The title of this article could have read “Don’t trust Bureau of Meteorology, says weather expert”. But, actually, it’s not a weather expert, it’s Tony Abbott’s top business advisor, Maurice Newman, who has called for an ‘independent’ review of the Bureau of Meteorology.

Newman, the former investment banker who once headed the ASX and the ABC, recently advised the world to prepare for global cooling, and now says he is unhappy with the process of what he calls “homogenising” climate records. In a new column for The Australian newspaper, he says the BoM has become caught up in global warming politics.

“As a member of the World Meteorological Organisation, the BoM is inevitably caught up in global warming politics,” Newman writes. “After all, it was the WMO that part established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it remains an anthropogenic warming propagandist.”

He went on to say:

“The stated reasons for homogenisation seem arbitrary. It should explain why homogenisation consistently turns cooling trends to warming and why pre-1910 records were dropped and, with them, the extreme heat-waves of the Federation drought.”

This latest question mark from the Abbott camp on a scientific organisation appears to be yet another whirl of the government’s unofficial spin machine, which they’ve already used successfully to paint climate science as superstition – not by government ministers of course (unless you include Barnaby Joyce) – but by their nearest and dearest “advisors”. None of Abbott’s key advisors accept the science of climate change.

None are quite as dogmatic as Newman however. “Nothing short of a thorough government-funded review and audit, conducted by independent professionals, will do” trumpeted Newman in his column for The Australian.

Another recent article in The Australian written by Newman warns not only of global warming being over-estimated by the 197 scientific organisations around the world who warn of the risks of climate change, but rather that global cooling is the most pressing matter and that the world is ill-perpared for ‘the iceman cometh’.

“Having put all our eggs in one basket and having made science a religion, it bravely persists with its global warming narrative, ignoring at its peril and ours, the clear warnings being given by Mother Nature.”

In his latest opinion piece, Newman pulls out an Einstein quote “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

Quite so.