Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It wasn't that long ago I woke up on a Friday morning after a late night of estimates, only to have my wife text me to say that there would be some heavy weather coming into Brisbane because overnight there had been about four inches of rain. This shocked me. It shocked me because I'd checked the forecast the day before, and the Bureau of Meteorology hadn't forecast any rain. It's just another example of the many failed forecasts that the bureau has made throughout this summer. Originally, it forecast that it would be dry, and it has been an extremely wet summer in Queensland, unfortunately to the detriment of many Queenslanders who've been caught on the hop by a bureau that is no longer focused on doing its job properly and forecasting weather. That is because for far too long they have been spending way too much money on the climate division and not on the weather division.

This is nothing new. I have here a 2011 independent peer reviewed report. Let me tell you what it says. It says:

The WMO—

that is, the World Meteorological Organization's—

Guide states that an acceptable range of error for thermometers (including those used for measuring maximum and minimum temperatures) is ±0.2 °C. However, throughout the last 100 years, Bureau of Meteorology guidance has allowed for a tolerance of ±0.5 °C … This is the primary reason the Panel did not rate the observing practices amongst international best practices.

I'll pick another couple of mistakes here, just bear with me:

Before public release of the ACORN-SAT data-set the Bureau should determine and document the reasons why the new data-set shows a lower average temperature in the period prior to 1940 than is shown by data … by previous international analyses of Australian temperature …

This is more proof of homogenisation, of the bureau fudging records rather than doing their job.