatures, but also forecasts the weather.
The plan went to Cabinet and was “discarded” by then Environment Secretary Greg Hunt. In the public files, he proudly declares that he “killed” the idea.
Greg Hunt wanted everyone to know that he stepped in and crushed the idea, and Tony Abbott has never been asked to explain how or why he allowed that to happen.
Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the articles that sparked calls for an FBI investigation was sent to South America on a work stint, and I lost my adjunct position at Central Queensland University. That was in 2015.
In the eight years since then, the FBI has continued to exaggerate historical warming trends while introducing a new series of resistivity probes in electronic weather stations that can record even warmer temperatures in the same weather.
It’s not like this went unnoticed. The FBI’s hype provided a justification for far-reaching economic interventions, leaving Australia without a functioning energy market. Instead, governments on both sides of the political spectrum have provided hundreds of billions more in taxpayer dollars, and at an accelerating rate, with all the laws and regulations needed to enforce the renewable energy transition and the closure of coal plants.
In the meantime, the bureau is working on ever-faster resistivity probes that get thinner and thinner, making them even more responsive to fluctuations in air temperature — and to political imperatives for increasingly hotter days. Without the inertia of market forces or a mercury thermometer that takes a minute or two to adjust to a change in air temperature, depending on wind speed, the probes can measure higher daytime temperatures over the same weather.
This allows the FBI to keep declaring new record hot days and claiming they are a result of man-made global warming. For example, the FBI claimed that on September 22, 2017, Mildura set a new record for the hottest September ever, and then extended this to the entire state of Victoria. Due to carbon emissions, it claimed the hottest September was record-breaking since 1889, without explaining that the same effect can be achieved from more sensitive equipment. In 1889, temperatures were measured with mercury thermometers, not resistance probes.
It was the call for this new record for Mildura that prompted me to complain to John Abbot, a scientist and lawyer, about the need for the parallel data. These are temperature readings taken by mercury thermometers at the same time and place as readings from resistivity probes, potentially providing a check on the Bureau’s exceedances.
It took more than three years and one Administrative Appeals Tribunal appearance before John Abbot, under Freedom of Information legislation, was able to extract even a small portion of the parallel data for the one Brisbane Airport location from the bureau.
After analyzing the data provided over three years in the form of over 1,000 scanned reports, I showed that measurements from the probe and the mercury at Brisbane Airport are different, with the probe sometimes being up to 0.7°C warmer than the mercury and that this difference is statistically significant and after Graham Lloyd wrote the story which was published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday 15 April I was invited to be on Chris Kenny’s show on Sky TV.
It wasn’t the main story on Monday April 17th.
Chris Kenny introduced the topic of catastrophic man-made global warming as a “debate.” He then introduced me as a biologist in a “fight” with the Bureau of Meteorology over measurements of new instruments that overstate current temperatures. Aside from not arguing with me, the FBI ignores me – as much as possible, at least publicly.
Chris Kenny nonetheless introduced the issue in this way, and only after a lengthy segment in which he complained that the Princess of Wales Catherine was reportedly denied access to the Queen’s bed before her death for fear that this would offend the Duchess of Sussex Meghan.
I thought that was old news. And certainly not without economic consequences – while our entire economy is being restructured at great expense to stop global warming because measurements show that it is getting hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, the two royal commentators he had before me discussing Meghan were allowed to go on and on and were allowed to engage in a “debate,” specifically about politics within families and how Meghan is evolving has a disruptive effect.
Of course, if Chris Kenny had two conservative commentators for the segment before I discuss Meghan, he could have, at least in theory, found a conservative commentator to debate with me on the topic of the Resistance investigations and the FBI warming hype. Not to mention that this gives rise to more government funding for the cartels that make so much money from renewable energy at taxpayer expense.
Except that Chris Kenny didn’t, and he doesn’t let anyone debate me or the subject. Not the details of how temperatures are measured or the history of Conservatives starting with Margaret Thatcher making a mess of it. The conservative media always portrays this problem as someone else’s fault and elevates the same others to positions of honor whenever they switch sides, be it Patrick Moore or Michael Shellenberger.
As Tucker Carson has explained, ever since he was removed as Fox News’ Favorite Host for going into detail on an unpopular topic – he has even shared footage of the QAnon Shaman peacefully being carried away by Capitol Police on January 6th was escorted
– If you want a job in the mainstream media, you have to censor yourself.
And if you want a job in politics and you can’t censor yourself, have someone like Greg Hunt do it for your entire team, for the entire Cabinet – for you and Scotty and also Peter Dutton.
I have observed that over the past decade the Conservatives have shown more groupthink than the Greens and Labor combined on this and most other issues, despite claiming they welcome debate. If only the Australian Broadcasting Corporation would let it. Don’t forget that for most of the last decade they have been the government.
As Timothy Crouse wrote in his famous analysis of mainstream mass journalism:
“In the world of straight-forward, objective journalism, the more freedom you give the reporter, the more censored they become. The freedom scared one reporter to death because it wasn’t real freedom at all.
Freedom simply meant that no one had clearly marked all pitfalls and booby traps, and so the reporter became wary, like a blind man on a battlefield. [ends]
And so Chris Kenny demeaned my segment, which may have provided just the ammunition Conservatives need to argue against Net Zero, by placing it at the very end of the evening and after amusing rumors about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
I was reading the memoirs of former Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Spare, in which towards the end he bemoans the royal family’s relationship with the British media. He details how both Charles and the late Queen had/had PR teams in constant negotiation with the media. He explains that what is being reported has less to do with the news and more to do with what both sides find convenient and acceptable within their own bizarre rules of this game at any given moment. No wonder there has never been a proper ‘debate’ about man-made global warming in Britain, as the former Prince, now King Charles III, is known to have this subject as his pet project, which the media respect by code of conduct become .
I would be grateful to Chris Kenny for including me on his program for the last time on Monday 17th April after Graham Lloyd’s front page article in The Weekend Australia except that there was no debate and there is no debate . This is the most destructive and worst of all lies.
Furthermore, most conservatives keep repeating the FBI’s claims that disaster is imminent. There is Tim Wilson, former member of Goldstein and former IPA staffer and a great advocate of the official line on all these matters. Then there’s former Deputy Prime Minister Josh Frydenberg. He is fully open to the Bureau’s manipulation of historical records and, as a former Environment Secretary, could at least have tried to do something about it. Why doesn’t Chris Kenny or one of the other Sky News commentators start a debate by including one of these proponents of catastrophic warming, and thus presumably the FBI’s false historical temperature reconstructions, in his debate program?
Then of course there is Greg Hunt. In 2014, he appeared to have “failed Tony Abbott’s attempt” to force an investigation into the industrial reshaping of Australia’s temperature history through the process of homogenization that underlies the narrative that gives us increasingly expensive but less and less reliable electricity.
Most Conservative politicians in Australia already know that there are major problems with the FBI’s characterization of our temperature history, and perhaps even that the new record hot days the FBI is constantly announcing are a result of specially designed resistivity probes and not global warming. But they pretend they have something else and look away.
No one really wants to have this debate – either side of Australian politics.
SHEFFIELD, UK – AUGUST 12, 2017. A cosplayer dressed as the Joker from the movie ‘Batman The Dark Night’ at a Comic-Con event in Sheffield, UK.
I will continue this story as part of a series I call “Jokers, Off-Topic Reviews, and Drinking by the Alcohol Thermometer.”
You can read my previous comment here: https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/05/jokers-and-temperature-as-radio-chatter
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