A follow up on the 'it was warmer in 1790 in Sydney' story

BTW, model skeptics, amongst whom I count myself, might be interested to know that the East Gippsland fire models failed the night before last. For those who may not know, fire models are used by fire incident controllers to predict the probable behaviour of any particular fire. Lots of parameters go in to the model – eg wind speed and direction. The incident controllers use this to decide on where to put containment lines, where to backburn and where to deploy their human and physical resources. They also use them to alert homeowners and farmers about the degree of danger. So the models are very important.
The details are very sketchy but it appears as if at least one of the East Gippsland fires spotted up to 8 kilometres in the absence of significant ambient wind. The suggestion was that the fire was so hot that it created its own weather.
Normally spot fires are started several kilometres in front of a moving fire front by the wind carrying embers). It is spot fires that can be particularly dangerous to firies because the spot fires can block exit roads and because the firies, instead of being outside the fire front can find themselves inside a ring of fire. Sudden wind changes can have much the same sort of impact on firies. The other thing about spot fires is that that is how fires jump containment lines.

michael sweet says:
January 18, 2013 at 2:32 pm
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?
They said it was going to get hotter. Gobally, hot temperature records are being set at multiples of cold temperature records. The oceans are getting hotte. Arctic ice is disappearing over summer. A high proportion of the worlds 45,000 odd glaciers are retreating. Globally thousands of species of plants and animals are behaving as if it is hotter.
Passes the pub test, doesn’t it?

“Richard Sharpe says:
January 18, 2013 at 6:38 am
The BBC are saying that a new record of 45.8 deg C has just happened. Well above the 42.8 deg C in 1790.
Of course, Sydney has several orders of magnitude more asphalt and has had many human-caused changes to the local environment since then.
Urban heat island?”
Agree UHI would be part of the increased temp equation.
I had a interesting observation of the UHI effect in Auckland NZ. Last week. The official Temp for Auckland was 25C for the day. I was driving all over Auckland from South to North and on parts of the Asphalt covered roads the car’s outside temp reading was peaking up to 31C.

Marian
I was driving all over Auckland from South to North and on parts of the Asphalt covered roads the car’s outside temp reading was peaking up to 31C.
Excellent thinking. Instead of leaving it to suspect organisations like BOM and CSIRO with their fraud-filled halls of suspect scientists who do nothing but fiddle data to gain research dollars, maybe we should just crowd-source citizen temperature readings by getting people to drive around?
Of course we would have to calibrate the results a bit – to take into account the 1 degree, 4 degree or 5 degree UHI. Whichever we happen to pick.
We could get Craig Kelly and Piers Akerman to run the databases and do the reporting. They could include a dead Budgie index and a dead bat index to provide external validation of the drive-by temps. They know all about that sort of stuff. Just ask them.
I bet you that the results would show that Sydney is already cooling! That would show those AGW hoaxing panic merchants!

Not sure about Climate Ace, but 0.5 of a degree between 1939 and now seems fair. Two reasons – One – Sydney stretches a huge distance in any direction now, and given Anthony’s personal account of Sydney’s Observatory weather station, it is likely to read high. For the same reason Melbourne’s station (in a small park less than 3m from the footpath and road) are hardly reliable. However we have had a heatwave, and the heat had to get out of the inland somehow. Glad it didn’t come directly through Melbourne. Don’t know about Sydney, but the temps in this heatwave in Melbourne are nowhere near the years from 2003-2009. Then we’d have a few hot days together, this year they’ve been sporadic.
Two – If temps are rising out of the LIA you’d expect higher temps as time goes on. Why we are rising out of the LIA is the question. Are temps plateauing? Will they go down in one of the many cycles that seem to be available? But yes hot in Sydney yesterday.
@Gail,Combs: Australia has compulsory voting, with the Australian Electoral Commission paying professional people to run the stations. Many advantages IMHO. Elections are on a Saturday, so easier for people to get there, never run out of ballot papers, cos we know how many people will vote. Voter turnout is not an issue, as you get fined if you don’t, more consistent rules across the country and everyone pays more attention to politics. There are still some who vote for Micky Mouse or whatever, and that’s legal, but its usually less than 10%.

For the fun of it, go to Youtube and see the movie, Kangaroo (1952), starring Maureen O’Hara, Peter lawford, and Richard Boone. Notice the scenes where they are saving a herd of cattle from the drought as the trees fall apart, the kangaroo die, and other wildlife perish in the Australian heat.

On our 40 plus day last Saturday, temps were registering up to five degrees above official out on the busy Pacific Highway. Not that it means much, of course. If the record that got broken in Sydney was a 1939 record, it only shows not much has changed – especially since Sydney’s monthly heat and annual drought records still stand from the 1800s.
The real hazard, apart from fire, is high summer heat with inland influence sustained over weeks. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Far more people perished through heat than fire in the summer of 1938-39, and the 1895-1896 toll was nearly as bad.
Let’s hope that we have a completely renovated coal power generation industry and low coal and energy costs so that Australian humanity can stay as cool as it likes as long as it likes. And when it chills, same deal. And when people need to run whitegoods and cook…same deal. And the same deal for industry and all commerce, for the people who give job-type jobs.
Cheap, accessible and reliable electricity for all. Nothing else is acceptable. I suspect Craig Kelly may be of like mind, though I don’t want to speak for him. He’s made a great start, that’s for sure.

I wonder what sort of thermometer they were using back in 1806 in the first southern settlement in Tasmania?
By early 1806, bay whaling had begun in the mouth of the Derwent River but by October 1806, the signs for the coming summer were bad. Chaplain to Lieutenant-Governor Collins, Reverend Robert Knopwood wrote in his diary late in October:
“ The distress of the colony is beyond conception. ”
In November:
“ The weather is very dry. Nothing grows for want of rain…the grubs destroy all our vegetables. ”
By Christmas Day, the temperature was so high he wrote of the heat:
“ that it bent the glass of the thermometer and broke it. ”

It is claimed that yesterday :
The mercury hit 45.8 degrees Celsius at Observatory Hill at 2.55pm, 0.5 above Sydney’s previous hottest day in 1939.
Here’s the temps at Observatory Hill :
2:30pm 45.1
3:00pm 44.7
3:30pm 37.7
Is a 1.1 degree fall in 5 minutes likely ? Did someone turn off an air conditioner perhaps ?
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60901/IDN60901.94768.shtml

Dr Burns, I have commented elsewhere on very strange readings from BOM sites – like the recorded temperature dropping from 24C to 15C in ten minutes, as has happened here in Canberra at least twice recently. As a resident, I can assure readers that no such unlikely event occurred.
They need to sack the climate fantasists and get on the job of properly measuring and recording weather. Meanwhile, between their crappy records, dubious measurement and fiddling with data decades after the event, I only believe what I see on the satellite pictures.

Lewis P Buckingham says:
A rosehiller fell dying from the sky? How could that be?
We now have several posts (see above) which prove that the temperature data was wrong, fiddled with, and/or deliberately distorted, so it must have been cooler than the deliberately dissembling authorities reckon, that it might have been hot but it was hotter in their cars, and that it was hot but hotter as it should have been, because you can safely deduct 1, 4 or 5 degrees for the UHI effect. Take your pick.
Anyone would think that a single data point cherry-picked by an Aussie polly matters a jot or a tittle to a general discussion about AGW. (It demonstrates that the man is a fool but he has a bit of history in that direction, so no real harm done). So the Sydney Basin broke a swag of temperature records? So what? You Sydney-siders should get a bit of a grip. Australia beyond the Blue Mountains is a big place and we have had a national heat record broken.
Perhaps had the dead parrot read WUWT it would still be alive? Maybe, it was just panicked into dying by rabid trendy greenies who fooled it by ignoring the UHI?
BTW, what species were Tench’s dead bats? If you want a direct comparison with the Bot’s Fruit Bats, for example, it matters. Scientifically. Fruit bat species distributions vary considerably and you might want to consider whether some are better able than others to withstand heat. Indeed perhaps the ones that could not stand heat might have become locally extinct well before the nineteeth century? You might also want to enquire whether the Bot’s micro-climate (with its magnificent non-local shade trees and its constant watering) replicates anything at all that was available to any species of bats at all during the colony’s infant years. If not, you might want to withdraw your dead bat comparative climate studies altogether. Or at least qualify them sensibly.