Tony Abbott's top business adviser says the Bureau of Meteorology is caught up in global warming politics and nothing short of an independent review will dispel suspicions of bias.
Maurice Newman, who chairs the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, is highly critical of the BoM's process of homogenising climate records.
Mr Newman questioned the way the bureau adjusts historical data, which he equates to manipulation of Australia's temperature records.
"The stated reasons for homogenisation seem arbitrary," he wrote in The Australian on Wednesday.
"It should explain why homogenisation consistently turns cooling trends to warming and why pre-1910 records were dropped and, with them, the extreme heatwaves of the Federation drought."
As a member of World Meteorological Organisation - which helped found the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the BoM was "inevitably caught up in global warming politics".
Employing more than 1700 people and costing taxpayers $300 million a year to run, the bureau must "dispel suspicions of a warming bias", Mr Newman says.
"Trust in our national climate records is critical.
"Nothing short of a thorough government-funded review and audit, conducted by independent professionals, will do."
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