The $96 million Bureau of Meteorology website is a bigger fail than you think, and none of it is accidental.

The scandal that’s hit the media is the cost blowout of the website itself, which is certainly a failure of governance, and I would argue it’s just the Australian form of corruption. But it’s what’s been happening at the BOM quietly for the last 15 or so years that is the real scandal. And it’s costing us far more than just a cool $100 million. We’ll get to that scandal before the end of this video, but let’s start with what’s been in the news.

Taxpayers spent $96 million on what was supposed to be an already absurdly expensive $4 million website remodel.

And let’s be clear, $4 million for a website is already eye wateringly expensive. But let’s just let that one slide, shall we? I mean, Australia is a big place. This website has to handle a lot of data and a lot of users. So, fine, $4 million. Let’s just pretend that that’s a fair price. Even with that concession, there is no website on earth, no matter how big, that costs $96 million to make. You cannot spend $96 million on just a website. It isn’t possible. You could maybe spend it on a server farm, sure, but not just the website. Australian taxpayers were slugged 14, excuse me, 24 times the budgeted amount for this website. And the BOM would have actually got away with this except that they used that money making their website worse and not better. That’s the only reason we ever even heard about this. And for once, people are actually angry. But again, if the website had actually been good and user-friendly and made sense, then this would be just another in a long list of taxpayer-funded rots for the consultant class to profit from at our expense.

Do I need to mention some of the other examples of similar cost blowouts and I would argue rotting? How about a bit of Snowy 2.0? The back of the envelope estimate was $2 billion. Now, we’re up over $10 billion for the actual pumped hydro part of it and something like 20 billion, yes, that’s with a B, once you include the transmission lines. So depending on how you account for it, it’s something like 10 to 20 times over its budget. It’s also years overdue. And I can only imagine what it’s going to cost once the lawsuits start over the alleged millions of Aboriginal artifacts, which have supposedly been lost forever because of the Snowy 2.0 no project. What about the NBN? Double the original budget for a substandard result. I would mention the NDIS, but I can already hear the sound of my wallet crying. These are just the federal boondoggles. And once you get into state level boondoggles, it just gets silly. Nearly every project is billions of dollars over budget, and no one seems to care. The government and the bureaucrats and the consultants seem to just keep getting away with it and getting paid.

Thing is though, we actually use the BOM website which means that suddenly we saw it and lots of people were angry and rightly so. The fact that we’re not angry enough about lots of other things doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be angry about this one. But let’s use this moment and the anger around the botched and in my opinion corrupt BOM website redevelopment to draw some other things to people’s attention. Because once you know what else the BOM have been doing with their website and the history of Australian temperatures, you’ll realize that screwing taxpayers out of an extra $92 million for a website is the least of our worries. Their manipulated data is being used to screw us out of trillions. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. We’ll get to all of that in a moment.

But first, my name is Topher Field. This is the Topher project, and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around us. I am 100% viewer supported and I talk about topics which often get my videos demonetized on YouTube. Topics like the BOM manipulating the temperature records to cool the past and create a warming trend in the data. So, I can’t rely on YouTube to keep me going financially. So please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos then you will love my books, my DVDs, and my merch which is all available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And there’s just days left before five of my original Topher merch designs go out of print forever. I’m launching a new website and no, it didn’t cost $96 million, but it does have a new look, a new logo. We’re releasing new merch designs, the whole box and dice. And it’s all happening on the 1st of December. So, these five designs, they are never coming back. Get them before we shut down the existing merch lines on the 30th of November. And hey, if you are watching this after the 1st of December, then you can check out the new look and all the new merch. But if you haven’t missed that deadline, then jump in and get my original works before they’re gone forever from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And know that in the process, you are helping me to keep the Topher project going.

Okay, so the new BOM website was a PR disaster and lots of people hated it and it cost something like 24 times more than what it was supposed to.

Whoop-de-doo. Actually, it’s what the BOM have been doing with their website and specifically the historical temperature data that is the real crime and is costing us far more. But before I get to that, I want to touch on one more glaring issue that I’m not seeing enough people in the media asking about. Where did this extra $92 million come from? Someone at the BOM was still paying the invoices. Someone had access to a bank account with literally a hundred million in it and they kept paying the invoices as the project went over budget and then double the budget and then 10 times the budget and they still kept paying. And apparently everyone in the BOM knew about this. It was an open secret within the Bureau of Meteorology. Although in their defense they are very accustomed to getting their forecasts wrong. So I guess going over budget’s just normal.

There is at a minimum a failure of governance here, a failure of oversight that a project could get so far over budget and the relevant minister can still claim they didn’t know about it. If this was the private sector, there would be a forensic audit happening to determine whether the people involved were embezzling money, whether there was corruption or kickbacks. If the company was publicly listed, the corporate watchdog would be investigating their governance and whether the directors had violated their fiduciary duties by allowing spending to happen in such an uncontrolled way. If this was anything other than government, those people would be lying awake at night wondering if they were going to be on the receiving end of criminal charges. But it is government, so it’s normal. No, it’s not normal. It’s just that we’ve been so bullied, so battered, so demoralized that we’ve stopped fighting. We’ve stopped caring because we believe that they’ll get away with it. Well, we let them get away with it. Which is why in this case, we need to maintain the rage. Don’t just throw up your hands and say, “Oh, what can you do? She’ll be right. It’s the government. What do you expect?” I expect better, and so should you.

But in fairness, this is the lesser of the crimes being carried out by the BOM website right now. The greater and far more expensive crime in my opinion is their fiddling with the historical data to make the past look cooler so that the present appears warmer. Why is that such a big problem? And why is it costing us trillions of dollars literally? Well, because that altered data known as homogenized data is then used to justify the climate change scare campaign. Which isn’t costing us 92 million extra dollars. It’s costing us hundreds of billions in reckless spending and literally trillions in future wealth because of the harm that it is inflicting on our economy and on our future.

I’m going to give you just one example which I’m taking from the excellent work of Jennifer Marohasy as published by the IPA. I’ll put the links to this article in the description. Now, this was written back in 2020, but actually the altering of data by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had already been happening for a decade or so by then. I’m going to read the first few paragraphs to wet your appetite, but I highly recommend you use the link in the description to read the whole thing for yourself. But for perspective before we dive in, Marble Bar in West Australia measured over 160 consecutive days in excess of 100°F, which is 37.8°C. Now, that is a world record that has never been beaten, or at least it was a world record until the BOM quietly erased our record by cooling the past.

Jennifer Marohasy writes, “My friend Craig Kelly, the federal member for Hughes, as he was back then, attempted to raise the issue of the world’s longest heatwave record in the Australian Parliament last Wednesday. He was shut down by Tony Burke, the manager of opposition business. Specifically, Mr. Kelly was attempting to draw attention to how the historical observations have been changed and how the values as originally recorded at Marble Bar between 31st of October 1923 and 7th of April 1924 have been adjusted down. This was first brought to our attention by Chris Gillum and reposted by Joanne Nova. When the Australian Bureau of Meteorology calls the past, as it does with most of the 112 temperature series used to construct the official statistics, current temperatures appear hotter. The remodeling of Marble Bar has, to quote Mr. Kelly, also robbed Australia of the world’s longest heatwave record. This now goes to Death Valley in California.”

The bureau has made many more changes to the Marble Bar record than just dropping down the temperature back in 1923 and 24.

With the first iteration of Acorn Sat back in 2011, maximum temperatures as recorded at Marble Bar from 1967 back to 1910 were cooled on average by minus.41°C and from 1944 back to 1910 by an additional.52°C. There’s the upshot. Look at that. A clear cooling trend at the Marble Bar as measured in the raw temperature data from 1910 to about 2000 was turned into a warming trend of.7°C per century just by the bureaucrats at the BOM homogenizing the data.

And here’s the kicker. Up until May 2013, this world record heatwave at Marble Bar was celebrated on the BOM’s own website. Now these days you have to use the Way back Machine to find it, but this is the screenshot from the BOM website pre-May 2013 celebrating that world record heatwave at Marble Bar and then they started fiddling with the data. And Jennifer Marohasy goes on to talk about the BOM’s justification for these data changes, literally reversing a cooling trend, turning it into a warming trend, and then she absolutely explodes their lies showing that they were using data from stations that are up to 700 km away from Marble Bar as their justification for rewriting history.

Now, for perspective, that’s like using the weather in Sydney as a reference point to make adjustments to your measured temperatures in Melbourne. It’s visible. It’s beneath contempt. If you even tried to use temperatures in, let’s say, Geelong to alter the measurements in Melbourne, you’d be mocked for it, and rightly so. They’re not the same place. This is just taking the piss and it’s just one example of many. You can follow the work of Jennifer Marohasy, Joanne Nova, Craig Kelly, and others who are all hot on the heels of this issue. They all know it in far more detail than what I do. But this, in my opinion, is the real scandal at the BOM.

Now, I’m grateful that they screwed up their new website and have upset so many people. And yeah, we’re right to be mad about $96 million wasted without proper oversight for a website that wasn’t even any better than the old one. But if that’s all we’re mad about, then we’re missing the point. Because the BOM website isn’t the real issue here. It’s the BOM itself. It’s the fact that as an organization they are using taxpayers’ money to lie to taxpayers, erasing record heatwaves, cooling the past, and manipulating the data to create a warming trend that was not there in the raw data with the aim, in my personal opinion, of supporting their belief that man’s CO2 emissions are warming the world to hell.

How can they claim that year after year it’s the hottest ever if we are nowhere near the heatwaves of the past 100 years?

How? Well, they can’t. So, they erase the heatwaves of the past 100 years in true 1984 style, creating an ever-changing present in which the party is always right. So, if you want to be mad about the BOM website, go right ahead, be mad about it. You should be. But don’t stop there. We don’t just need to know how the BOM got this website so badly wrong. We need to know how the BOM itself went so badly wrong. And we need to stay mad until we get the answers.

I highly recommend you follow these people that I mentioned, Jennifer Marohasy, Joanne Nova, Craig Kelly, as well as Professor Peter Reid if you’re interested in the Great Barrier Reef specifically. And there’s so many more amazing people who are doing great work on this and related topics. It’s impossible for me to keep you up to date with all of it here on the Topher project, although I will certainly do my best. But if this is an issue that interests you, then I suggest you go straight to the source and follow them directly.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around us. To cut through the crap from the media and our politicians and to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And be sure to check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. Remembering that there’s only a few days left to grab my original designs before they’re gone forever. So, head over to goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com right now. Get them before the month of November ends. And of course, everything you buy will help me to keep the Topher project going.

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