The Bureau Blocked Me: Temperature Data (1864-2022)

In this presentation, I attempt to show you some historical temperature data from around Australia and how it’s been trending over time. But in the end, the Bureau of Meteorology blocked me! (I’ll tell you what happened later). Just as a note, I’m not here to make a political statement or anything like that. I’m just here to show you the data. You can judge for yourself.

All the data is sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s website, www.bom.gov.au. Although, it should be noted they longer wish to be called the BOM, but instead simply, “The Bureau”, which apparently they’ve spent more than $200,000 on.

Now my goal in this video was to take a few samples from around Australia, but unfortunately, I could only get the data from two locations until the Bureau intervened. I first wanted somewhere nearby in South East Queensland that wasn’t a big city. According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, cities are often 10-15 °C hotter than their rural surroundings due to things such as industrial areas, lack of vegetation, and dark-coloured building materials. So of course, if we’re looking at temperature trends over time, I think it would be wise to avoid these big cities as obviously, over time, new construction takes place, which could add to this so-called “heat island” effect.

Anyway, back on the Text Search screen, you need to click on the data drop-down menu and select Temperature. Then you need to click on the Monthly observations. You can use the Daily data if you want to, but I tried it myself and there’s so much data, it very quickly becomes unwieldy. But I’ve found their monthly data is perfectly fine. In the next text box, type in Brisbane and hit “Find”. Click on Brisbane and then scroll down a bit and you’ll see a list of Bureau stations. For example, if you click on Brisbane, you’ll see that there is a graph below titled “Data available for the selected station”. For this station, there’s only data from the 2000s onwards, which isn’t very useful to us, plus, it’s a big city. So basically, you just need to click through the other stations until you find one that has a lot of data. In this case, Amberley, a suburb of Ipswich, fits the bill, which has data starting from the early 1940s all the way up to the present day.

Okay, so here’s the Amberley data. Remembering these are the average maximum temperatures for each month. I’ll be using this column, which is the average maximum temperature for the year. Here’s a chart of that data showing the average maximums since the early 1940s. If we put a trend line in there, we can see that the average maximum temperatures are trending upwards, however, I thought, this doesn’t tell the full story. What about the average minimum temperatures? So back on the BOM website under Text Search, we can change the type of data from Mean Maximum Temperature to Mean Minimum Temperature. We’ll download that data as we did before, and then I’ll plot it on a graph. If we add a trend line, we can see that it is definitely tending downwards, perhaps by not as much, but it’s heading downwards on average. So if we put them on the same graph, we can see that since 1942 in Amberley, on average, the maximum temperatures are heading upwards, but the minimum temperatures are heading downwards. If we average the two, you can see a squiggly line that goes pretty much straight across the middle. I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just showing you the Bureau’s data. For completeness, I’ll add a trend line. You can see that perhaps there’s a slight rise, but it certainly isn’t dramatic. Make of it what you will.

As I said earlier, I was looking forward to analysing some more locations around Australia, however, when I went to do so, I got this error message: “Your access is blocked due to the detection of a potential automated access request. The Bureau of Meteorology website does not support web scraping: if you are trying to access Bureau data through automated means, you should stop.” I tried all those links, but I get the same error message. I’ve literally been blocked from the Bureau of Meteorology. So much for my taxes!

I’m not trying to suggest anything here. I’m not accusing anybody of nefarious deeds. I think I just downloaded too much data in a short space of time, and now I’m blocked. I know it’s easy enough to get around. They’re just blocking my IP address, so I could just go to the public library, or request an IP change from my provider, or even contact the Bureau and ask them to unblock me, but who knows how long that will take!

Anyway, that beings us to a definitive close. It was a bit of a failure, but at least we learnt how to access the climate data from the Bureau’s website, and I learnt that you can actually get blocked from accessing government data. Funny, huh?

MUSIC
Melancholia by Godmode