Fake weather

It never rains .....

Whilst recently scrawly through postings on a quaint, proto-social media Australian archivist listserv (an electronic mailing list whose origins go back to the 1990s), the writer came across a posting by that equally quaint gentleman archivist Michael Piggott regarding early Australian weather records and their apparent misuse abuse to appease a contemporary scientific and political agenda. Accusations came thick fast from journalist Graham Journalist and researcher Tom Berger within a local weekend right-wing newspaper The Australian that the climate change agenda was at play in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) staff's "homogenising" past records and "inserting errors" or "misplacing data sets" in order to push forward the earth warming claims by pro-Climate Change scientists. Would the reputation of the BOM be sullied in this way? Could the numerous accusations of tampering and dealing fraudulently with historical records be true? As journalist Graham Lloyd noted in his headlining article to the weekend edition:

Among the many treasures held by the National Archives of Australia in Sydney are some of the nation’s oldest and most precious records of temperatures and weather. They include the original books from Sydney Observatory in 1867 … But the minimum temperatures recorded in the Sydney Observatory books for August 1867 are not the same as [the] Bureau of Meteorology’s official digital raw data for the same period. … The facts matter and they are written in black and white in well preserved logbooks … (Lloyd 2026)

Defend the archives! Do not corrupt the archival record! are shouts which regularly go up amongst the small community of diligent professional archivists who have served the people of Australia for near on a century. Further inflaming the issue was the Editorial, which stated in part,and in reference to a recent audit of the aforesaid historical weather records:

The audit discovery builds on long-held suspicion about what is going on. A lot of the concern has centred on the BOM’s practice of homogenisation, in which records are adjusted to give a better picture of climate trends. Successive revisions of this data have increased the warming trend. But homogenisation of temperature records is accepted as good practice by the global scientific community. … [The Bureau of Meteorology] rejects allegations of fraudulent or deliberate manipulation. But findings of obvious data corruption raise serious questions that must be addressed.

It would appear from the reports by Berger and Lloyd that there has been at some point or points in time large scale manipulation of weather data with the aim to deceive, or to merely fill in holes. Of course if this is the case - and the evidence is there to prove it is - then this represent nothing less than corruption of the highest order in regard to the use of such data and adherence to the strict rules of the scientific method. The Bureau of Meteorology would need to start from scratch, digitise the known historical records, and create a new database which is "clean" and can be made use of in the future.

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References

Berger, Tom, Dodgy data deluges on way, storms expected, The Australian, 17-18 October 2026, page 7.

Lloyd, Graham, Fake Weather: Bureau’s Bogus Climate Records. BOM alert: widespread dodgy data deluges, storms expected, The Australian, 17-18 October 2026, page 1.

-----, Facts Matter: these raw numbers are not fit for purpose, ibid., page 7.

Piggott, Michael, The National Archives - Weather Records and Palace Letters, archives-and-records-australia@googlegroups.com, 18 October 2026.

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Last updated: 19 October 2026

Michael Organ, Australia