ElasticTruth

Possible Is Not Probable: Media Watch and the Palmerville Flatline

On 23 October, Media Watch contacted me. They said they were investigating claims from my BoM audit report. 

They also told me that “all climate scientists” disagreed with me. 

That is a big claim. But they did not tell me they who they were, whether they had read my report or only the media, whether they had examined the data, or whether they had done any calculation at all. 

Instead, I was told that a 17-day temperature flatline at Palmerville, to 1°C precision, “was possible”.

Possible? 

Yes. A stuck thermometer is possible. A copied database block is possible. Missing data infill is possible. 

But that is not the question. 

The question is: is it plausible as real weather, or is it a data integrity failure?

At Palmerville, from 21 April to 7 May 2004, the maximum temperature was listed as 31.0°C every day for 17 consecutive days. That is not a minor oddity. That is a flatline.

Media Watch and the Bureau want to hide behind the word "possible". But in statistics, "possible" is a remarkably low bar. It is possible to flip a coin and get heads twenty times in a row. It doesn't mean it happens, and it certainly doesn't mean it's a valid explanation for a pattern in an official dataset.

Let’s look at the actual mathematics of this "possibility".

My new investigation partner Patrick Lloyd found that during the degraded 2002–2004 period, when Palmerville was only being read to whole degrees, the day-to-day repeat rate was artificially high (30–50%). Even assuming that elevated repeat rate, the probability of 16 repeats in a row is about 1 in 10 million.

I recalculated under normal conditions, using the station's actual historical variance and autocorrelation the probability drops to roughly 1 in 90 million. 

It is not just unlikely. It is a statistical impossibility.  Under normal conditions, the Palmerville flatline is effectively not a natural weather event.

Media Watch never told me who this anonymous scientist was. They didn't tell me if he had read the report, examined the data, or done a single calculation before dismissing it. 

But here is the ultimate irony.

You do not need to be a climate scientist to count duplicate months. 

You do not need a PhD to find 17 identical temperatures in a row. 

You do not need a climate model to ask why a database contains copied blocks. 

You just need arithmetic, an audit trail, and a willingness to ask the obvious question.

Media Watch offered the word "possible". The data offers the math.

Possible is not probable.  

Probable is not proven.  

And a flatline is not a measurement merely because it appears in a government database.