Quite by accident I took a wrong turn this AM while searching for a Starbucks, and ended up in front of an interesting bookshop in the old Scots Church building in Sydney. I went in and one of the first books I saw, prominently displayed, was this book written by BoM:
It was pricey, large and heavy. Coffee table book. $65AU. So I went back to my hotel to see if I could order on Amazon. No such luck. In fact I couldn’t find it to order anywhere. So I bought it given the opportunity. Now I just need to lug it back.
The rear cover is interesting.
It contains a CD ROM of data, tables, illustrations and graphs. This will of course make blogging easy for future topics.
To fit it into my carry on, I had to leave a couple of other things. In a future post, I’ll discuss what else I left behind.
I’m offline for a couple of days as of now. but I do have a couple of posts scheduled to run while I’m in the air. Thanks to the kind people of Australia for their support and hospitality. Yanks, I’ll see ya soon.
UPDATE: Writing from the airport net kiosk, I’ve tried to post a pix of a hilarious book juxtaposition I saw. It will have to wait until I return since the SD card reader doesn’t work. Also, I should point out that I’ll also be reading Dr. Bob Carter’s book, The Climate Counter Consensus on the way home. – A
I hope you didn’t have to leave your souvenir didgeridoo behind. 😉
Oh Noes! Think of the trees!
Bet it has some beautiful photos to look at anyway.
o/t Anyone up for this in Edinburgh a week on Wednesday?
http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/events/index.htm#July
Well my first thought was that it was published by the Australian Government Bureau of Meterology so it’s all on the up and up eh what?
I’m sure that the Australian government is as honest and aboveboard as our American government so it must be 100% accurate yes?
Second thought… 65 dollars for a book? darn… that’s almost up there with University level text books. I wish I could borrow it from Anthony when he gets back, I could learn a lot of things about Australian climate at least from it.
You know Anthony, I’m surprised airport security is letting you take it on a plane,
The bloody thing looks so big and heavy I’m surprised they aren’t considering it a deadly weapon and confiscating the beast.
🙂
Not exactly “light” reading, or something most people would be willing to lug halfway around the world. But it will be interesting to see which dataset is on the CD.
I hope you didn’t have to leave a razor behind!
“To fit it into my carry on, I had to leave a couple of other things.”
That’s what snailmail is for.
tan me hide on the shed fred….
sorry for being off topic.
Congrats on your world tour, and all that.
As a skeptic, no roo’s in any pictures makes me wonder ?
Welcome back, we need you.
Yeah – why didn’t you just snailmail it home? How much more could it cost?
We will welcome our brave leader back to climate change:
The observatory posted this picture of the snow on its website.
By Jeff Fish, Globe Correspondent
Ignoring the calendar, which showed the beginning of the month of July, a dusting of snow fell Thursday on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, startling tourists and forcing the closure of the road to the top.
“It’s not extraordinary, but it’s definitely interesting,” said Stacey Kawecki, a meteorologist for the Mount Washington Observatory.
Thats sounds like a book I might like to own assuming the content resembles the preface. They didn’t mention “climate change” or “global warming” once! Look forward to your review of it. I am wishing I bought something to read on the way home from down under……that flight was brutal! 13 hours from brisbane to LAX. Bunch of drunk women behind me made it impossible to sleep, but I digress.
A quick search on the ISBN yielded at least a couple of online book stores that post to the US with this title in stock…
Thanks for visiting Australia. You have further inspired many of us with your research and informative presentation. We now have a little more ammunition for the debate which seems to be stirring up again in anticipation of an Australian Federal election.
Speaking of long flights, I was around an ex-Quantas DC-7C Propliner, it was converted
to an Airtanker, 3000 US Gallons. What was amazing it had a fuel capacity that gave it
a 10,000 mile range max. However it also had some 75 gallons of oil -60 wt- behind each
engine. Yet it would run out of Oil before it ran out of gas. Usually they stopped in Tahiti
to re-oil. Still, at 300kts to was more like 30 hours than 13 hours..
Have a safe trip, Anthony…
Sounds like a heavy book and a large carbon footprint by carrying it on a plane all the way from the land of Oz. You will have to plant a couple of trees as penance when you land back home, Anthony.
Shoulda shipped it Fedex. Woulda beat you home by 12 hours.
I also appreciate your visit to Australia, though it would appear that nothing seems to get through to the (so-called) scientific establishment, starting with the CSIRO – S used to stand for Scientific – someone will have a better suggestion now.
However it seems that you were so busy on your trip that you did not notice the relative importance (or lack) of Starbucks in Oz. In the area of the city in which you wandered, during the working day, there must be hundreds of barista manned (personned) espresso coffee machines in establishments ranging from barrows to restaurants – a favourite is a cafe in what used to be the large, previously empty, monumental entrances to modern bank buildings – now shared with the waft of superb coffee, panini, biscotti and French or Italian or… style cakes.
Only those who are “culturally deprived” – meaning US visitors, new non-European residents or those who have just progressed from Nescafe, get their fix from a Starbucks!
We, (exhuding hubris), true Australian city occupiers and workers, “wouldn’t be seen dead in” Starbucks – not that there’s anything wrong with them, of course.
Seriously, the only rise in sea (well fluid) levels in Australia, is from the “flood” of superb coffee – in a country where all my parents would ever drink was tea (and beer of course).
Richard Henry Lee says:July 2, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Sounds like a heavy book and a large carbon footprint by carrying it on a plane all the way from the land of Oz. You will have to plant a couple of trees as penance when you land back home, Anthony.
Au contraire, that book has probably sequestered enough carbon to offset the the entire flight home.
It’s sunny and warm here on the Gold Coast, I’m just saying.
I scored one today too. I ordered “Heat transfer by infrared radiation in the atmosphere”Author/Creator: Elsasser, Walter M., 1904-
Contributor: Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory (Harvard University)
Subjects: Heat — Radiation and absorption
Publisher: Milton, Mass., Harvard university, Blue Hill meteorological observatory
Date: 1942
Language: English
Format: 107 p. incl. tables, diagrs. 26 cm.
A little less pricey, to get it through inter-library loan. I hope to be able to extract DIRECTLY from it the part about the CO2 “upflux” contribution in the Troposphere being EQUAL to the CO2 “downflux” contribution based on “first principles” of grey gas radiation heat transfer.
Maybe we can then start a “thread” on trying to find out what happened between 1942 and now that “changed the fundemental physics” and made CO2 a predominate “downflux” agent. (Stratosphere, because of the “shape factor/view angle subtended to space, CO2 is a net UPFLUX agent.)
I’m sure Anthony may find many sets of data in the $65 Aussie book, that may make claims about “massive change” moot points. It will be a wonderful thing to look forwards to!
Michael Lewis says:
July 2, 2010 at 8:35 pm
“[…]
We, (exhuding hubris), true Australian city occupiers and workers, “wouldn’t be seen dead in” Starbucks – not that there’s anything wrong with them, of course.[…]”
For the U.S., Starbucks must have been a step forward. But i would be careful in importing European influences; for instance, be picky when importing politics. There’s a lot to chose from; not all of them are fresh.
Anthony,
There is a book on the history of the Oz BoM. I haven’t read it but I’ve seen a review. In the beginning there was a staff of one and he was supposed to cover all of Oz. So he did all he could – he just made it up.
Hi Anthony
Hope that book is more even handed than recent BOM/CSIRO pamphlets that are sadly biased to warming.
I reckon I’ll wait till that book comes up (inevitably) in the Dirt Cheap Books range of remainders. The book I offered you in Melbourne, “The Weather Watchers” (100 years of the Bureau of Meterology) official history is similarly heavy, but remaindered at AUS $19.99!! (Authored by David Day and produced by Melbourne University Publishing
ISBN 9780522852752
ISBN 0 522 85275 0)
Of course, printed in China by the Australian Book Connection! on behalf of the BOM and the Australian Government!) Sad that!!
As I have said previously the written history explains a lot about the politics of Weather in Australia, the early struggles to source equipment and then set up and maintain due to lack of support unless successive governments were prodded by crisis, and media pressure. The inevitable internal bickering, personalities, and even more revealing the resistance to early modeling and uncertainties and the competition with Australian Scientific organisations like the CSIRO and the “new guns on the block”, computer scientists, flexing their newfound political authority. Also details the very dedicated service by many meteorologists to the dream of providing the best weather(an unbiased) service to the Australian community, while operating under quite adverse conditions.
Our continental variety of climate with its extremes, makes it easy for the warmist’s agenda to misrepresent and exploit historically repeating weather cycles, as scary anthropogenic C02 induced climate change!!
My offer to mail a copy still stands!!
Thanks for undertaking such an arduous tour for all our sakes, and hopefully in less strenuous times you might get back for a well deserved holiday!!
We greatly appreciate your visit to our sunburnt country, seeing you rubbing shoulders with Archy and the others has given us a boost in confidence.
The election is coming up and we don’t want a delusional PM at the helm, so its imperative Carter has a chat with government and opposition over the winter break.
Books are always expensive here in Australia. There is a protection system that is supposed to support Australian authors, but mostly just rips the rest of us off.
When I was an undergrad in the late 1960s, it took about six-months to get overpriced textbooks from the U.K. and the U.S. Why, I sometimes wondered, didn’t they make copies of the plates, fly them over, and print the books here?
Nowadays, they could sent the whole book as a CD or an e-mail attachment and print them here.
Guess how long it takes for my students to get their overpriced textbooks from the U.K. and the U.S.?
Anthony,
Just in case you have time for a little hiking in the Land of Oz… Drop Bears are reputed to be the most dangerous animals in Australia. Here’s what every prospective bushwalker should know.
Read more here. http://tinyurl.com/ygwgq9z
And don’t forget the screwdriver!
I would like to also extend my thanks to Antony for his trip to Australia.
I dragged Mrs Ripper & one of the young Rippers along to the Perth talk and despite her for ever telling me “Don’t show me another graph!” all the time She really enjoyed it and it indeed opened Young Ripper’s eyes (He is at UNI doing engineering).
Well worth the 1600km round trip although the road never seems to get any shorter.
Half a world away, the extreme intensity of Cyclone Tracy is permanently fixed in my memory. When I woke up as little tyke in the Northern Hemisphere USA winter opening my Christmas presents that morning in 1974, my transistor radio broadcast the news that “Cyclone Tracy flattens Darwin”.
An austral version of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane that devastated the Florida Keys, Tracy was spinning the “wrong” direction (lol)…nonetheless, the damage she inflicted was extraordinary.
Truly an amazing feat of nature….and tragic for the human suffering and loss of life in this event.
Australia is definitely a place of extremes….always has been.
And this has nothing to do whatsoever with “CAGW”.
It has everything to do with their location, location, LOCATION…smack between the HOT (humid and arid) Indo-Pacific region and the open, cold, roaring Southern Ocean.
With those diametric opposites, there’s always gonna be a brawl.
And my experience is…those friends from Down Under….are always prepared for a brawl. Its in their blood.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
bruce says:
July 2, 2010 at 6:18 pm
tan me hide on the shed fred….
Bruce if you going to quote Rolf Harris from “tie me kangaroo down”, you might as well get it right.
Tan me hide when I’ve died Clyde… and that’s it hanging on the shed.
bruce says:
July 2, 2010 at 6:18 pm
tan me hide on the shed fred….
Bruce if you going to quote Rolf Harris from “tie me kangaroo down”, you might as well get it right.
Tan me hide when I’ve died Clyde… and that’s it hanging on the shed.
I apologize I also got it totally wrong. correct lyric is.
Tan me hide when I’m dead, Fred
Tan me hide when I’m dead
So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde
And that’s it hangin’ on the shed!!
Altogether now!
woodentop: It looks like you’ve got a series of propaganda talks up there in Edinburgh (Stern and Krebs to follow). It would seem that there is not much in the way of proper science though at the RSE. You’d better get the opposition organised (the good Bishop?)
Anhony… I may have missed it in some older posts, but, did you ever get your luggage back? Or was the story of some environmental-tourists finding your luggage at the North Pole true?
The front and back cover photographs of Climate of Australia remind me that Australia’s BoM publishes a calendar each year with wonderful photographs, cloud, sky, lightning… all could be contest winners. I believe it circulates free to all their volunteers, partly by way of saying “Thank You”, and some extra copies are sold. They make wonderful Christmas presents. The catch is that you have to order in advance to reserve a copy, and the entire run is sold out by October or November.
Sorry Anthony, those fat fingers! I swear I spend more time correcting than typing!
savethesharks says re Cyclone Tracy
My company had about 80 employees and family in Darwin when Tracy blew in Christmas 1974. Luckily, only a few minor injuries, but most lost all possessions. At Sydney Head Office I had the job of manning the phone far into the night for some days after as people from many countries phoned into to inquire of the fate of friends and relatives. It reinforced my feelings about how nature has a strength that is beyond the comprehension of most people.
Driving South-East from Darwin, there were steel electicity poles by the roadside to the old My Bundey iron mine. (Termites east wooden poles and produce methane – we knew that in the 70s). With each kilometer further s-e, the steel poles were gradually bent less from the vertical, but still bent 100 km inland where the poles stopped.
I guess there is resilience to natural events in Australia, but as insiders we do not notice it because we grow up with it and it’s part of the normal scene. Maybe that’s one reason why so many from Oz write on blogs like this. Even if climate changes, there is stuff-all that people can do about it.
Let it be remembered that Anthony’s visit coincided with one of the coldest spells in Eastern Australia for a long long time. Last Wednesday was the coldest day in Sydney for 60 years. The irony is fitting.
Cheers
Larry Fields,
I enjoyed your link to the deadly Drop Bears of Australia. I’ve canceled my Oz holiday & will travel to Canada instead. Hosers only have to worry about bedroom bears, which are much more cuddly.
bruce says:
July 2, 2010 at 6:18 pm
tan me hide on the shed fred….
Fred tanned his hide when he was dead. Clyde hung it on the shed.
“Tan me hide when I’m dead, Fred. Tan me hide when I’m dead. So they tanned his hide when he died Clyde and that’s it hangin’ on the shed”.
“Second thought… 65 dollars for a book? darn… that’s almost up there with University level text books…..”
Wait till you start buying meteorology books…. >:(
Long flights … I remember quite a long time ago Quantas did some test flights from London to Sidney, non stop (747/400 with extended range tanks).
After a couple of such flights they dropped the idea.
Apparently, most passengers didn’t appreciate 25 hours sitting in a plane.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/ has a lot to say about BoM and their approach to rainfall forecasting, but is also generally interesting. Apologies if this is a grandmother meet egg situation…
Michael Lewis says:
July 2, 2010 at 8:35 pm
“I also appreciate your visit to Australia, though it would appear that nothing seems to get through to the (so-called) scientific establishment, starting with the CSIRO – S used to stand for Scientific – someone will have a better suggestion now.”
You sink low Michael. The CSIRO is a highly respected research organisation that has produced outstanding results, most not even remotely related to climate change. You are insulting hundreds of honest hard working people with this generalised swipe. Anthony Watts should remove this paragraph from your posting. I will never attack and or insult a research organisation; they may do thing wrong but mostlt aim to do things right and always deserve the benefit of the doubt. Shame on you.
Curious yellow, the evidence lately about the “adjustment ” to suit the AGW agenda being pushed by our non loved PM and the greens has shown that the CSIRO is NOT above bowing to an agenda, and has Justifiably raised doubt on all thats gone before, as possibly also not so On the square.
The recent appointment of a man with NO science background what so ever, is going to lower their cred even more and with good reason.
its about as bright as using a railway engineer with NO cred to head the IPCC.
The treatment of a man who had the guts to dissent was disgusting and a fine glaring example of “this IS the agenda” and no one will digress from it.
their research on adding kangaroo gut bacteria to cattle, is a money wasting Farce, and theres other ideas as stupid too I bet.
since they turned to a for profit org, they turned away from honesty it appears to many of us.
sad for the honest chaps.
maybe they should leave?
amicus curiae says:
July 4, 2010 at 7:31 am
Isn’t that in the nature of CEO’s in the free market where everything must be a business against all good sense? If a research organisation owned by the government is turned in to a business by the government, is that a fault of the people and scientists working there? Research is not a farce, it can be wrong yes, but that’s what research is, thinking outside the box. Can you think outside the box? Well, don’t try, someone may call it a farce, which would be emberrassing, would’t it?
The only thing not justifiable is your broad sweep, tainting all and sundry. A bad surgeon does not make a bad hospital. It’s CEO does not need to be a surgeon.