Readers may recall the story Global Warming?……. It was warmer in Sydney in 1790 by Craig Kelly, MP in NSW Australia in response to some of the recent alarmist caterwauling in the press about the hot summer in Australia being a sign of ‘global warming’. He writes in with an update regarding criticisms by Steven Mosher regarding instrument calibration.
Kelly writes:
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Hi Anthony,
I’ve done a bit more research on the temperature measurements recorded by Tench in 1790 that I thought you might be interested in.
Firstly, it appears the measurements were taken in a purpose built observatory which stood at location of the current pylons of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The Observatory was built and run by William Dawes.
There is a detail description of the Observatory in letter sent back to England. The Observatory had two thermometers not one. These were loaned to the First Fleet by the Board of Longitude.
One was made by Nairne & Blunt and the other one by Ramsden.
When the First Fleet stopped at Cape Town on the way to Sydney, Dawes refers to calibrating the instruments. William Dawes’ journal actually mentions making a comparison between the two thermometers, noting;
‘‘I observe when the thermometers have been long at nearly the same height that they agree.’’
When both Dawes and Tench returned to England at the end of 1791 (after having their requests to stay denied) they took the thermometers with them and returned them to the Board of Longitude.
Both Tench and Dawes were remarkable men, they would have done everything in their power to ensure the measurements were as accurate a possible. Gergis et al. (2009) has stated that William Dawes’ data is commensurate with present-day meteorological measurements.
Add this to the numerous ancedotes of bird and bat deaths, and I think even the most skeptical would have to agree that records are quite accurate.
Regards,
Craig Kelly
Federal Member for Hughes
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Some additions by Anthony:
The abstract of Gergis et al 2009:
This study presents the first analysis of the weather conditions experienced at
Sydney Cove, New South Wales, during the earliest period of the European settlement
of Australia. A climate analysis is presented for January 1788 to December
1791 using daily temperature and barometric pressure observations recorded by
William Dawes in Sydney Cove and a temperature record kept by William Bradley
on board the HMS Sirius anchored in Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in the early
months of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia. Remarkably, the records appear
comparable with modern day measurements taken from Sydney Observatory
Hill, displaying similar daily variability, a distinct seasonal cycle and considerable
inter-annual variability. To assess the reliability of these early weather data, they were cross-verified with other data sources, including anecdotal observations recorded in First Fleet documentary records and independent palaeoclimate reconstructions. Some biases in the temperature record, likely associated with the location of the thermometer, have been identified. Although the 1788–1791 period experienced a marked La Niña to El Niño fluctuation according to palaeoclimatic data, the cool and warm intervals in Sydney over this period cannot be conclusively linked to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions. This study demonstrates that there are excellent opportunities to expand our description of pre-20th century climate variability in Australia while contributing culturally significant material to the emerging field of Australian environmental history.
An account from Dawes journal extracted from Gergis et al 2009:
By September 1790, the settlers were fast realising just
how unpredictable Australia’s weather could be. Watkin
Tench remarks ‘it is changeable beyond any other I ever
heard of… clouds, storms and sunshine pass in rapid succession’.
But by the middle of 1790, Tench (1793) describes
the impact of dry conditions on the colony’s food supplies:
‘vegetables are scarce…owing to want of rain. I do not think
that all the showers of the last four months put together,
would make twenty-four hours rain. Our farms, what with
this and a poor soil, are in wretched condition. My winter
crop of potatoes, which I planted in days of despair (March
and April last), turned out very badly when I dug them about
two months back. Wheat returned so poorly last harvest’
(Tench 1793).
It appears that the summer of 1790–91 was a hot and dry
summer. Tench comments that, at times, it ‘felt like the blast
of a heated oven’. He goes on to describe the heat endured
during summer: ‘even [the] heat [of December 1790] was
judged to be far exceeded in the latter end of the following
February [1791], when the north-west wind again set in, and
blew with great violence for three days. At Sydney, it fell
short by one degree of [December 1790] but at Rose Hill [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…it must, however, have been intense, from the effects
it produced. 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’, though tropical birds, bear it better.
The ground was strewn with them in the same condition as
the bats’ (Tench 1793).
Gosh, “climate disruption” in 1790? It’s worse than we thought!
List of Instruments proper for making astronomical Observations at Botany Bay
Other related items include two lists that detail the instruments Dawes needed for his colonial observatory. ‘List of Instruments proper for making astronomical Observations at Botany Bay’ contains a great many items, but as the Board of Longitude — of which Banks was an ex-officio member by virtue of his position as President of the Royal Society — did not have sufficient instruments on hand, most of these were eventually crossed out.
Note the “two thermometers” in the list above.
List of instruments to be lent by the Board of Longitude for making astronomical Observations at Botany Bay
The ‘List of instruments to be lent by the Board of Longitude for making astronomical Observations at Botany Bay’ is a much shorter list; it served as a clean copy of what was actually available from the Board of Longitude.
Here is a photo from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Thermometer with case, glass / mercury / metal / wood / shagreen, Nairne and Blunt, England, 1770-1800
Read more: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=68006#ixzz2IKiUeerQ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial
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It’s Australia. It gets hot. Who cares as long as there is some AC around to cool you off. For the Aussies it’s just another excuse to drink beeeer.
You could have picked a better day to post this. It hit 45.8 degrees Celsius in Sydney (Observatory Hill) today. Hottest day in the record. UHI of course and one hot summer in Australia doesn’t mean anything. It’s hot every summer here. Nothing new in that.
It’s only getting hotter because of the hot air over the centre that can’t escape plus UHI in Sydney and Alice Springs. Nothing that proves global warming. I read somewhere that China is having it’s coldest winter in nearly 30 years which is the sort of signal we’re expecting to mark the beginning of the ice age that’s due this decade with the solar minimum.
Mosher’s skepticism regarding the teperature record is met with facts and data, logs and methodological descriptions, rather than with ad hominem attacks, feeble attempts at ridicule, invective, or slander.
That’s showin’ ’em!
Steve Mosher is one of the good guys. Skepticism is a good thing on both sides. I may not always agree with his view of the evidence, but he doesn’t play games with the facts or smear people that disagree with him.
Kudos to Steve Mosher for reviewing a claim and bringing up a valid concern, and kudos to Craig Kelly for doing the research to help address that concern. And while I’m at it, kudos to Tench and Dawes for the quality of the records they kept.
Meanwhile they dropped to within a degree of the coldest ever in Tuscon, Arizona. It got to 17 (F) and the record is 16.
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/tucson-hits-record-low-but-temps-on-way-up/article_a070e978-c88b-5b53-aaa2-6e9d43d1c282.html
Considering weather records are generally a hundred years old (unless you dig, as this post does,) I figure there is a one-in-a-hundred chance of setting a record, on any given day.
When Jefferson completed the Lousiana Purchase, he need REAL data on the topography, biology, weather and native tribes of this vast new territory. In May 1804 the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition left St Charles Missouri, and with winter approaching, established Fort Mandan on Oct 24, where they were snow and ice bound until until April 1805. This was the end of the Little Ice Age, and the expedition recorded little “merry weather” during these brutal winters. An excellent history of this is “The Way to the Western Sea” by David Lander, but this did not concentrate on the daily weather records of double leg transcontinential journey. This is the only recorded information on weather in many of these locations for the next fifty years. It is VERY easy to calibrate a mercury thermometer in a glass with both water and ice. Lewis & Clark had no Carbon traders (traitors?) to please, but a president that needed accurate information for future settlement. Researching this great achievement and comparing to post LIA conditions would make an excellent thesis for an object climate science student.
sunshinehours1 says:
“Does anyone take Mosher seriously?”
I do but I think that he is probably wrong in this case. However we should all respect a man who has obviously done a hell of a lot of good work in this area.
I would be interested to learn whether Steve Mosher accepts any temperature records pre CRS and if so which and why? I seem to recollect him taking me to task for suggesting that we should no longer use (Tmax +Tmin)/2 as a proxy for Tmean and being told that one of the reasons for so doing was to ensure continuity with earlier records. How much earlier and were all those based on post CRS records?
45.8C yesterday 18/1/2013 in Sydney and 42.8C in 1790 – Yes but you cannot make simple comparisons. The population in Sydney is now over 3.6 million but only 2,953 in 1796 so the change in UHI needs to be taken into account. This could easily be 4C or more now than in the late 18th Century.
In any event 30km north of Sydney CBD yesterday temperature was measured at a peak of 43C at 2.30 PM. At 9.30pm it had dropped 20C over an hour following the ‘southerly buster’. This morning it is a pleasant 21C.
Going by this the last record high was 45.3c set on the 14th Janaury 1939.
http://www.australiasevereweather.com/links/temprec/syd-d01.htm
Excellent work by Mr Kelly in raising this topic.
A Sydney record of 45.8 degrees was measured in the city yesterday.
However nearby on the harbour off Bradley’s Head the temperature was 29 degrees- see page 6 of The Australian Saturday 19 January.
Even the warmist Sydney Morning Herald (page 5 Saturday 19 January) quoted a meteorologist who said “ Without a sea breeze it meant we had westerly winds billowing across the city, gathering heat off the roads and concrete buildings”.
How accurate do you feel these particular measurements need to be to be useful for this purpose of characterizing the 18th Century Australian climate?
I think that invoking the UHI effect for up to 4 degrees is a bit rich. I was in Western Sydney yesterday, and with the wind and relentless power of the heat (the oven effect Tench refers too), the UHI would have been remarkably small (see Sydney airport to get an possible idea of a UHI effect). Their were wide ranging temps in the 45-46 range recorded. Even in paddocks at the rural edge with nothing but farms to the northwest. Mount Boyce for instance when adjusted for altitude by using a dry lapse rate (1013m ASL) comes up with 45-46, as does a range of other locations well out of metropolitan area both in distance and geography.
Mark.R says:
January 18, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Going by this the last record high was 45.3c set on the 14th Janaury 1939.
http://www.australiasevereweather.com/links/temprec/syd-d01.htm
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Indeed and when the population in Sydney was only 1.5 million we can therefore add at least a UHI of 1C to that temp for comparison with 45.8C yesterday. But hey we’re talking about weather here not climate.
Sydney (Observatory Hill) is not used in BoM’s ACPRN-SAT network.
“Out of the 112 locations in the ACORN-SAT network (Trewin 2012a ; Trewin 2012b), we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)”
On the sensitivity of Australian temperature trends and variability to analysis methods and observation networks – CAWCR Technical Report No. 050 – March 2012
http://www.cawcr.gov.au/publications/technicalreports/CTR_050.pdf
to Son of Mulder, mate there is a city of 4.5 million people there now that wasn’t in 1790 odd. Take off say 5 degrees for UHI and its just another hot January day in NSW.
Gail Combs says:
Romney winning in every single Photo ID state and a lot of other scuttlebutt. You can just do a search to see what I mean.
And a search will find equal evidence of Republican interference. Some people are bad losers.
The photo ID thing is silly. To get those laws enforced requires a Republican majority in the first place, and then ensures it.
Interesting map of the 1939 heatwave.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17557773
The good news is that fire conditions have eased and the firies will have a day in which they will probably be able to establish containment lines, do backburns and put out burning logs and roots. The bad news is that lightning strikes overnight lit lots more fires and more lighntning is predicted for today.
I see that the BAU boosting data fiddlers are out in force again. Tench was good and right. All modern data is bad and wrong when it supports AGW, but good when it casts doubt on AGW. So, we have a lot of paniced clutching at the UHI straw. All this in a background of record national and local temperatures. Not by your measley .1 or .2 of a degree either.
You have to feel sorry for Kelly and Akerman. Mugged by AGW reality. There should be an old bush saying in Australia that if you pick your cherries at the wrong time the cherry branch might fall on your head.
Of course there wasn’t a rail system in Sydney when Tench was around so we have to stick with dead birds and bats as confirmation of his thermometers that it was very hot then.
I do hope that those who claim that AGW prevention is more expensive than AGW adaptation are redoing their figures following the record heat-induced transport chaos that hit Sydney yesterday. Phew, it would have been hot waiting on the platforms…
The adaptation-is-cheaper crowd would, of course, naturally add in the costs to emergency services and the health system of the hundreds of hospitalizations that were required to treat people who were found unconscious and so on and so forth. They would also, being reasonable people, add in some sort of calculation for loss of labour productivity (not least the cost of thousands of volunteers who aren’t producing outputs in their day jobs) and the cost of increased power usage as people huddle in the aircon. Finally, they would be adding all the hundreds of millions that the bushfires have cost. And going through all of this will be increased insurance premiums and increased cost of risk capital. No doubt that AGW Adaptionistas will be adding lines for these elements into their ledgers.
I am skeptical, but I am not sure what to be skeptical about on this matter. Upstring we have claimed UHI impacts of 1 degree, 4 degrees and 5 degrees. So, which is it?
46.5 at Penrith, near Sidney. Could these all time record highs be related to warming? It has sure been hot for a long time now in Oz. See here for discussion and links to scientific opinion. Or we could continue to listen to politicians here. Who do you trust?
Mooloo says:
January 18, 2013 at 1:58 pm
Gail Combs says:
Romney winning in every single Photo ID state and a lot of other scuttlebutt. You can just do a search to see what I mean.
And a search will find equal evidence of Republican interference. Some people are bad losers.
The photo ID thing is silly. To get those laws enforced requires a Republican majority in the first place, and then ensures it.
So, what exactly is the relationship between Sydney’s record temperatures yesterday and Romney?
Places outside of Sydney experienced their hottest temperatures ;records were broken at Kiama and Nowra which would not attract a huge UHI effect.That being said records are made to broken.Cloud from the monsoon is accumulating up north so we should return to normal conditions very soon.As usual the press ABC etc will milk it ad nauseum .A good blog Anthony !
James Cam says:
January 18, 2013 at 1:17 pm
I think that invoking the UHI effect for up to 4 degrees is a bit rich. I was in Western Sydney yesterday, and with the wind and relentless power of the heat (the oven effect Tench refers too), the UHI would have been remarkably small (see Sydney airport to get an possible idea of a UHI effect). Their were wide ranging temps in the 45-46 range recorded. Even in paddocks at the rural edge with nothing but farms to the northwest. Mount Boyce for instance when adjusted for altitude by using a dry lapse rate (1013m ASL) comes up with 45-46, as does a range of other locations well out of metropolitan area both in distance and geography.
—————————————————————————————————————-
Not where we were James – 43C for about 15 minutes at 2.30 pm and apparently only 29C off Bradleys Head (see a previous post). I think you are underestimating the effect of UHI in my experience. Little Oil notes above ‘Sydney Morning Herald (page 5 Saturday 19 January) quoted a meteorologist who said “ Without a sea breeze it meant we had westerly winds billowing across the city, gathering heat off the roads and concrete buildings”.’
But even ignoring UHI in 1790 or 1939 at 43.8C and Sydney yesterday at 45.8C if someone’s arguing “more extreme” conditions it’s obviously nonsense. Localized weather is not global climate.
Typo: 1939 should read 45.3C