Australia has recently experienced a hot summer leading to calls of “global warming did”, but its actually been cooler than the time when the first convicts arrived in Australia back in 1790
Guest post by Craig Kelly MP
It’s been a scorcher. With the mercury soaring to 42.3 C in Sydney last week and the city in meltdown, the papers screamed, “This is climate change. It is here. It is real.” Even the taxpayer funded Climate Commission could not hide their excitement declaring, “it was hotter than before” and that “climate change” was responsible for the “unprecedented” extreme heat Sydneysiders were experiencing.
And with the satellites unable to detect any global warming for the last 16 years, and the IPCC computer modelled predictions failing to come to fruition, Labor Government ministers were quick to exploit the situation to claim the “extreme heat” was evidence of why the Carbon Tax was needed to “do the right thing by our children”. Yet they failed to detail how, when, or by how much (even to the nearest 0.0001 °C) that the Carbon Tax would change the temperature.
But I wonder if any of these people actually knew that Sydney’s so-called ‘record hot day’ on Tuesday 8th Jan this year, that had them screaming “Global Warming”, was actually COOLER than the weather experienced by the convicts of the First Fleet in Sydney way back in the summer of 1790/91 ?
For while the mercury peaked at 42.3 C last Tuesday at Observatory Hill in Sydney – more than 222 years ago at 1.00pm on the 27th Dec 1790 (measured at a location just stones-throw from Observatory Hill) the mercury hit 108.5 F (42.5 C) before peaking at 109 F (42.8 C) at 2.20pm.
The extreme heat of Sydney’s summer of 1790/91 is detailed by Watkins Tench (1758 –1833) in his book ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson’ published in 1793. (Available to download from the internet for free, here).
Watkins Tench was British marine officer whom accompanied 88 male and 20 female convicts on the First Fleet ship the Charlotte which arrived in Botany Bay 20th January 1788. Watkins then stayed in Sydney until December 1791 when we sailed home to Britain and later went on to fight in the Napoleonic Wars where after a naval battle he was taken prisoner by the French and imprisoned on a ship in Brest Harbor.
Of Sydney’s weather of 27th December 1790, when the mercury hit 42.8 C (109 F), half a degree Celsius higher than last Tuesday, Tench wrote; “it felt like the blast of a heated oven”. But the extreme heat wasn’t restricted to the 27th Dec 1790. The following day the temperature again surpassed the old 100 Fahrenheit mark, hitting 40.3C (104.5 F) at 12.30pm.
And later that same summer, in February 1791, the temperature in Sydney was recorded at 42.2 C (108 F). Tench commented;
“But even this heat [of 27th Dec 1790] was judged to be far exceeded in the latter end of the following February, when the north-west wind again set in, and blew with great violence for three days. At Sydney, it [the temperature] fell short by one degree of what I have just recorded [109F]: but at Rose Hill, [modern day Parramatta] it was allowed, by every person, to surpass all that they had before felt, either there, or in any other part of the world. Unluckily they had no thermometer to ascertain its precise height.”
Tench also speculated on the cause of the extreme heat of the summer of 1790/91, and he didn’t blame global warming, coal mining, or failure to pay homage to a pagan god. Tench deduced;
“Were I asked the cause of this intolerable heat, I should not hesitate to pronounce, that it was occasioned by the wind blowing over immense deserts, which, I doubt not, exist in a north-west direction from Port Jackson, and not from fires kindled by the natives.”
Now global warming devotees may be sceptical of Tench’s records. After all, scepticism is a healthy thing. They may even seek to deny Tench’s measurements and have them purged from our history, sent down a memory hole – as the global warming texts & prophesies deem it heresy for it to have been warmer in Sydney way back in summer of 1790/91 than it is in the ‘unprecedented’ extreme heat of Sydney’s ‘globally warmed’ summer of 2012/13.
However, Tench’s meteorological recordings were undertaken following strict scientific procedure using a “large thermometer” made by Ramsden, England’s leading scientific instrument maker of the day. Tench also left a message for those that might seek to question the accuracy of the records;
“This remark I feel necessary, as there were methods used by some persons in the colony, both for estimating the degree of heat, and for ascertaining the cause of its production, which I deem equally unfair and unphilosophical. The thermometer, whence my observations were constantly made, was hung in the open air, in a southern aspect, never reached by the rays of the sun, at the distance of several feet above the ground.”
It also worth noting that in 1790, Sydney (population 1,715) was still surrounded by mostly natural bushland, where modern day Observatory Hill in Sydney (population 4,627,000) is now surrounded by the concrete, steel and glass of a modern city, not to mention the tens of thousands of air-conditioners pumping out hot air into the surrounding streets, nor the 160,000 cars & trucks that cross the Sydney Harbor Bridge daily and pass within 100 meters of Observatory Hill.
Further, the contemporaneous notes of the day concur with the empirical measurements. Lieutenant-Governor David Collins (1756-1810), in his book ‘An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales’ published in 1798 also commented on the incredible effect of the extreme heat of 1790/91 summer on the local wildlife:
“Fresh water was indeed everywhere very scarce, most of the streams or runs about the cove being dried up. At Rose Hill [Parammatta], the heat on the tenth and eleventh of the month, on which days at Sydney the thermometer stood in the shade at 105°F [40.6°C], was so excessive (being much increased by the fires in the adjoining woods), that immense numbers of the large fox bat were seen hanging at the boughs of trees, and dropping into the water… during the excessive heat many dropped dead while on the wing… In several parts of the harbour the ground was covered with different sorts of small birds, some dead, and others gasping for water.”
Tench also recorded the effects of the extreme heat of Feb 1791;
“An immense flight of bats, driven before the wind, covered all the trees around the settlement, whence they every moment dropped dead, or in a dying state, unable longer to endure the burning state of the atmosphere. Nor did the perroquettes, [parrots] though tropical birds, bear it better; the ground was strewed with them in the same condition as the bats.”
And even Governor Arthur Philip noted the effects of the extreme heat of the summer of 1790/91;
“from the numbers [of dead bats] that fell into the brook at Rose Hill [Parramatta], the water was tainted for several days, and it was supposed that more than twenty thousand of them were seen within the space of one mile.”
Yet 222 years later, reports of the mass death of birds and bats are more like to come from those sliced & diced by industrial steel wind turbines, than the heat.
Finally, Watkins Tench concluded on ‘climate change’ in Sydney back in 1790’s;
“My other remarks on the climate [of Sydney] will be short; it is changeable beyond any other I ever heard of”
Fortunately for the convicts and settlers of the new colony, Governor Arthur Philip and later Governors didn’t believe they could change that with a new tax.
===============================================================
Addendum from Anthony: Readers may also find my investigation into the thermometer at Observatory hill interesting: Sydney’s historic weather station: 150 meters makes all the difference.
Note also the current placement of the BoM weather station at Observatory Hill is surrounded by heat sinks. Here are my photos from June 2010.
Click for a larger image
Note how the BoM thermometer shelter is completely surrounded by urban heat sinks and wind breaks.
A 1972 study by meteorologists Rosea Kemp and John Armstrong found that since 1918 Sydney’s average annual maximum temperature, as recorded at the new site, was 0.7 degrees warmer than the average at the old site. Winter averages were up 1.6 degrees.
The old thermometer shelter at the observatory is the pyramid shaped slatted object at the left side of this photo:
It was more exposed to the breezes of the bay than the current location.
UPDATE: Reader kalsel3294 notes support for drought and high temperatures from 1789-1796 in the peer reviewed literature:
A quick search found this research regarding the South Asian monsoon noting the great drought in India of 1790 to 1796, noting also how the reduction in rainfall in 1789 preceded by a year droughts in “Australia, Mexico, the Atlantic Islands and southern Africa” A High-Resolution Millennial Record of the South Asian Monsoon …
http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/LGT00-3.pdf
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Photos of weather stations again?
How did that wheeze work out for you last time, remind me?
REPLY: it has worked out great, though you obviously don’t have a clue – Anthony
@Mosher
“a skeptic would ask these questions.
1. was the thermometer properly calibrated.
2. since this was prior to the days of CRS can we trust it.
I find it amusing that people who question records prior to the invention of the CRS, so willingly accept them when they like the story.”
No Mosher, while a real sceptic considers all facts provisional, he would not simply ask questions for the sake of creating FUD. He would seek out or consider any evidence as to why people during this era would be, for example, unable to accurately measure temperature. Were the instruments of the period unreliable? Given the instruments in use during this period, to what extent would calibration be an issue? Etc. If you have reasons present them.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:02 am
Weather is not climate
Well why are the CAGW folk pushing the weather variablility constantly of late,
and why are weather extremes now being pushed as proof of CAGW effects?!…….
When a year or so ago it was said by them always that …”weather is not climate”!?
[snip – off topic, unfounded accusations, drek. Be as upset as you wish. Keep it up if you wish to be banned – Anthony]
Thanks to Craig Kelly for a very relevant and sensible article. It is refreshing to see one of our MP’s who has not ceased to think and just hum along with the latest Warmist Jingle. The photos of the badly located present Stevenson screens was interesting and revealing. In 1790, the whole of Sydney would have been a leafy paradise. Now it is an electrified glass, concrete and steel jungle sucking up and re-radiating heat in summer.
Yes, I was wondering which record had been broken – turns out it was the same old one = the number of overstated claims of record being broken.
A real skeptic might ask since we have no confidence in the accuracy of most of our records, how can we proclaim any warming (or cooling, either)?
After all, all those dead birds and bats listed in the anecdotal records may have been killed by wind turbines. We just don’t know.
Friends:
The nasty little troll who hides behind the untrue alias of ‘Climate Ace’ is attempting to disrupt this thread with another of his offensive but content-free posts.
Please ignore him/her/it. Responses encourage him/her/it.
Richard
But Steve Mosher, why take sides. I thought you were supposed to be in the middle of this and know that weather only becomes climate change after many years of change. As a scientist, why take sides in an argument about one season? There is no verifiable change in climate, so looking for evidence of similar hot summers to help explain this to people is useful. Very useful. People have been told one side of the story. They need the missing picture. Don’t we want people to know the difference between climate and weather changes?
Murdoch media in Australia has this one today!
15 Jan: Sky News Australia: Hot weather records increase fivefold
Global warming has caused monthly records for heat to increase fivefold in frequency, according to a study by scientists in Germany and Spain.
In parts of Europe, Africa and southern Asia, the frequency of months with record-breaking heat has surged tenfold, said the study published on Monday.
The evidence comes from an analysis of 131 years of monthly temperature data, monitored at 12,000 points around the world, which are stored in a NASA database.
If man-made warming is stripped out of the equation, 80 per cent of the records for hottest-ever months would not have occurred, it said.
‘The last decade brought unprecedented heatwaves, for instance in the US in 2012, in Russia in 2010, in Australia in 2009 and in Europe in 2003,’ said Dim Coumou of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin…
On current trends for global warming, the number of new monthly heat records will be 12 times higher in 30 years than today, the researchers said.
‘This doesn’t mean there will be 12 times more hot summers in Europe than today – it actually is worse,’ Coumou said in a news release issued by PIK…
The study, which was co-authored by scientists at the Complutense University of Madrid, appears in the journal Climatic Change.
http://www.skynews.com.au/eco/article.aspx?id=835793
Leif Svalgaard says:
“Weather is not climate”
But if there is not much change in the overall weather.. ie it can be very hot in Australia in summer !!
Then how the heck can anyone say that the climate has changed.
We are getting similar conditions to those that occured 100 – 200 years ago.
SO, WHAT HAS CHANGED. ? ………….. NOT MUCH AT ALL !
Murdoch’s Brisbane paper last week ran this cartoon:
Sean Leahy Cartoon from Brisbane Courier Mail: Hottest Day on Record: Climate Change Denial
http://www.leahy.com.au/leahy/comic.cfm?cid=2071
compare with NASA supplied no-flame pics:
14 Jan: Herald Sun Australia: Australian bushfires visible from space
ASTRONAUT Chris Hadfield has tweeted another amazing photograph of Australia’s raging bushfires from the International Space Station…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/space-station-engineer-photographs-australian-bushfires-from-space/story-fncynkc6-1226553458564
Steven Mosher says:
January 14, 2013 at 8:04 am
2. since this was prior to the days of CRS can we trust it.
===========================================
Oh good grief…..if it was a whole degree different in over two hundred years
…who cares
it’s close enough
It’s 6:45 pm ET and just watching BBC here in Toronto…amazing how they can show weather for the whole world in a minute. What got me was the temps in Australia, he was quick to say that interior temps may get very hot approaching 40C(but without degrees shown on his map). When you saw the high for Sydney it was a cool 24C and then off to NZ where rainy and in the 20’s for much of the countries.
I spent 5 months near Christchurch 30 years ago working on a horse farm and the heat routinely cooked this Canadian, but the beer was terrific!
regarding the aussie bush/grass fires, remember the australian outback has had great rains/floods in recent years:
29 Sept 2012: Sydney Morning Herald: AAP: Megan Neil: Drought, rain and now grass fire risk
After the drought came the rain. And after that may well come the fires.
Last summer’s heavy rains have transformed large parts of the middle of Australia, with sparse desert replaced by waist – or even shoulder-high – grass in places.
It may look spectacular, but it also means Australia faces the prospect of huge fires burning for months across its centre.
Experts say the season could be a repeat of the summer of 1974-75, when fires throughout central Australia razed 117 million hectares – 15 per cent of the continent.
Millions of hectares could burn, bushfire expert Phil Cheney says.
All it takes is a lightning strike to set the grass alight, and once a wildfire takes hold it’s very difficult to put out.
“They will be very difficult to contain,” said Mr Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO’s bushfire research unit.
“It’s likely to burn for months.
“It will be in the tens of millions of hectares.”…
Heavy rain through Australia’s centre has sparked prolific grass growth. It’s now curing, or drying out, after recent drier weather.
The thick band of grass extends from the Indian Ocean in the west to the Pacific Ocean in southern Queensland and the Great Dividing Range in NSW.
“Essentially we’ve got a fuel bed that stretches from Sydney to Carnarvon, it goes right across the nation,” said Chris Arnol, assistant chief operations officer (country) at the Fire & Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia.
The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre warns of the potential for above-normal bushfire activity across the middle of Australia, with grass fires posing the biggest risk this season…
“The centre, as everybody knows, has had heaps of rain, there’s heaps of growth and they are going to have heaps of fires,” Mr Packham said.
“I would expect massive fires in the centre.”…
Fire authorities have been talking about the risks this fire season, but the concern is that memories have faded since the last bad grass fire season, and for some reason the community thinks a grass fire isn’t as bad as a bushfire…
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/drought-rain-and-now-grass-fire-risk-20110929-1kyyv.html
26 Oct 2012: ABC: Chrissy Arthur: Simpson Desert travellers warned of fire threat
Birdsville grazier David Brook says it is impossible to fight all fires burning in some of the remote Channel Country…
Mr Brook says they have had multiple fires on the cattle station Adria Downs earlier this month, but getting machinery and equipment to sandhill country is impossible, so graziers can only protect critical country and let the remaining fires burn.
“These fires were started by lightning strikes – I think there were 15 going at one stage,” he said.
“They’ve subsequently burnt out…
***“They can burn for quite a long time now, with the whole country, even the stony areas, are covered with grass.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-26/simpson-desert-travellers-warned-of-fire-threat/4335270
13 Jan 2013: UK Independent: Kathy Marks: Australia heatwave: Even in the shade I felt as if I was standing next to an open furnace
As bushfires ravage the countryside and the mercury hits 48C, Kathy Marks talks to locals in one of Australia’s most resilient Outback towns to find out how they’re coping with the worst heatwave on record
“1972 we had the last roaster,” said Marilyn Reed, leaning over the counter in Bourke’s police station, where she works as an administrative assistant. “It was when I first came to town and I’ve never forgotten it. It was 121 degrees (Fahrenheit) for 10 days straight and 99 at night. I dragged my bed outside, it was that hot.
“There was no aircon in those days. We used to wet a sheet in cold water in the bathtub, wring it out and then sleep under it. It was the only way we could survive. During the day people would just go and sit in the river, up to their necks. And when you walked in the road – I never wore shoes in those days – the tar would stick to your feet.”
While every home has air-conditioning now, the locals are just as robust…
***The heatwave follows three consecutive years of floods…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australia-heatwave-even-in-the-shade-i-felt-as-if-i-wasstanding-next-to-an-open-furnace-8449268.html
For those of you who don’t get the ‘pining for the fjords’ parrot references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch
Craig Kelly MP is a representative of the Liberal Party and, given his scientific interest, and indeed climate policy, given his concluding remark, it might be interesting for non-Australian WUWT readers to understand just what climate policies Kelly does support in practice.
Kelly’s Party officially supports AGW science.
Except that the leader of Kelly’s Party has stated publicly that, ‘Climate Science is crap’.
Take your pick.
Kelly says Fortunately for the convicts and settlers of the new colony, Governor Arthur Philip and later Governors didn’t believe they could change that with a new tax.
Kelly’s Party has pledged to spend $10 billion of taxpayers’ money to reduce Australia’s CO2 emissions by 5% by 2020.
Take your pick.
Kelly’s Party is the Party of the free market, free enterprise, free trade, big business and small government.
It has a policy to destroy Australia’s market-based carbon mechanism and replace it with BIg Government direct spending programs.
Take your pick.
Was it an El-Nino causing the heat wave of late 1790 and early 1791? People seem to forget that snow was seem at ground level in Tasmania in January 1788 as the first fleet sailed up to Sydney. Also remember, 12 days after leaving Capetown, the Guardian, the lead ship of the second fleet, struck an iceberg late Christmas eve 1789 and almost sunk.
The Dalton grand minimum is said to have commenced in 1790 but I suspect the extreme UV emissions of the sun had already been very low for several years – probably since the solar minimum of the early 1780’s (similar to what is happening now). Hence the Rossby waves would have been much deeper and so been causing the same sort of extreme weather that is being experienced at present. The problem is that the raw sunspot count does not distinguish between the different types of sunspots.
I hope Craig puts in a submission to the current Australian Senate Environment Committee’s inquiry into recent trends in and preparedness for extreme weather events. Even if he just submits what he included in this post it would be useful.
Climate Ace: you owe me an answer from a previous thread:
Climate Ace: I did not mention ‘acidification’. Stop pretending I did.
===========================
mpainter: You are the pretender; quit being evasive- For the second time, I ask what you mean by this statement:
“4) the impact on food availability caused by chemical changes in the oceans, for example, the possible collapse of Southern Ocean fisheries based on pterapods”
The insurance companies will be figuring out the appropriate market-based monetization of the CO2-influenced Coonabarabran fire as we speak. With 33 houses burned along with much pastureland, farm infrastructure, farm machinery and stock the costs will run into hundreds of millions of dollars. The Tasmanian fires, with over a hundred houses burned, will have cost even more. The fire season has some time to run.
The good thing for Australian farmers and home owners, If nothing has changed since 1778, is that fire premiums should only just keep pace with inflation!
But as all Australians who pay fire insurance know very well, the premiums have been rising faster than the CPI for some time.
Based on the polls, Kelly’s Liberal Party is likely to be the Australian Government later in the year. Consistent with either one of his Party’s positions on AGW policy, he might want to look at the way the insurance industry in Australia is profiteering by pretending that climate-related extreme events like storms, floods and fire, are costing them bigger and bigger payouts, and therefore that premiums have to keep rising faster than the CPI.
A lot of you (and Jo Nova as well) are trying to tell us that, in the past, Australia sometimes got hot in Summer.
Australia has always been famous for its freezing, snow-bound, winters, and cool, rainy, summers.
When pollitions buy into climate change you know their talking to create distraction If not you would think he would have also brought what he has referenced into the NOW Pollatitions are great spin doctors and only have something to say when it fits their agenda Here’s what’s taking place word wide, weather modification to controll the earths water buget WATER and oxygen are the keys to life not money. It’s my opinion thet their using weather modification to drive a new world wide TAX scam If they don’t come clean then don’t bother insuring anything http://usahitman.com/leaked-weather-modification-document/ One thing the hydroelectic system need is water http://www.snowyhydro.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cloud-Seeding-14092012.pdf So why not redirect rain to their catchments . So while we talk in circles the reality regarding weather modification continues behind our backs Australia has already gone down this path of deceiving the the public back in the 50’and 60’s regarding nuclear testing. We the public are only as powerful as the questions we ask and were not asking the right questions to the right people. I hope you don’t mind Anthony me using your website as an example. A good well put together web site creates alot of traffic which is great for advertising and creates a income for Anthony and others who have the time and expertise to create them like Anthony’s great site, The problem is that avertisers are like shareholders they help fund the site through advertising their product or idears. So why would sites like WUWT and SKS want a end to the cimate debate the longer it goes on the more money is made through avertising on their site . Like this blog I’m responding to by a NSW polly who is more interested in going back to 1790 to destract people away from what’s going on in the NOW WEATHER MODIFICATION America plans to OWN the weather by 2025 and their working hard towards that goal. While the public debate the goverments are taking ACTION to carry out the agena of a word matrix system. In the right hands this could be a good thing but the question is there a HITLER out there we can trust to make life better for all mankind and not just a few. looking at history I dought it, there’s more chance of WW3 taking place. Or is it already in progress with these new weapons of mass destruction were we only SEE the reactions with no noticeable actions being carried out The best weapons are the stelthy ones You know the ones we can’t see. Who do we fight when there’s no identifiable enermy or target ? I sugest people take their CO2 blinkers off and start asking about weather modification and were there being carried out, more then likely happening in your back yard right now.
mpainter says:
January 14, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Climate Ace: you owe me an answer from a previous thread:
Climate Ace: I did not mention ‘acidification’. Stop pretending I did.
===========================
mpainter: You are the pretender; quit being evasive- For the second time, I ask what you mean by this statement:
“4) the impact on food availability caused by chemical changes in the oceans, for example, the possible collapse of Southern Ocean fisheries based on pterapods”
I don’t ‘owe’ your, or anyone else at WUWT, anything. I provided you with an answer. If it did not fit your acidification fetish I can’t be held responsible for that. I prefer the term ‘changes to ocean chemistry’ because the term ‘acidification’ is a term that BAU boosters love to hate.
But I thought this was in the Little Ice Age and that the LIA was global. I guess a spot on the earth the size of Sydney could be allowed to be warm – it’s mild +50 F in New York City and 30 -40 below in the eastern half of Russia..
RoHa
What I would like to know from Kelly is that since there is no AGW, since sea levels are not rising, since air temperatures are the same, since the oceans are not heating, since ocean chemistry is static, since there have been no change in droughts, heat events or cyclones, since CO2 is improving crop production by 10%, since Arctic sea ice is not disappearing, and since glaciers are not retreating, why is he going along with the policy of spending $10 billion on nothing?
Shouldn’t he just be using it to address the poverty that BAU has yet to fix?