From the University of Melbourne, where being angry about “weather is not climate” isn’t just a science, it’s a way of life:
Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found.
The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record hot summers such as the summer of 2013, by more than five times.
Lead author, Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science said the study showed it was possible to say with more than 90 per cent confidence, that human influences on the atmosphere dramatically increased the likelihood of the extreme summer of 2013.
“Our research has shown that due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in the future,” she said.
The study Anthropogenic contributions to Australia’s record summer temperatures of 2013 has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The study used climate observations and more than 90 climate model simulations of summer temperatures in Australia over the past 100 years.
Professor David Karoly, a co-author on the paper said the observations, coupled with a suite of climate model runs comparing human and natural influences in parallel experiments, indicated we have experienced a very unusual summer at a time when it was not expected.
“This extreme summer is not only remarkable for its record-breaking nature but also because it occurred at a time of weak La Niña to neutral conditions, which generally produce cooler summers,” he said.
“Importantly, our research shows the natural variability of El Niño Southern Oscillation is unlikely to explain the recent record temperatures.”
This analysis of the causes of the record 2013 Australian summer is one of the fastest ever performed worldwide for a significant climate event.
This fast-response analysis was made possible because data from many existing climate models and observations were made available through Centre of Excellence collaborations with CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the National Computational Infrastructure in Australia.
“The new data resource means scientists are able to work on understanding and addressing the problems of extreme climate events sooner,” Professor Karoly said.
The researchers are now turning their attention to other recent extreme climate events.
[UPDATE]: I’m sure Anthony won’t mind if I offer a bit of perspective on the thoroughness of the Australian researchers. This is what the RSS and the MSU satellite records for the lower troposphere have to say about Australia:
Figure U1. Austral summer temperatures. Note that the 2012 summer in the Southern Hemisphere runs from December 2012 to February 2013.
The data is from that marvelous resource, KNMI. Go there, and under “Select a field”, click on “Monthly Observations”. Scroll down to “Lower Troposphere”, and click on either the RSS dataset or the MSU dataset.
When the page comes up, specify the bounding box around Australia (-38 to -11° latitude, 113 to 153° longitude. Click the land only check box, and tell it to generate the data series.
In this case, both satellite datasets agree that there was nothing at all unusual about the 2012 summer. The researchers should at least have noted that fact … assuming that they noticed that fact.
w.
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Didn’t the satelites show that the Australian summer in 2012 was 14th of the last 34 years? If I’m correct, no other organization records it as the hottest summer. Yet, they still make the claim?
Oh, it was based on models. Got it.
Somewhere hot, Comrade Lysenko is smiling.
You’ve made the Weather Gods angry, peasants! Only increased taxes and massive research grants can appease them! Pay now or you are doomed!
The terminology is laughable, straight from the manual of the rapid climate response team. Angry Gaia to replace Angry Birds.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/book_this/
Mother Earth is angry. She is going to punish all humanoids if not by cold, by heat. If not by water, by lava, and if she doesn’t do the job correctly: Obama will starve us.
Dying Polar Bears, angry heat and storms, “Please, don’t punish us any more Gaia”.
Melbourne uni remains with a significant investment in the perpetuation of this scare. They will be relieved that it is now being invigorated by the President but also (it seems) by the new prime minister…now there’s hoping!
Just more future embarrassment for them. The more desperate they become the more their claims stretch (to put it as politely as possible) the truth the more material for ridicule when even the low information crowd knows the whole scare has been an exercise in exaggeration taken to unprecedented lows.
More dribble. But they get paid for it!!! I would have liked them to walk the summer I lived in about 40 years ago in the same land. It was 40 plus for ten days in a row!
-Here is the thing—-There is no proof that mankind can increase atmospheric CO2, even if we tried.
Then, there is no proof that increasing CO2 could warm the planet.
Oh, well, must forget the science to move to the perfect society…..
Anthony we could do with some heat right now , it has been very cold here in southern Aust.
If only the weather would take anger management classes. I wonder if a bad temperament is responsible for global warming rather than the reverse?
“Our research has shown that due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in the future,”
Assumption.
“Importantly, our research shows the natural variability of El Niño Southern Oscillation is unlikely to explain the recent record temperatures.”
That’s because climate models can’t simulate ENSO. Is this some type of misdirection?
Looks like we need the Angry Carbon paper http://shpud.com/weather/main.php?g2_itemId=179
The whole angry summer argument rested upon counting number of stations generating record temperatures, plus a few other record breaking metrics around flood gauges etc.
If you bother to apply this technique across multiple years or check for counter records then the scary disappears. For example from Oz data if you count the number of record breaking low max temperature records, then 2004 count comes pretty close to count for 2012 high max temperature records. Making 2004 the not-so-angry summer, I guess.
My point is that you cannot perform a constructive analysis to increase our understanding of what trends have been occurring, if any, in Oz summers by counting records alone. So why do this in the first place and push it so hard if for no other reason than for the purpose of manipulating your intended audience by engendering fear and concern.
That’s what they said about Australian droughts a few years back before the Biblical floods. Just before they were forced to mothball the desal plants as the dams were full to overflowing.
Ha, ha, haaaa. Bollocks to that.
When you start recording temperatures in the middle of the Simpson Desert and adding those to the figures you will get the Warming you desire.
When a City like Sydney has a 2 day heatwave that shaves half a degree off some record from the 1930s you will get the Warming you desire.
Let’s disregard the facts that the population of Sydney has 4.6 million today but 1.3 million back then and that today there are many hundreds of thousands (if not millions of AC) units pumping waste heat into the atmosphere whereas in the 1930s there were very few.
In Australia the Political tide has already turned against Warmism with the recent crucifixion of Prime Minister Julia Gillard for introducing a Carbon Tax, but Warmism itself is deeply embedded in the middle class psyche. The Scientists know that this is their last gasp so they are squealing
louder than usual right now, fortunately their noise is being drowned out by more and more mainstream media reports like one from several days ago…”Sydney endures coldest 4 days for 31 years”.
News flash: “Our research” now eclipses “statistics” as the worst liar.
And did humans play a role in the same summer over Australia when it was “angry” COLD?
Feb 2013:
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html
“This fast-response analysis was made possible because ”
we needed it for our important climate event. So it was important to rig the model in just the right way; we didn’t have time to run it 30 times as usual until the right looking time series comes out by accident. /sarc
Time for Karoly to ‘fess up about the ultimate fate of the “warmest in 1000 yrs paper”, still in the process of re-submission according to his uni’s website, and that of the hyper-alarmist ABC Science Show “The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.” It’s taking a long time Karoly, perhaps it will be 1100 yrs before the paper resurfaces.
Well, it is very hot in the UK this summer (2013) as well. Today was a very hot day – nearly 16 deg. C in some places – so it is obvious that the warming they are observing in OZ is global. When they had their record hot summer, the UK had a “record” cold winter.
So I wonder what is “Global” about that.
I am willing to bet a penny – or even a pound – that they had lots of sunshine filled days during their summer down under in 2013.
I wonder how CO2 manages to keep the clouds away.
Why is it that only the recent summer was ‘angry’ when the NINO3.4 SST record shows other la Nina conditions over the past 15-20 years.
And, since when are model runs ‘experiments’ where the results can be called a new data resource?