Thanks to Graham Lloyd, (Letters to the Editor, Weekend Australian 14 Jan), many more people will now be aware of the biases embedded in our climate reporting agencies like BOM and the CSIRO. It is without doubt that they would rather report on ‘extremes’ of weather without much reference to historical records that show such extremes are within the bounds of natural variation.
The bar was set very low when Michael Mann introduced the world to his ‘hockey stick’ in 2007, showing unprecedented warming from 1920, only for it to be exposed as a figment of creative use of statistics, and cherry picking of tree rings in a single tree. When one sees data away from urban development, such as Hachojojima Island just south of Tokyo, there has been little or no change in daily mean maximum temperature since measurements began in 1907, a period of over 100 years.
G M Derrick
QLD