Bishop takes us for mugs and insults China

Yesterday, Julie Bishop said this in a statement:

The Chair of the Climate Change Authority, Mr Bernie Fraser, released a statement on 14 August noting that China’s emissions would increase by 72 to 96 per cent above 2005 levels by 2030.

The Australian Government disputes these figures.

China’s 2030 target will allow emissions to increase by around 150 per cent from 2005 levels when calculated on China’s national currency.

In saying that, she obviously thinks Australians are idiots, the press will report anything without examining it and the Chinese are a shifty lot who are intent on fiddling the books.

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ACORN-SAT is AOK

Last Friday the global climate conspiracy erected another plank dressing up the façade that is record of warming record in Australia. At an extra-ordinary nerdfest held the Victorian State Library, the cruel manipulations of temperature records by the Bureau of Meteorology were described. ACORN-SAT, I mean, really! Lies dressed up as statistics were outlined to an audience who hung on every word. The conspirators have done such a good job that the Australian record so closely resembles the tricked up records from Hadley-CRU, the Goddard Centre for Space Studies and NASA, that they all have to be made up. There’s no way that independent analyses of measurements of something we can’t see – air – can be so accurate.

Well, that’s the objections of the denialati out of the way.

The BoM did release The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) data on Friday and it looks excellent. Today I’m downloading some of the data for a project I’m involved in, so it’s good to have. The data were also used in the recent State of the Climate 2012 released by the Bureau and CSIRO.

Part of the impetus to get this done was a barely coherent set of assertions on how Australia’s climate records were being massaged by the Bureau. These assertions were formally submitted (pdf) as a request to audit climate records to the Attorney-General in February 2010. Co-signees were Senator Cory Bernardi, Joanne Nova (an alias), Andrew Barnham, Anthony Cox, James Doogue, Chris Gillham, Ken Stewart and Dr David Stockwell. They also alleged that BoM and CSIRO advice on climate change was misleading. This follows up similar fishing expeditions in New Zealand and the US yielding similar results. Not only were the records validated, quality control methods and subsequent adjustments improved those data giving us even more confidence that the record of warming they contain is unimpeachable.

Improved methods, external international review and a more comprehensive coverage have led to the Bureau to claim they have the some of the best quality records of temperature of any country. I think they’re right.