In yet another attempt to dispell the ‘rumours’ that global warming is a real thing that is really happening, Tony Abbott‘s main man and chief business advisor Maurice Newman has come out and basically said the Bureau of Meteorology is not to be trusted.
A noted skeptic who a few weeks ago told everyone to prepare for global cooling, Newman has now accused the Bureau of global warming bias and “homogenising” data to beef up the statistics in
favour of climate change.
In an opinion piece published by The Australian, Newman states, “as a member of the World Meteorological Organisation, the BoM is
inevitably caught up in global warming politics. After all it was the
WMO that part established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
and it remains an anthropogenic warming propagandist.”
Citing a series of articles by the paper’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, questioning the Bureau’s homogenising of data – that is, “the mixing, matching and deletion of temperature records that seemed to create its own discontinuities” – Newman has called for the BoM to be independently audited, by a government-funded body of course.
But here’s the thing. Newman is a business advisor. A former investment banker who once headed the ASX and the ABC. Nowhere in his resume do we see meteorologist, or scientist, or enthusiastic guy who has a rain gauge in his backyard and a thermometer on his verandah. He is a business advisor. If he were a science advisor or even Science Minister – which hey, look at that, Australia doesn’t have anymore – we’d be more inclined to listen to him.
But he’s not. The CSIRO has said that climate change is a thing, 196 other organisations have said that climate change is a thing, scientists and meteorologists the world over have said that climate change is bloody well a thing. So, why should we be questioning the data collectors when the ones we should be questioning are the ones that don’t believe the stone cold facts?
Just to recap on ol’ mate Abbott’s current stance on climate change: he repealed the Carbon Tax (making Australia the first country in the world to do so), he skipped out on the UN Summit on Climate Change (sending Julie Bishop in his place to kind of just gloss over the facts), and he thinks “the climate change argument is absolute crap” (circa 2009 but we assume his sentiments are still the same).
In a twist of irony, Newman even quotes Einstein in the piece with “whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”
Our thoughts exactly.
Photo: Rufus Cox via Getty Images.
