We often hear that the science of climate change is settled—but a growing number of scientists are challenging that notion, reminding us that science, by its nature, is never truly settled. Frank Batini is one of them. A forester and environmental scientist, Batini holds qualifications from Oxford University, the University of Western Australia, and the Australian Forestry School. Over the course of his career, he has held several senior roles, including Adjunct Professor of Environmental Science at Murdoch University and Chair of the Board at the Centre of Excellence for Climate Change, Woodland and Forest Health. He also served as Manager of the Environmental Protection Branch within Western Australia’s Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM).
With his permission I have reprinted the following two articles they make for interesting reading, but before you delve into them let me explore the issue of truth in science.
There was a time when science meant the pursuit of truth through scepticism, falsifiability, and open debate. Today, especially in the climate change arena, that ethos is quietly being bulldozed by a new orthodoxy. A powerful cocktail of ideology, funding dependence, and institutional groupthink has corrupted the peer-review process and rendered many climate models little more than speculative fiction dressed in the white coat of authority.
Frank Batini’s exposé on the rainfall myths of south-western Australia is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a murky sea of data manipulation, pal review, and moral panic masquerading as environmental policy. Farmers across WA aren’t just sceptical of the climate movement—they’re increasingly suspicious of the scientific machinery driving it.
Let’s begin with the obvious question: if climate models are so accurate, why do they fail the simplest test of all—predicting the past? A model that can’t run in reverse to reproduce known temperature and rainfall patterns from 1900 to now isn’t a model—it’s a guess. Yet, we base multi-billion-dollar decarbonisation policies, electricity market overhauls, and rural land use reforms on these outputs. This is not science; it’s climate Kremlinology.
The dirty little secret of climate science is that many of the most alarming predictions stem from a small subset of models that assume worst-case emissions scenarios (RCP8.5, for instance), now widely considered implausible even by mainstream researchers. But these doomsday models persist—because fear sells, both in politics and academia.
It’s not just theory. We now have well-documented examples of scientific misconduct and bias:
- The “Hockey Stick” Debacle: Michael Mann’s famous temperature graph, which erased the Medieval Warm Period, became a poster child for climate alarmism. Its statistical methods were later torn apart by statisticians like McIntyre and McKitrick, who found that the algorithm would produce a hockey stick shape from random noise.
- The Climategate Emails (2009): Thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed leading climate scientists discussing how to “hide the decline” in temperature records and avoid sharing data with sceptics. Phil Jones, a key figure, admitted he had trouble “keeping track of which data was adjusted and why.”
- Recent Peer-Review Scandals: In 2023, the prestigious journal Nature had to retract a paper after revelations that the authors cherry-picked data to exaggerate the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Reviewers missed the flaw—or ignored it.
And yet, sceptical voices, no matter how credentialed, are blacklisted. Consider Dr Judith Curry, former chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, who resigned citing the “cancer that pervades academia—the cancellation of dissenting opinions, the silencing of inconvenient data.” Or Dr Roger Pielke Jr., who faced career sabotage for pointing out that natural disaster costs were increasing due to development, not climate change.
The comparison to Soviet-style central planning is no longer rhetorical. We have embarked on a grand climate experiment with eerie parallels to Marxist utopianism—where the forces of individualism and market rationality are suppressed in favour of top-down control “for the greater good.” The farmer who questions whether rainfall decline is natural is treated as a heretic. The rural landholder who resists tree planting mandates or forced carbon offsets is labelled a climate denier.
The irony is rich: the very class of people who understand climate variability best—farmers, who live and die by seasonal shifts—are treated as ignorant by urban bureaucrats and ivory tower academics whose exposure to weather is filtered through spreadsheets and policy briefs.
It’s no surprise, then, that confidence in institutional science is eroding. A 2023 Australian National University poll found that only 45% of regional Australians believed climate science was “mostly unbiased.” Among broadacre farmers, the figure was closer to 30%. Anecdotally, more and more producers are noting that models have consistently over-predicted temperature rises and rainfall declines.
Just ask a wheatbelt farmer how many times they’ve heard, “This will be the new normal,” only to get walloped by a record downpour or bumper year. As Batini pointed out, when the models are wrong, it’s never the model’s fault—it’s the data, or the sunspots, or “natural variability.” Anything but admitting the possibility that the science is not settled.
We are told that dissent endangers the planet. But real danger comes from the suppression of scrutiny and the blind trust in models that don’t match observation. It is time for a renaissance in scientific integrity—one that welcomes opposing views, rewards real-world accuracy, and separates climatology from ideology.
Farmers don’t need models that are used by politicians to insist they change how they farm. What they need is science that respects history, embraces uncertainty, and acknowledges that the climate has always changed—and always will, the question is just how much is in their control.
Until then, we remain unwilling participants in a climate experiment whose high priests refuse to share their formula, but demand our faith.
Bad Models and Worse Science Frank Batini – Published in Quadrant 27 November 2024
Within government, academia and the media in Western Australia it is now virtually an undeniable “truth” that rainfall in the southwest of the state is in permanent decline, and that this is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The premise is that only Net Zero by 2050 will correct the situation.
However, this is a deception, based on flawed models and failure to consider long-term rainfall records. Rainfall data collected over a period of 160 years support an alternative hypothesis: rainfall patterns follow multi-decadal cycles, and there have been many periods in our history when the climate has been wetter or dryer than average.
As I will outline below, my attempts to discuss this alternative scenario with model-makers and government have been fruitless. Simply put, ‘climate modellers’ and proponents of “climate change” are in the ascendancy, and they choose to ignore the empirical data because their models cannot explain it.
In this discussion, I start with four things about which the model-makers and I agree. I do not dispute that carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the greenhouse gases, although by far not the most dominant. I agree that rainfall has been below long-term averages over recent decades. I also agree that without greenhouse gases our Earth would be inhospitably cold, and humans would not have evolved. Finally, that CO2 is not a dangerous pollutant, it is a key ingredient in the process of photosynthesis, without which all humans would die.
Where the model-makers and I disagree, however, is with the assertion that our below-average rainfall (which they call “a drying trend”) since 1970 is a result of rising levels of CO2 and increased temperature. The WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) clearly believe this; indeed, they go even further. Their climate model-makers project a trend line of further decreases in rainfall, by up to 15 per cent by 2030, and a further 25 to 45 per cent by 2090, depending on whether intermediate- or high-emission scenarios for carbon dioxide are used in their model.
The post-1970 decline in rainfall in the south-west of WA is said to be the most extreme in Australia and likened by DWER to the “canary in the coal-mine”. It is receiving special attention and attracting funds. The WA Government has recently funded a $3 million Climate Change Initiative study, the aim being to further refine climate models. This initiative can be traced back directly to DWER’s dramatically pessimistic projections of future rainfall.
There is an intriguing flaw in all this. The climate modellers have overlooked one of the most basic principles in the science of trend analysis and projection. This is the choice of baseline, the start-point from which a trend is analysed. Selection of baseline is critical, since an inappropriate selection will lead to incorrect conclusions and to flawed projections. The baseline year that WA climate model-makers have chosen is 1950.
There are problems with choosing 1950 as the baseline, and I believe they invalidate any projections made from a trend starting at that point. 1950 was a tipping point. It came at the end of several decades of above-average rainfall in south-western WA and led into decades of below-average rainfall. 1950-onwards is also a time when (selected) temperatures and carbon dioxide levels rose substantially. Thus, post-1950, we have simultaneous rising CO2 and declining rainfall. Ignoring the principle that correlation is not proof of causation, the reduction in rainfall is then attributed to human-induced climate change.
Climate-trend baselines between 1950 and 1970 have also been accepted without question in several research papers and reports published by academics and the CSIRO. These data are then used to project future environmental and agricultural scenarios — those projections always being pessimistic.
You would think that when studying climate change and rainfall trends, the longest records available should be used. You would be wrong. This approach has been rejected by DWER’s climate model-makers and various academic climate scientists.
I obtained rainfall records for 1880 for Perth, Jarrahdale (a small town located in the Darling range, some 50 km southeast of Perth), Albany, (400 kms south-east) and Busselton (250 kms south-west of Perth). These data came from published Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) records. I found that actual rainfall data do not support the conclusion that rainfall decline and carbon dioxide are linked
What the actual rainfall data from 1880 for all four sites show is that the rainfall in the latter years of the 19th century is comparable to that of the present. All sites experienced substantial above-average rainfall between 1910 and 1970. During this period, CO2 levels rose by about 30 percent.
In summary, between 1910 and 1965, as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were rising , rainfall in each of Busselton, Albany, Jarrahdale and Perth increased, not decreased.
The cyclic nature of rainfall in the south-west is also supported by dendrochronology (tree ring analysis) studies by the University of WA (UWA) at Lake Deborah near Southern Cross. Their analysis looked back to the mid-14th century and showed many cyclical patterns of wetter and drier periods. These frequently lasted for several decades. Clearly the pre-20th century rainfall cycles were independent of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide.
The obvious conclusion from these data is that the recent below-average rainfall in south-western WA is not unusual in terms of either magnitude or duration. In fact, the UWA scientists concluded that the twentieth century was the wettest of the last 700 years. This occurred despite major increases in the levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases since 1900.
I raised all these points recently at a seminar on Climate Modelling held at Murdoch University. The response was unconvincing. I was told: (a) that 1950 was selected to comply with an International Convention on climate modelling — hardly a scientific reason for choosing a baseline; and, anyway, (b) pre-1950 BOM data had not been “peer reviewed” and may be inaccurate. To assert that only peer-review guarantees the accuracy of data is absurd!
What the climate model-makers seem to be saying is that, if the real-world data don’t fit the model results, it’s the data, not the model that is to blame. In my view, any climate model that cannot explain the past can have no credibility when used to predict the future.
The rainfall data I have shown are publicly available and are easily understood. In contrast, the inputs and assumptions used in climate models are complex, require thousands of calculations and are analysed by “black-box computing” where the model-maker has total control over all inputs, and also designs the algorithms. They then ask the community to accept the model outputs at face-value, knowing that there is no possibility of any in-depth scrutiny. The community is also asked to ignore real-world rainfall data because it has not been “peer-reviewed”.
Although they will not admit it, WA’s climate model-makers have a big problem. Tree ring analysis and long-term rainfall data from four widely-spaced stations simply do not support the hypothesis that human-induced increases in carbon dioxide levels have led to unprecedented reductions in rainfall. On the contrary the data support an alternative hypothesis: that the region has long experienced multi-decadal cycles that may be wetter or dryer than average and are independent of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The Western Australian government is pushing to achieve Net Zero by 2050 in a futile attempt to influence climate cycles, and this is impacting on many aspects of policy, including energy, agriculture, forestry and transport. This strategy is based on the concept of “a drying south-west” caused solely by human CO2 emissions. Government policy should be based on real data and not on opaque computer models. Instead, the government should recognise that long, dry periods are quite normal and promote appropriate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
IS IT CLIMATE CHANGE OR JUST A NATURAL ECOLOGICAL CYCLE?
FRANK BATINI
In summer 2011, following a very dry winter there was limited but noticeable tree crown scorch and some deaths of jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) on sites with shallow soil. This event was repeated in summer 2024. On both of these occasions the forest growing on deeper soils was healthy.
Academic and media comment immediately linked these deaths to human induced climate change. Their proposed solution was to achieve “Net Zero” as soon as possible.
Based on contributions of Working Group II (Australasia), the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, in their 6th assessment report dated 2022, listed the northern jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) forest at a “key risk of transition or collapse from drought (high level of confidence)”.This prognosis was accepted in the development of the Western Australian Government’s Forest Management Plan (2024 to 2033) covering forests in the south-west. The FMP now identifies that “climate change will be a persistent, escalating stressor on all ecosystems in the planning area”.
I have spent the past 60 years observing and researching the health of eucalypt trees in the northern jarrah forest, particularly in the Wungong catchment, about 50 kilometres south-east of Perth. A recent 50-kilometre roadside survey conducted in January 2025 confirms that this forest remains healthy. My conclusions—drawn from decades of field observation, long-term rainfall records dating back to 1882, more than 50 years of vegetation monitoring, and tree-ring data extending to 1350 CE—stand in stark contrast to the claims made by climate alarmists.
The sites on shallow soil where some tree deaths were seen have always been unsuitable for tree growth. Seedlings may invade during periods of higher rainfall and develop into saplings, but these will suffer when a drought occurs. These cycles of invasion decline, recovery and decline have occurred for hundreds of years.
The jarrah forest is resilient and the tree deaths we have observed in recent years are simply natural ecological changes as the result of multi-decadal cycles that are wetter or drier than average.
Why has our society developed this obsession to attribute all natural events to “Climate Change”? Why not accept them for what they are?
