Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. Here’s the general area where they live:
Figure 1. Lake Eyre region in South Australia. Yellow line show the area from 25°-30°S, 135°-140°E
A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks:
The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come.
“Temperatures could increase up to four degrees Celsius in Arabunna country in the next century, threatening the survival of many plants and animals,” says the author of the report, Dr John Tibby from the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Geography, Environment and Population. SOURCE: PhysOrg
Yes, temperatures “could” increase … and I could win the lottery, but I’m not quitting my day job just yet. Meanwhile, back in the real world, what’s been happening in the Lake Eyre region in the last thirty years? Figure 2 shows the satellite-derived temperature trends for the lower troposphere in the area around Lake Eyre, from both the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Services (RSS).
Figure 2. Satellite temperatures for the lower troposphere in the Lake Eyre Region of Southern Australia. Photo shows the approach to Lake Eyre. Temperatures are the average of the region outlined in yellow in Figure 1. All data from KNMI
So … here’s the deal. We have no evidence that the temperatures are rising in the Lake Eyre region. There has been little change in the area temperatures since the satellite records began. Despite that, University of Adelaide professors are selling their fantasies of a terrifying future to the Arabunna, the aboriginal people who live in the area.
Meanwhile, the temperatures in the region are currently lower than they have been in the entire satellite record …
The professors seem to find nothing wrong with scaring the aboriginal people who have lived there for generations. And where do their projections of a 5°C temperature rise originate? Well, as usual, it’s models all the way down, and even the modelers say that their models are useless at the regional level … but despite that, these professors from the University of East Wankerton or wherever it is are more than happy to use these useless models to terrify the local folks.
I find this kind of crying wolf reprehensible, particularly when it is aimed at indigenous people, but hey, that’s just me.
w.
From my experience of meeting Aborigines in Australia I think the alarmists have picked the wrong target audience to try and scare. Firstly, living in such harsh conditions makes you extremely aware of your natural surroundings and able to spot even the slightest change in conditions. Secondly, the Aborigines have a corporate knowledge in the form of an oral tradition that goes back a very long time. This will be a clash of cultures; one rooted in practical knowledge and the other in fantasy land.
I totally agree Willis – notoriety USED to be a bad thing, and scientists wanted to be “right”, not merely “not wrong”.
Newsflash! Just heard in central Pennsylvania in the intro for the 11PM local news:
New evidence of massive cover-up at Penn State University!
Oh, wait a minute, it’s about that Sandusky moron, not Mann.
Well, if you can pull up one bucketful of alarming faecies (pardon my Latin) out of a deep hole, it tends to indicate there’s still more down there.
“Also, do Dr john Tibby’s degrees in Geography and Environmental Science qualify him as a climate scientist …….
NO ! but writing this sort of trash does. !!
This is now the ONE DEFINING TRAIT of the “Climate Scientist”.
You can tell a climate scientist by the total lack of anything resembling reality in their work.
eg Hansen, Mann, Jones, Steffen, Flannery, now this Tibby guy.
There’s lots of them, all on the AGW teat, all producing garbage.
Greg House
It would be of interest to discuss alternatives to “global” temperatures somewhere. Any sceptic blog would do, but WUWT has too many posts to make discussion easy.
Restless 1 says:
June 29, 2012 at 10:42 am
Been saying for some time, that any policy originating from the left is designed to perpupetuate poverty. Lying is no issue to them.
If these policies hit the darkskinned harder, they consider that a bonus.
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I gather that a delegation of African farmers at a CFACT fringe event in Rio noted that for them “sustainable development” meant poverty and malnutrition.
So they agree with you. As do I
I’ve been up that way. Not quite as far as Lake Eyre. Nothing grows there bar a bit of scrub anyway. Except when it rains on and off.
markx says:
June 29, 2012 at 5:53 pm
King of Cool says: June 29, 2012 at 4:05 pm
And, just a very polite query …
What is it with people putting video musical clips in a climate blog comment section?
Now, I can understand quotes of lyrics…
markx – my friend, the very polite answer is not blowin in the wind it is “because you can” and I had an impulse to do it, but I promise I will be more disciplined in future and will stick to topics like Anthropogenic GW, Climate Sensitivity, Desertification, ENSO, Evapotranspiration, Hydrochlorofluorocarbons, Non-Methane Volatile Organic Compounds, Residence Time, Thermohaline Circulation and Tropospheric Ozone Precursors.
But one for the road – and I promise this will be my absolute finale:
“White man speak with forked tongue.”
Funny that they single out an area in Australia that has seemingly nothing except a few indigenous living on the land. A pointless scare story unless there is an ulterior motive, ie something in the ground so the first step is to remove the locals then you are free to exploit. Nothing is ever what it seems. There is always a real motive. Find who sponsored this study and you may well find the answer.
Office of Research Ethics, Compliance and Integrity
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/ethics/
It’s always bad. Where are the studies telling us that a certain community will find life to be better due to higher temperatures? I reckon the folks in Mongolia won’t mind higher temperatures.
Most of the South East Australia is sitting on a lump of iron, its magnetic field intensity has increased by nearly 10% in the last 400 years, due to the magnetic pole getting closer. In recent decades (since 1950s) local magnetic field has oscillated in synchronism with changing polarity of solar cycles.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AL-MF.htm
This was not the case in the pre 1950 period, but then data accuracy and resolution may not be as good as in the more recent decades. (NOAA gmf data resolution is too low to examine post 1995 record).
I have done virtually hundreds of automatic geomagnetic scans all around the globe and have not found similar rapid oscillations of the local Earth’s magnetic field intensity, nothing comparable to the South East Australia.
It is difficult to say if there may or may not be any direct climate relationshipbut case of nearby Echuca is interesting http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Echuca.htm .
King of Cool says: June 29, 2012 at 9:18 pm
(re musical video clips) “….. the very polite answer is not blowin in the wind it is “because you can” and I had an impulse to do it…”
Ha ha, fair enough … it’s only that when I’m wading through this stuff, I never stop when I see a video clip and think; “Hey, that’s a good idea, I’ll just stop this and listen to this old favorite for a while…”
Anyway, don’t think twice, its alright.
…the author of the report, Dr John Tibby from the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Geography, Environment and Population.
Well, the Arabunna (100 to 500 of them, anyway) live in Australia, so he got the “Geography” and “Population” part right. and like the song says, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
*refraining from posting U-Toob vid link in defference to markx’s sensibilities*
Max says: June 29, 2012 at 9:25 pm
“… Find who sponsored this study and you may well find the answer….”
Right on the money (so to speak) Max: (see earlier comments)
mfo says: June 29, 2012 at 2:30 pm
“BHP Bilton and others. BHP own the Olympic Dam which is a Uranium mine south of the area outlined on the map. …”
I sent the following letter to The Australian newpaper in response to its 27 June story on this. They didn’t print it:
The University of Adelaide warns that “based on the best possible science” residents in the South Australian outback should prepare for 4C temperature rises over the next century (“Heat danger looms for outback,” 28/6). This is the same science that told us temperatures would rise in line with CO2, and can not explain why there has been no rise for 15 years; the same science that admits that its models have high degrees of uncertainty and that they are not fine enough to make regional forecasts. Not to mention that those warned will have much more urgent issues to deal with than the climate in 2112, and will very sensibly ignore such warnings.
Don’t worry, Gillards’ carbon pollution price starts to be collecetd tomorrow (July 1st) @ur momisugly AU$23/tonne, so these people, their environment and the global climate will be saved. Interestingly enough, Snowy Hydro is in the list of Aussies top carbon polluters whereas Hydro Tasmania isn’t.
The thing is that climate change has been ongoing in this region for the last 40,000 years. There is a national park called “Lake Mungo” to the right of the bottom right hand “dot” on the map in the state of New South Wales. This lake was a thriving indigenous people’s community then, with fishing and gathering of mussels sustaining the community. If you go there now you find that the lake is quite dry – and it has been for thousands of years. It is actually a very nice place to visit, with strange landforms on the eastern edge of the dry “lake” where sediments have been blown to form a crescent-shaped low set of eroded hills that glow apricot in the afternoon sun. The point is that the drying occurred long before anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, and this type of climate change (or the opposite) could occur into the future quite independently of puny attempts to control climate like Australia’s carbon tax!
Perhaps the professors can be re-educated to go upscale. Since GCMs are no good going down the scale, maybe the good professors can scale the other scale direction. THey would not even have to change the acronym. From now on GCMs can mean Galactical Computer Models.
Ken Gregory says:
June 29, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Several comments have provided links to the official Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) surface data here;
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/trendmaps.cgi?map=tmean&area=aus&season=0112&period=1910
Catweasle says June 29, 2012 at 4:32 pm
The BOM is under grave suspicion over its adjustments to the measures records particularly when all the adjustments have been upwards
From Climate Explorer, I found 2 surface stations in the area 25 to 30 S, 135 to 140 E in the GHCN with at least 10 years of data. They are:
MARREE (AUSTRALIA), coordinates: -29.65N, 138.05E, and
BIRDSVILLE (AUSTRALIA), coordinates: -25.90N, 139.35E.
The data goes only to October 1992.
A graph the maximum temperatures from 1979 to 1992 is at
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/images/LakeErye_Australia.jpg
The temperatures correlate well with the satellite data.
The best fit lines are Marree -0.61 C/decade, Birdsville -0.34 C/decade.
Yes, both stations show declining temperatures.
BOM adjusted the data to change a temperature decline into a temperature increase
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yes! and about Two years ago just before copenhagen a whole pile of HOT weather records ie marble bar in the 30s, charleville and marree that were available to view with charts Vanished to some BoM hole never to be seen again, some opbscure format to read files, no way to get it etc.
and yeah ABC was all over it like blowies on poop.
ABC is ausgovt agitprop dept.
Weren’t Australians warned to prepare for permanent drought – until the recent Biblical floods?
Well – back here in the UK, we have crass statements like the following from our Secretary of State for Energy and (excuse me while I find a bucket) Climate Change, when questioned about the march of electricity pylons across picturesque countryside from remote wind farms:
‘The appearance of the countryside would suffer much more due to climate change..!’
Words fail me….
“Jimbo says:
June 30, 2012 at 5:12 am”
Yes. Just as the Met Office in the UK were saying that snow would be a thing of the past a few years back, our climate commissioner, Tim Flannery, stated that rain would be a thing of the past and we must build desal plants. The NSW and QLD Govn’ts, like lemmings, followed that advice and built them. Tomorrow, July 1st, the start of Gillards’ climate savings tax, our own $AU2bil desal plant in NSW will be shutdown and mothballed.
Johanna says I was wrong on two points. She is correct on one, the percentage of desert. There was a typo. I had 94 percent when it should have been 74 percent as stated.
However, the Snowy Mountains Scheme was, as I said, to provide water for a coastal plain city.
“Yet the Snowy Mountains are perhaps best known for the Snowy Mountains Scheme a project to dam the Snowy River, providing both water for irrigation and electricity for nearby Canberra.”
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Snowy:Mountains.html
By 1974, 145 kilometres (90 mi) of underground tunnels and 80 kilometres (50 mi) of aqueducts connected the sixteen dams, seven power stations (two underground), and one pumping station.
Water has been and will remain a major issue for most of Australia. Griffith Taylor in a report to the government said the population would be limited, I believe the number he gave was 22 million, because of inadequate water. (It is reported he never got paid). It is possible Australia will be the first country to experiment with towing tabular icebergs from Antarctica for supply.
There, are too many uni places there! People are being educated beyond their ability!
DaveE.