Bureau of Meteorology attacks pushed by 'fever swamp' of climate denial | Graham Readfearn

For Rob Vertessy, the attacks on his government agency became tedious and time-consuming and no less irritating because they were coming from a motivated group of “amateurs”.

Vertessy spent a decade at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. He retired in April 2016 after five years as the agency’s director.

Over that time, Vertessy’s agency was under consistent attack from climate science denialists who would claim, often through the news and opinion pages of the Australian, that the weather bureau was deliberately manipulating its climate records to make recent warming seem worse than it really was.

“From my perspective, people like this, running interference on the national weather agency, are unproductive and it’s actually dangerous,” Vertessy told me. “Every minute a BoM executive spends on this nonsense is a minute lost to managing risk and protecting the community. It is a real problem.”

Now, the agency is under another wave of attack through the pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadsheet, which is publishing claims made by Jennifer Marohasy, of the “free market” conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs.

Earlier this week, the former Abbott government adviser and climate science denier Maurice Newman accused the bureau of “fabricating temperature records” that represented a “smoking gun that threatens the integrity of global temperature records”.

As rhetorical overreach goes, Newman has form. “The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,” Newman has written.

The current non-story centres on two of the bureau’s 695 automatic weather stations (AWS). As temperatures reached -10.4C in Thredbo and Goulburn in July, a hardware card in the AWS stopped working. This event, detected by the bureau, kick-started several internal quality control processes.

The bureau found four other hardware cards in areas where things can get chilly and replaced them. The cards should not have been used, as they could become faulty at low temperatures.

That’s essentially it. But the Australian and the IPA and the network of climate science denial blogs have once again screamed scandal.

In an interview with shock jock Alan Jones, who thinks climate science is “witchcraft”, Marohasy claimed the bureau had “reached a new low”. Jones called for people to be sacked.

A report was also commissioned by the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, with three external independent reviewers joining bureau staff.

Was this really a scandal? A smoking gun? No.

The review found the incident, if we can even grant it that status, had “no direct or indirect” impact on the bureau’s long-term climate dataset (known as ACORN-SAT). The bureau’s procedures worked and its data quality control processes were “of a high standard”, the review found.

“The Australian people have been well served by the bureau and can continue to rely on the excellent services it provides,” Frydenberg said.

Much of the current noise is like deja vu for Vertessy, who is now a part-time professor at the University of Melbourne’s school of engineering.

“I was exposed to a lot of it and it took up a lot of my time that’s for sure,” he says. “I feel for my successor and the team at the bureau having to constantly devote energy to this. It’s really quite debilitating.

“Time and time again there has been one independent review by experts after another, all telling the same story. The simple, unimpeachable facts are that the BoM is doing an exemplary job at managing the nation’s climate data and multiple independent reviews have confirmed that and we are recognised by our World Meteorological Organisation peers as being amongst the best in the world; that keeps being restated and restated.

“I think the Australian play on very dangerous ground here,” he says, adding that some editors at the newspaper were guilty of “perpetuating nonsense”.

“For a newspaper that has a strapline that reads ‘for the informed Australian’ they really should refocus on talking to people that know something about the topic, instead of perpetuating this bizarre myth that the BoM are fraudsters [or] conspirators.”

Vertessy says staff inside the bureau are well aware of the concerted attempts to attack their work.

“They understand that there is an organised climate denial network and that it has a fever swamp that communicates amongst itself and occasionally tries to enter the national debate through the agency of leading newspapers and the like,” he says.

“That’s very well understood, because it is very well documented. It remains hurtful and creates anxiety among the technical specialists involved in this but those people do the right thing and buckle down. They are a great bunch of people.”

In 2009, the bureau’s then most senior climatologist, Dr Michael Coughlan, told me that the agency had stopped responding to claims being pushed in the Australian newspaper.

“The Australian clearly has an editorial policy,” he said. “No matter how many times the scientific community refutes these arguments, they persist in putting them out – to the point where we believe there’s little to be gained in the use of our time in responding.’’

So how should the agency respond when it comes under attack?

Vertessy says: “It has perplexed us all over the years about the extent to which we should or shouldn’t engage in the so-called ‘ping pong’ of this stuff. I think Mike’s commentary remains largely intact.

“We see limited gains in arguing with a newspaper that has got a rusted on view about these matters and is not open to reasoned debate.”

He says that, instead, the bureau’s staff put their energies into “continual improvement” of their methods.

Vertessy says that, while he considers the current wave of attacks “a tremendous waste” of the government’s time, he has sympathy for ministers.

“When something makes front-page news in a national newspaper, it requires a political response and I think over the years the government has done a pretty good job in sticking with the bureau and independent experts in examining these matters rationally and reporting on them and communicate them transparently to the public.”

He says that, during his own tenure, the government has consistently supported the bureau because it trusts its experts.

“I’m not saying they would not be concerned about the claims that are made but, at the end of the day, they have a reasonable level of trust and certainly supported me through my time and I never felt under siege by the government. But I felt under siege by the Australian and the IPA.”

He says the constant attacks have also changed the way the bureau interacts with the media on climate change.

“The BoM provides amazing access for the media to its people but, on climate change, we have had to implement stricter protocols about who is authorised to talk and how. I implemented a lot of that stuff, quite frankly, because the minute you are entering the polity of the country in the debate, as are senior bureaucrats, you have to treat it carefully and look at it as a risk and manage it accordingly.

“If someone says the wrong thing then it’s likely to be amplified one hundred times fold into something that looks like a scandal, when it is anything but.”

So when a shock jock or a thinktank employee claims the bureau is trying to cook the books, how should the public react?

What needs to be front of mind, Vertessy says, is that there is “virtually complete consensus on the extent to which the planet has warmed and why, since the beginning of the industrial revolution”.

“The facts are just unequivocal because they have been replicated so many times, by so many teams, using multiple independent methods.”

He says if the bureau “was really making a hash of managing its climate data” then it would be documented in scientific “journals and at symposia” but “that’s clearly not happening”.

He says it “beggars belief” that these commentators “actually profess to know better”.

“They simply don’t,” he says. “Think about the big picture and don’t get lost in the smokescreen that’s created by people who are trying to undermine the science.

“The data absolutely confirms that we have already seen consequences from climate change, certainly in the way the climate system is behaving. There’s just zero doubt about it any more.

“Looking into the future is of course more fraught, but that strongly suggests that we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”

He says while making predictions of the future clearly comes with uncertainties, the planet is on “a very dangerous trajectory”.

“We know plenty enough to say that unless there is corrective action in the amount of emissions – very significant corrective action I might add – then we will enter increasingly dangerous times that will be very costly throughout the world to life, food security, water security and to the economic damage wrought by severe like we have seen in the United States in the last few days.

“So I have to admit that I am something of a climate pessimist because I worry about the trajectory that we are on.

“But, as the costs of climate change accumulate in the years ahead, I can see that leaders of this climate change denial movement will really be seen as culpable.”