From the University of Melbourne, where being angry about “weather is not climate” isn’t just a science, it’s a way of life:
Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found.
The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record hot summers such as the summer of 2013, by more than five times.
Lead author, Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science said the study showed it was possible to say with more than 90 per cent confidence, that human influences on the atmosphere dramatically increased the likelihood of the extreme summer of 2013.
“Our research has shown that due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in the future,” she said.
The study Anthropogenic contributions to Australia’s record summer temperatures of 2013 has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The study used climate observations and more than 90 climate model simulations of summer temperatures in Australia over the past 100 years.
Professor David Karoly, a co-author on the paper said the observations, coupled with a suite of climate model runs comparing human and natural influences in parallel experiments, indicated we have experienced a very unusual summer at a time when it was not expected.
“This extreme summer is not only remarkable for its record-breaking nature but also because it occurred at a time of weak La Niña to neutral conditions, which generally produce cooler summers,” he said.
“Importantly, our research shows the natural variability of El Niño Southern Oscillation is unlikely to explain the recent record temperatures.”
This analysis of the causes of the record 2013 Australian summer is one of the fastest ever performed worldwide for a significant climate event.
This fast-response analysis was made possible because data from many existing climate models and observations were made available through Centre of Excellence collaborations with CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the National Computational Infrastructure in Australia.
“The new data resource means scientists are able to work on understanding and addressing the problems of extreme climate events sooner,” Professor Karoly said.
The researchers are now turning their attention to other recent extreme climate events.
[UPDATE]: I’m sure Anthony won’t mind if I offer a bit of perspective on the thoroughness of the Australian researchers. This is what the RSS and the MSU satellite records for the lower troposphere have to say about Australia:
Figure U1. Austral summer temperatures. Note that the 2012 summer in the Southern Hemisphere runs from December 2012 to February 2013.
The data is from that marvelous resource, KNMI. Go there, and under “Select a field”, click on “Monthly Observations”. Scroll down to “Lower Troposphere”, and click on either the RSS dataset or the MSU dataset.
When the page comes up, specify the bounding box around Australia (-38 to -11° latitude, 113 to 153° longitude. Click the land only check box, and tell it to generate the data series.
In this case, both satellite datasets agree that there was nothing at all unusual about the 2012 summer. The researchers should at least have noted that fact … assuming that they noticed that fact.
w.
Didn’t the satelites show that the Australian summer in 2012 was 14th of the last 34 years? If I’m correct, no other organization records it as the hottest summer. Yet, they still make the claim?
Oh, it was based on models. Got it.
Somewhere hot, Comrade Lysenko is smiling.
You’ve made the Weather Gods angry, peasants! Only increased taxes and massive research grants can appease them! Pay now or you are doomed!
The terminology is laughable, straight from the manual of the rapid climate response team. Angry Gaia to replace Angry Birds.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/book_this/
Mother Earth is angry. She is going to punish all humanoids if not by cold, by heat. If not by water, by lava, and if she doesn’t do the job correctly: Obama will starve us.
Dying Polar Bears, angry heat and storms, “Please, don’t punish us any more Gaia”.
Melbourne uni remains with a significant investment in the perpetuation of this scare. They will be relieved that it is now being invigorated by the President but also (it seems) by the new prime minister…now there’s hoping!
Just more future embarrassment for them. The more desperate they become the more their claims stretch (to put it as politely as possible) the truth the more material for ridicule when even the low information crowd knows the whole scare has been an exercise in exaggeration taken to unprecedented lows.
More dribble. But they get paid for it!!! I would have liked them to walk the summer I lived in about 40 years ago in the same land. It was 40 plus for ten days in a row!
-Here is the thing—-There is no proof that mankind can increase atmospheric CO2, even if we tried.
Then, there is no proof that increasing CO2 could warm the planet.
Oh, well, must forget the science to move to the perfect society…..
Anthony we could do with some heat right now , it has been very cold here in southern Aust.
If only the weather would take anger management classes. I wonder if a bad temperament is responsible for global warming rather than the reverse?
“Our research has shown that due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in the future,”
Assumption.
“Importantly, our research shows the natural variability of El Niño Southern Oscillation is unlikely to explain the recent record temperatures.”
That’s because climate models can’t simulate ENSO. Is this some type of misdirection?
Looks like we need the Angry Carbon paper http://shpud.com/weather/main.php?g2_itemId=179
The whole angry summer argument rested upon counting number of stations generating record temperatures, plus a few other record breaking metrics around flood gauges etc.
If you bother to apply this technique across multiple years or check for counter records then the scary disappears. For example from Oz data if you count the number of record breaking low max temperature records, then 2004 count comes pretty close to count for 2012 high max temperature records. Making 2004 the not-so-angry summer, I guess.
My point is that you cannot perform a constructive analysis to increase our understanding of what trends have been occurring, if any, in Oz summers by counting records alone. So why do this in the first place and push it so hard if for no other reason than for the purpose of manipulating your intended audience by engendering fear and concern.
That’s what they said about Australian droughts a few years back before the Biblical floods. Just before they were forced to mothball the desal plants as the dams were full to overflowing.
Ha, ha, haaaa. Bollocks to that.
When you start recording temperatures in the middle of the Simpson Desert and adding those to the figures you will get the Warming you desire.
When a City like Sydney has a 2 day heatwave that shaves half a degree off some record from the 1930s you will get the Warming you desire.
Let’s disregard the facts that the population of Sydney has 4.6 million today but 1.3 million back then and that today there are many hundreds of thousands (if not millions of AC) units pumping waste heat into the atmosphere whereas in the 1930s there were very few.
In Australia the Political tide has already turned against Warmism with the recent crucifixion of Prime Minister Julia Gillard for introducing a Carbon Tax, but Warmism itself is deeply embedded in the middle class psyche. The Scientists know that this is their last gasp so they are squealing
louder than usual right now, fortunately their noise is being drowned out by more and more mainstream media reports like one from several days ago…”Sydney endures coldest 4 days for 31 years”.
News flash: “Our research” now eclipses “statistics” as the worst liar.
And did humans play a role in the same summer over Australia when it was “angry” COLD?
Feb 2013:
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html
“This fast-response analysis was made possible because ”
we needed it for our important climate event. So it was important to rig the model in just the right way; we didn’t have time to run it 30 times as usual until the right looking time series comes out by accident. /sarc
Time for Karoly to ‘fess up about the ultimate fate of the “warmest in 1000 yrs paper”, still in the process of re-submission according to his uni’s website, and that of the hyper-alarmist ABC Science Show “The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.” It’s taking a long time Karoly, perhaps it will be 1100 yrs before the paper resurfaces.
Well, it is very hot in the UK this summer (2013) as well. Today was a very hot day – nearly 16 deg. C in some places – so it is obvious that the warming they are observing in OZ is global. When they had their record hot summer, the UK had a “record” cold winter.
So I wonder what is “Global” about that.
I am willing to bet a penny – or even a pound – that they had lots of sunshine filled days during their summer down under in 2013.
I wonder how CO2 manages to keep the clouds away.
Why is it that only the recent summer was ‘angry’ when the NINO3.4 SST record shows other la Nina conditions over the past 15-20 years.
And, since when are model runs ‘experiments’ where the results can be called a new data resource?
Living in the state of Queensland I was very surprised when I read about our record heat. Relations in other States were equally surprised. From memory I only recall a few hot days last summer. I think an analysis of the data would show a bit of cherry picking to get the extra tenth or hundreths of a degree they needed. In Queensland the average for the summer was within 1/10 of a degree of the long term average. Andrew Barnham is correct in his analysis.
Professor David Karoly, a co-author on the paper…
At this point I knew I could stop reading, as Australia’s Climate Consensus Elite had clearly sanitized the real truth out of this press release for my protection.
I Skyped with my daughter, living in Sydney, this last Tuesday. She was fashionably dressed in fingerless mittens, a long-sleeved tee shirt, a pull over sweatshirt, a knit woolen sweater and she sitting by an electric heater in their apartment. It had been rainy and gloomy for several weeks now and the prospect for more rain and cold the next weeks out has somewhat put a damper on her spirits. At her work (Government), there are some grumblings about the rain, overcast sky, sunset before 5 PM, going home from work in darkness, cold and the very high cost of electricity.
With all the rain, Sydney is green this winter.
What made last summer unusual was that it was consistently, but not record breakingly hot across the entire continent. No single region was record breaking, but the average of the continent was high because summer temps were consistent. Normally if you get a hot summer it will be localised to one or two regions where the other not so interesting regions push continental average down.
The only way to extract a record was to aggregate all records. No other regional level slicing/dicing yielded anything. Even comparing half continental zones. All the ways the bureau slice and dice the continent a record only appeared for total.
Now maybe consistently hot is consistent with a AGW signature, but subtlety of this observation never featured in the public narrative.
“This fast-response analysis was made possible because data from many existing climate models…”
There it is: data from climate models. These people have completely lost any scientific perspective. In their fantasy land, physical models produce data.
I’ve added an update to the head post, viz:
[UPDATE]: I’m sure Anthony won’t mind if I offer a bit of perspective on the thoroughness of the Australian researchers. This is what the RSS and the MSU satellite records for the lower troposphere have to say about Australia:
Figure U1. Austral summer temperatures. Note that the 2012 summer in the Southern Hemisphere runs from December 2012 to February 2013.
The data is from that marvelous resource, KNMI. Go there, and under “Select a field”, click on “Monthly Observations”. Scroll down to “Lower Troposphere”, and click on either the RSS dataset or the MSU dataset.
When the page comes up, specify the bounding box around Australia (-38 to -11° latitude, 113 to 153° longitude. Click the land only check box, and tell it to generate the data series.
In this case, both satellite datasets agree that there was nothing at all unusual about the 2012 summer. The researchers should at least have noted that fact … assuming that they noticed that fact.
w
“Jorge: correct”, One out of five data sets showed a warmer summer. The AUH, RSS and radiosonde data did not..
In the West and southwest of Australia we get warmer summers because of the preponderance of east and northeast winds. In the East and south east of the country it’s because of a preponderance of west and north west winds all of which bring hot winds from the arid interior. Karoly obviously understands little about the meteorology affecting the country in which he lives.
“Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science said the study showed it was possible to say with more than 90 per cent confidence, that human influences on the atmosphere dramatically increased the likelihood of the extreme summer of 2013 …”.
“Professor David Karoly, a co-author on the paper said the observations, coupled with a suite of climate model runs comparing human and natural influences in parallel experiments, indicated we have experienced a very unusual summer at a time when it was not expected …”.
Like their 1000 year Gergis paper, I detect a certain circularity in the line of reasoning here.
Well we had a very nice summer in Melbourne, not too hot, only turned the fans on at night 4 or 5 times (we don’t have any air conditioning). Beach close by but warmer days a bit windy so only a few days spent at the beach. Sufficient rain so gardens fared well, all round just a very average lovely summer.
wws says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:41 pm
Somewhere hot, Comrade Lysenko is smiling.
——-
Good point…and I think THAT warming is the kind none of us would/will want….
“Angry” summer – what garbage. And “data” from the models. Lordy these people are stupid.
The Sky is Falling the Sky is Falling…. oh wait…. IT ISNT!
As Andrew Barnham correctly points out above, the Angry Summer was a fiction based on some very dubious “records”, such as claiming two records for the same river on the same day 50km apart, and claiming temperature and rainfall records for stations with short histories, ignoring neighbouring ones. Yes, 14th warmest out of last 34 summers is correct.
Ken
As the Julia Gillard reign is over, there will in the very near future be some return to sanity down under.
Based on what has happened in the past when there was a Maunder like solar magnetic minimum, the Aussies should see some cooling and significant increase in rainfall, due to the solar cycle 24/25/26/27/28/29/30/31/32/33/34 minimum, the James Hansen solar magnetic cycle minimum.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/summary.shtml
Australia rainfall May, 2013 +25%(Rank out of 114, 91st highest) highest since 1997
There is now record sea ice in Southern Hemisphere for all months.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
Arctic sea is improving if your idea of utopia is record Arctic sea ice and crop failure.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
The majority of the James Hansen solar minimum will be in the Northern Hemisphere which makes sense as the Northern hemisphere has warmed 4 times more than the tropics and twice as much as the planet.
The point is the warming is reversible, if the majority of the warming in the last 70 years was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes as opposed to the CO2 forcing mechanism which it appears is saturated. Curiously no one noticed that there are periods of millions of years when the planetary temperature does not correlate with CO2. Fortunately there has been a series of papers in the last 5 years that have redacted the lack of correlation of planetary temperature with atmospheric CO2 levels, however, fudging the analysis does not change reality.
We certainly live in interesting times.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324803/UK-weather-Its-middle-May-Two-inches-snow-months-rainfall-day-65mph-winds-hit-Britain.html
It’s the middle of May! Two inches of snow, one month’s rainfall in a day and 65mph winds hit Britain
– Up to 2in snow reported in Princetown, Devon, and Rhayader, Powys
– And 3in snow fell on high ground in Shropshire near Welsh border
– Month’s rain in 24 hours to 7am today in Pembrey, Carmarthenshire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Little Ice Age
Climate patterns
In the North Atlantic, sediments accumulated since the end of the last ice age, nearly 12,000 years ago, show regular increases in the amount of coarse sediment grains deposited from icebergs melting in the now open ocean, indicating a series of 1-2°C (2-4°F) cooling events recurring every 1,500 years or so.[63] The most recent of these cooling events was the Little Ice Age. These same cooling events are detected in sediments accumulating off Africa, but the cooling events appear to be larger, ranging between 3-8°C (6-14°F)
Australia
There is limited evidence about conditions in Australia, though lake records in Victoria suggest that conditions, at least in the south of the state, were wet and/or unusually cool. In the north of the continent, the limited evidence suggests fairly dry conditions, while coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef show similar rainfall as today but with less variability. A study that analyzed isotopes in Great Barrier Reef corals suggested that increased water vapor transport from southern tropical oceans to the poles contributed to the LIA.[53] Borehole reconstructions from Australia suggest that, over the last 500 years, the seventeenth century was the coldest in that continent, although the borehole temperature reconstruction method does not show good agreement between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.[54]
It may have been cooler in the troposphere, but down here on the ground it was hot. Here’s the BoM report. 1.44°C above average, beating the previous record by 0.21°C.
The hottest period was actually late spring to January; February cooled a bit. Here is the map for official summer; here is Nov-Jan.
You would have to believe a Nobel Laureate. The Macedon Ranges Sustainabilty Group claims David Karoly is a Nobel Laureate supporting their wind farm. http://wisegroup.org.au/research/karoly_wise_letter/
An attempted come back to this debunking
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/last-summer-was-not-actually-angrier-than-other-summers/story-e6frgd0x-1226611988057
It appears to rely on the same suspect data and computer models that are now recognized to be even less credible.
nick, your capture of the spurious is only superseded by your hilarity.
But, that’s just my opinion….
I am sorry, I am obviously loosing contact with the English language. Is “angry” hot, cold, wet or dry, or all four?
As for the Australian professor David Karoly, I put him in the same credibility category as Tim Flannery, Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook and of course as mention here in the comments the former Russian “scientist” Trofim Lysenko
We only had about two days the whole summer which were over 40 C in NSW east coast. Not so much angry as a slight frown, although one day in mid January was a record, 46 C.
I looked at the synoptic chart then and I saw a big blocking high in the Tasman Sea, which is a common cause of heatwaves here.
At the same time the Ap Progression index was at 5, very low especially at solar max. When it was at that level in 2010 there were blocking events commonly occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. Mike Lockwood of Reading University noted that the low solar activity was the cause of the blocking occurring in the UK winter of 2010, and blocking likewise was the cause of the 2010 Moscow heatwave.
My message to Prof Karoly is “look up”. But he won’t listen, he has too much skin in the game now to look at mere data.
“Gillard cooling: a Rudd awakening consequence of Anthropeginc Global Warming” David Karoly, John Cook, Tim Flannery, Nature climate science , in press …
The Oz BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) shows in their time-series histograms that both mean and maximum temperatures last Summer were cooler than previous years in ALL individual States and Territories. The most populous State; NSW is here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=tmax&area=nsw&season=1202&ave_yr=5
From there, drop-down menus provide the other States etcetera, including rainfall. One rather troublesome thing is that if you click “Australia”, (which I firmly believe means all States and Territories combined, maybe discarding a few relatively small islands), then it does show last summer to have been slightly warmer.
Ah, yet more drivel from Karoly! More models “prove” AGW drivel! Just in time for the election, now that Gillard is gone and Rudd (erless) is back, the ALP and Greens feel confident of a win. As someone once said “Tell ’em they’re dreamin’!”
So has Mother Giaia got a fever or a cold?
Or, is it a fever or a cold thats making Mother Gaia angry?
To our friends at WUWT, from Downunder I don’t believe the reshuffle of our PMs will necessarily be good. Rudd the newly recycled PM once infamously said ‘Global climate change is the greatest moral and economic of our time’. I doubt if he has changed much. Cheers from damp and chilly Sydney.
Nick Stokes says: June 27, 2013 at 4:59 pm
————-
Well mate, I can tell you … I live in the Queensland tropics and that is bullshit, we had a quite unremarkable summer. If anything it was cooler than usual. Everybody here knows that the BoM fudges the data.
1. Didn’t Karoly have to withdraw a recent paper because it was crap?
2. I’ll use the CAGW arguments these bozos like so much: Weather is not climate and Australia is only x% of the globe, so this is local not global.
Streetcred says:
June 27, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Nick Stokes says: June 27, 2013 at 4:59 pm
————-
Well mate, I can tell you … I live in the Queensland tropics and that is bullshit, we had a quite unremarkable summer. If anything it was cooler than usual. Everybody here knows that the BoM fudges the data.
___________________
Welcome to Nick’s world. of Bull S—.
On the bright side, you’re done with Julia Gillard’s BS.
But now we have KRudd’s BS … hopefully not for long and then the grownups will manage the country again 😉
My quick calc determines 66% is due to noise, and 34 % due to trend. So they are saying global warming has made it around 34% worse (there is no way I would read their crap anyway)?
That is why it was so pivotal to make the claim that most of global warming is human. Yet, if it is only “most”, then at the very least it is 51%. Thus the contribution to the anomalous summer could be as low as 34 times 0.51 = 0.17 deg C .
I very much doubt they can prove anything statistically, so its falsified in my view. Karoly is a loser.
“remarkable for its record-breaking nature but also because it occurred at a time of weak La Niña to neutral conditions”
Actually, that is quite unremarkable, given there are many leads and lags with ENSO effects on temperature. Especially considering El Nino thresholds were present a few months before the event. Not to mention a negative SOI during most of summer (planet Karoly- where the brain cells fail to fire).
It just goes to show that media press releases are carefully worded in order to minimize any honest doubts regarding the research in question. They must be friends with John Cook, propagandist extraordinaire..
The news is touting ‘Perth will get 50C summers’ – blah blah – in the last 5 years, there’s only been a half dozen days a year where the temp was significantly over 40, and only one or two days a year where it was more than 42C. Mostly, it hovers around 33-37C with some blips up and down as you’d expect. To claim temps will leap 8C from the today’s rare maxima is surely alarmist fantasy.
Streetcred says: June 27, 2013 at 6:19 pm
“Well mate, I can tell you … I live in the Queensland tropics and that is bullshit, we had a quite unremarkable summer. If anything it was cooler than usual. Everybody here knows that the BoM fudges the data.”
Qld tropics? Well, the BoM maps show the coast was normal. But Mt Isa. Average max for Jan 2013, 39.9°C. OK, Isa is hot, but ave max for Jan is 36.3°C.
Here’s how Marree (SA) started the year. 48.4°C, 48.2°C… 48.4°C… 48.2°C!
BoM fudges? You can track every one of those daily numbers to the hourly. When do you think they fudge?
Luther Wu says:une 27, 2013 at 6:30 pm
“Welcome to Nick’s world. of Bull S—.”
I live on the ground, and report what was recorded. All I see offered elsewhere here is lower troposphere.
Nick, this may seem repetitive, but then you know about repetitive….
“your capture of the spurious is only superseded by your hilarity.”
Hint: Consider looking at the real (spelled “complete”) data.
If you look at the temperature anomalies for the last 12 months. Maximums were clearly above average across most of Australia, but minimums weren’t. In fact minimums were well below average across much of the north and east. Both are signatures of decreased cloud cover.
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/temp/index.jsp?colour=colour&time=latest&step=0&map=maxanom&period=12month&area=nat
The Australian BoM. That’s the organisation which introduced new temperature graphs with new colours representing new, record, highs and then had to withdraw because they were completely wrong? The organisation that reviewed temperature data from NIWA in New Zealand and had to withdraw it because it was completely wrong? The organisation that has “created” a new way of “measuring” a country-wide average temperature (LOL), but won’t tell anyone how they do it? The organisation that has data on it’s website that contradicts the alarmism in the media and its own media releases?
Talking about increased global temperatures. apparently, a paper just published suggests that ageing stations may be causing a warming bias to creep into maximum daytime temps. Apperantly, age has no measurable affect on night time minimums but a bias up to about 1.6 degC is sometimes seen recorded in daytime maximums when comparing to max daytime temperatures recorded by older stations. See
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/new-paper-finds-that-aging-weather.html
I do not know whether the research is robust. No doubt it is something that Anthony may well look into, but if true this could seriously distort the land thermometer record.
@Nick Stokes. I appreciate your efforts. Every discussion should have push and pull.
prime minister Gillard was kicked out of here office ha ha ha ha she introduced us to a $26 carbon tax we might one day go back to being nomal . PS I heard on the grape vine that she is taking up a post in your GOV’T advising on ways to tax you all into the ground good luck
Nick Stokes says:
June 27, 2013 at 4:59 pm
It may have been cooler in the troposphere, but down here on the ground it was hot. Here’s the BoM report. 1.44°C above average, beating the previous record by 0.21°C.
The troposphere isn’t warming the surface as GHG warming theory predicts. Hence, something else must be. Care to suggest anything other than decreased clouds?
This stuff is simply grist to the MSM. While many here will switch of when they read “data from models” and realise it is total nonsense, those in the MSM who need something to write about to keep the alarm level up will seize upon it.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a really effective way to counter this trash and so the information poor will suck it up as gospel.
richard verney says:
June 27, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Talking about increased global temperatures. apparently, a paper just published suggests that ageing stations may be causing a warming bias to creep into maximum daytime temps.
One of Anthony’s co-authors on the Surface Stations paper found the same thing. Anthony also discovered modern paints are less reflective than older coatings.
http://www.climategate.com/stevenson-screen-paint
That’s bullshhh, we had one of the coldest summers ever 2013. Heavy rainfall and flooding. Victoria was hit very badly and still is with storms and floods. Depends where you live, if you live 50 miles from the coast, it does naturally get warmer. But where I live on the Northern Tablelands, NSW, we didn’t get exceptionally high temps, and now we are freezing cold. I live 3500 absl though. We don’t get the name New England for nothing. Even the red center got rain so I don’t know where they are getting their data from? Probably Tim Flannery. And of course they provided some of those academics that provided that poxy climate change commission pamphlet issued by the government, that had a disclaimer added on its accuracy and alleged death threats.
When the coalition government wins the next election, then Tim will have to find a new job, and so will his cohorts. Rudd is now promising to float the carbon tax and reintroduce the ETS that he dumped before being ousted as PM in 2010. After Julia’s campaign promise, that there will be no carbon tax while I head the government, who will believe his weak response to a labor backlash in the polls. He’s struggling to find more credibility for his labor party, that looks as if he might struggle to maintain his own seat.
Even the coastal areas of NSW and South Queenland were cooler than normal. You might get a few hot days, but generally that signals heavy rain is on the way. 3500 ft absl, we live here because we get more rain, and we did this summer, and temps rarely go over 30 C, but temps drop low at night, hence I can’t grow successful tomatoes here. No need for air conditioning, and it is a very healthy climate to live in.
The ‘Hot Summer of 2013’ was really just a hot 10 days in January. However for that period it really was much hotter than normal over much of Eastern NSW reaching 45C in Sydney. Whether that was just a larger than usual fluctuation, or a sign of something to come, is debatable.
> The study used climate observations and more than 90 climate model simulations of summer temperatures in Australia over the past 100 years.
Given that ALL the past IPCC models over estimated the current climate, why shroud anyone believe your model is correct?
Nick Stokes says: June 27, 2013 at 7:02 pm
> Qld tropics? Well, the BoM maps show the coast was normal. But Mt Isa. Average max for Jan 2013, 39.9°C. OK, Isa is hot, but ave max for Jan is 36.3°C.
Here’s how Marree (SA) started the year. 48.4°C, 48.2°C… 48.4°C… 48.2°C!
—————–
Well, the tropics is not limited to the coast only as you clearly know. Do you know much about Australia ? Do you know where Mt Isa is ? Do you know that it is always a ‘gawdawful’ hot place ? ROTLMFAO. ‘Isa is certainly not a proxy for the Australian continental temperatures.
jimmi_the_dalek says: June 27, 2013 at 8:54 pm
> The ‘Hot Summer of 2013′ was really just a hot 10 days in January. However for that period it really was much hotter than normal over much of Eastern NSW reaching 45C in Sydney. Whether that was just a larger than usual fluctuation, or a sign of something to come, is debatable.
The temperature measurements derived from Sydney were measured at a location well known for UHI effects … Jo Nova can provide you with the specific details if you’re interested.
Robert of Ottawa asks: “I am sorry, I am obviously loosing contact with the English language. Is “angry” hot, cold, wet or dry, or all four?”.
Any or all of the above if you are a CAGW climate scientist Robert.
this is the Opposition Climate Change Minister in Australia declaring they will not only not have a carbon tax, they will not have an ETS or any price on carbon dioxide. hope they mean it, cos it’s never been clear:
VIDEO: 28 June: Brisbane Times: Coalition: ETS is still a tax (08:02)
Greg Hunt, shadow environment minister, says any changes to the carbon tax under Rudd will still hit business hard and that carbon pricing has got to go.
http://media.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national-times/coalition-ets-is-still-a-tax-4527202.html
should have added the Opposition first needs to win the forthcoming Federal Election!
“pat says:
June 27, 2013 at 9:56 pm”
The Opposition have a “direct action” plan as opposed to a tax or ETS. So not much different really. The Opposition need to have the courage to have a “do nothing option”, but I don’t see that ever happening.
How many ways can I say BS to the stupid Aussie claim of an “angry” summer? I’m an Aussie, here in Australia, so I can call it a stupid Aussie claim – yes, and you guys can, too, because it is.
As for how many ways I can call it BS – once will have to do. Just know my mind is reeling with a whole teem of expletives and I don’t need a thesaurus!
The BOM in Aus used only 104 w/stations to gather that data. Many stations which recorded hot temps in Jan 1939 have been eliminated – so they’re comparing apples to oranges.
The data for the new ACORN stations has generally been adjusted downwards for earlier temps so it’s no wonder they can claim a ‘record’. Check Bourke’s raw data in Jan 39 with the adjusted ACORN data to see what they’re up to.
Bourke had 17 days in a row of +40C; not any more.
Streedcred,
I was in Sydney and it is undoubtable that it was very very hot. A typical temperature for the coastal suburbs of Sydney in summer is a pleasant 25C. If it gets to 35C people say it is hot. On some days in this January it was way beyond that. I particularly remember being it the city and noticing that all the digital thermometers on buildings were reading 45C. Now, even allowing for siting problems and a degree or two of UHI, that is far beyond the average. Of course, as I have already said, the cause is not established. It could just be an unusually large random fluctuation. But hot it most definitely was. February however was cooler than average.
NICK STOKES,
You say:
I give BOM Oz surface data above at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/27/claim-humans-play-role-in-australias-angry-hot-summer/#comment-1348942
that perhaps you may be uncomfortable with, but perhaps you can investigate and clarify it for us?
I watched the weather reports every night during that period and there were two blocking highs in succession which parked over the ocean east of the continent. The anti-clockwise flow around these highs drew hot air from the central Australian desert
(cont) which flowed down to the heavilly populated south east including Melbourne University. It is beyond my comprehension that these people did not see this.
Ian George says: June 27, 2013 at 10:32 pm
“Bourke had 17 days in a row of +40C; not any more.”
Really? In Jan 2013, the whole of January averaged 40.6°C. Raw data. That’s 4.3°C more than usual.
That’s why it was called an angry summer. Hot places got a whole lot hotter.
Bob F-J “perhaps you can investigate and clarify it for us?”
Not sure what needs clarifying. Your graph verifies what I said above. Australia summer 2013 1.44°C above average – that’s 0.21°C hotter than previous hottest. Yes, individual states have had hotter summers than 2013, but this was the combined effect of the heat over the whole country.
I live in New Zealand (not far from Oz) and our Wellington summer was not only the hottest I can remember it was the longest I can recall in my 52 years. Christmas day in Wellington was unbearably hot.
Nick, that ground temperatures would be superhot is not a surprise, quoting from Leroux Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate, Springer 2010, section 3.5, page 70:
“Weather associated with agglutinations of MPHs is controlled by raised pressure and anticyclonic stability, which bring heat, drought and pollution. The higher the pressure, the greater the molecular conduction and infrared absorption; air cannot rise and, at near-ground levels, becomes overheated (for the same quantity of solar energy received), especially when winds are light or non-existent. The heat brings about a marked diminution in relative humidity, i.e. the air becomes very dry, and more so if water vapour does not penetrate the anticyclonic area; the natural greenhouse effect, principally associated with water vapour, is considerably reduced, allowing more energy to reach the ground during the daytime. The absence of clouds also offers optimal insolation. So there are wide temperature contrasts (with much increased diurnal thermal amplitude), and the days become abnormally hot, or ‘spring-like’ in winter. Nights are cold, with frequent frosts and radiation fogs. In summer, the heat builds up to gradually to create what are traditionally known as ‘dog days’, especially in urban areas which are less ‘ventilated’, hotter, dryer and polluted: emissive gases are an aggravating factor. At the same time, the anticyclonic character limited to the lower layers and the absence of horizontal and vertical air movements concentrate pollution near the ground (below an inversion layer at about 1 000 metres), while the strong insolation accelerates photodissociation (the production of ozone, encouraging the temperature to rise in the lower layers). Precipitation is hindered, or even halted, and drought results in winter as in summer.”
Permanence of high pressure agglutinations fed by powerful anticyclones of dense polar air hardly makes a case for a warming world…
It is a sorry state of affairs where model calculations are described as “experiments”. This from a Professor and a Phd. Shameful spin.
Simon says: June 27, 2013 at 11:21 pm
>I live in New Zealand (not far from Oz) and our Wellington summer was not only the hottest I can remember it was the longest I can recall in my 52 years. Christmas day in Wellington was unbearably hot.
…
I believe that you’re having record snowfalls at the moment … so heavy that it’s collapsing the roofs of farm buildings.
jimmi_the_dalek says: June 27, 2013 at 10:35 pm
…
Not quibbling that it was hot … Sydney summers are generally hot like Melbourne when the N’Westerlies blow in from the interior … in this case there was a blocking high pressure system in the north which also delayed the Monsoon until late January.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/hottest-summer-record-in-australia-not-even-close-says-uah-satellite-data/
Streetcred says: I believe that you’re having record snowfalls at the moment … so heavy that it’s collapsing the roofs of farm buildings.
Yes we are and at the same time having record breaking wind storms. I tell you the weather has been crazy here. Droughts through summer and now record rainfalls in Nelson. One extreme to the other. Hell we had snow here in Wellington a couple of years ago. Unheard of.
Quote: “Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found.”
Quoi? I thought it’s winter down south, actually? Were all the geography-lessons I attended when I was a kid in vain?
mogamboguru says: “Quoi? I thought it’s winter down south, actually? Were all the geography-lessons I attended when I was a kid in vain?”
Ha ha. You are a funny guy!! At least I hope you are being funny.
NICK STOKES,
Wow! Congratulations Nick for your thoughtful 27 minutes of deep cogitation (at most) in responding to two separate comments!
My simpleton comment was that according to the BOM, ALL of the Oz States and Territories each individually showed that they were ALL relatively cool last summer. So in your remarkably rapid divided response, did you have time to examine all of the sixteen BOM histograms for mean and max summer T’s?
Bob Fernley-Jones says: June 28, 2013 at 1:00 am
“So in your remarkably rapid divided response, did you have time to examine all of the sixteen BOM histograms for mean and max summer T’s?”
I didn’t have to, and they aren’t histograms, they are time series. The information is well summarised in a table BoM report on the summer that I linked above – each state’s anomaly and ranking. And exactly as I said, the states did not individually set records, but since they were all well above average, for the country it was a record.
What’s your point anyway? Do you think they got the arithmetic wrong? What’s your “correct” answer? The numbers are there.
Philip Bradley says:
June 27, 2013 at 8:25 pm
//////////////////////
Now that you have pointed it out, I do recall some comment being made on paint.
It goes to show how some subtle issue 9although if you were to stop and think about issues, I suspect most people would cite screen maintenance as a potential issue), can have an effect, may be even a significant effect since we are meant to be getting alarmed at just fractions of a degree changes. It also goes to reinforce that weather stations are not laboratory controlled experiments and it reinforces the view that all types of margins of errors can creep in, especially when one is over straining the effectiveness of the system (in this case weather stations set up for general meteorological info0 and/or the robustness of the data produced.
“Simon says:
June 28, 2013 at 12:40 am
Yes we are and at the same time having record breaking wind storms.”
Having lived in Wellington myself, this is what the MSM would have you believe. Unfortunately for alarmists and the MSM, history suggests that, although it was an extreme event, it wasn’t a record breaker. 10th April 1968 the storm had wind speeds of over 100 knots at the harbour entrance.
Patrick says: Actually the peak wind gust last Thursday was 200Km’s an hour (108 knots) at Mt Kaukau, and that exceeded anything the Wahine storm had to throw at us… but lets not argue over a few Kmph’s. The point I was making is we have had an amazing run of extremes in the last two years. Drought, floods, snow, highest ever temps. It really has been one crazy ride.
Streetcred says:June 28, 2013 at 12:35 am
“Not quibbling that it was hot … Sydney summers are generally hot like Melbourne when the N’Westerlies blow in from the interior … in this case there was a blocking high pressure system”
Streetcred says: June 27, 2013 at 6:19 pm
“Well mate, I can tell you … I live in the Queensland tropics and that is bullshit, we had a quite unremarkable summer.
So OK, it wasn’t hot, and it was caused by a blocking high.
BTW, I know very well where Mt Isa is. My grandfather surveyed it in about 1930. There is a place in the region, Stokes QLD 4823, named after him.
“Simon says:
June 28, 2013 at 1:42 am”
I think you are out by a little more than a few KPH.
http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Kids/NZDisasters/Giselle.asp
I am not here trying to prove or disprove anything, but lets be historically accurate based on available information. Two weeks after I arrived in Wellington, the region was rattled by an earth quake (I was on the 9th floor of a building on The Terrace). Living in Island Bay, frequenting The Brass Monkey Café and looking at the pictures of the Wahine sinking, and then Mt. Ruapehu spat chunks the size of houses, I did a little research.
Start with a flat-out mis-characterization and mis-representation of the data, and the rest is easy. Don’t be shy; the bigger the distortion you start with, the more grandiose the foolishness you can inspire or mandate.
“Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found.”
I suppose the sun didnt have anything to do with it, like a warm afternoon after a hot day. Sun peaked activity in late 20th century, now its a warm afternoon, Big deal. Cooler night is coming.
Nick Stokes:
The record temperature (however obtained) was only one part of the Angry Summer report- however, here are some other not so widely known facts straight from Acorn:
» 2012 had the coldest winter minima since 1983
» 2012, at +0.11C, was the 36th warmest year- equal with 1995, just ahead of 1957.
» The past three years- 2010, 2011, and 2012- were the coolest of the decade.
» 2012 was cooler than 9 of the previous 10 years- beaten by 2011. 2011 was exactly at the median anomaly for the past 103 years, at -0.13C, according to Acorn’s homogenised record. So I wonder why the Angry Summer authors only concentrated on the summer and neglected to mention the entire year.
The mid-troposphere data, showing Australia’s summer to be 14th warmest of the past 35, is far superior to your beloved surface temperatures, as satellites cover the entire land mass, unlike the 104 Acorn non-urban stations which leave enormous areas of the continent to be infilled by area averaging as there are only a few stations hundreds of kilometres apart. And don’t get me started on the quality of the Acorn record.
1968 in Sydney. Hot I was 9 months pregnant I sweltered for 2 weeks, with temps over 104 F some days. High humidity. A southerly came up from the sea, and a thunderstorm, and the temps dropped 40 F in a hour. We felt chilled at night. That’s Sydney, they get Southerly Busters, in fact my grandfather came here in 1892 and 1894 with the British Royal Navy and he described a ship that turned turtle at Port Jackson, a coal carrier because it was caught in a Southerly buster. And a storm off Qld, which sunk several American ships with crews from what he called a hurricane. But on the Northern Tablelands, not Sydney or Tamworth, a summer temp over 30 C is unusual. But our night time temperatures drop dramatically. Sure Sydney and the western suburbs have hot days. I remember going to a dog show in 1978 in Penrith, dogs died through unusual heat, 45 C and I was stewarding and with a hangover too, I remember refreshing my lipstick before the judging recommenced, and my lipstick had melted and dropped all over my chin and clothes. That’s hot! But the temps dropped alarmingly that evening, another southerly buster came through.
How can a report of record 2013 summer come out with 10 weeks of summer to run? Are these people stupid or do they have very accurate crystal balls?
Just using the term “angry” to describe a natural phenomenon disqualifies them from consideration. Anthropomorphism is the fallacy of projecting your preconceptions.
Is it me? Or do I get the impression that they think everybody is stupid? They have to tell their puter models to show warming for a given amount of C2 in the atmosphere, based on an unknown quantity called “sensitivity”! They then run said puter model, it then shows warming for a given amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, based on a unknown quantity called sensitivity, & they call it proof!!!! How bizarre indeed.
As soon as I heard the University of Melbourne was involved I knew “The Angry Summer” couldn’t be due to anything else other than the Karolysis force.
I live in Australia (Tasmania) and travel around the place on business and can advise that summer 2012/13 was just another summer. It gets hot from time to time and we get summer storms. We get cyclones ( hurricanes/typhoons) up north. Have had summers like this for ever. David Karoly is an alarmist and on the public funding teat so he is paid to trot this sort of drivel out. I understand the technical term in academia is LPU ( least publishable unit – i.e. a paper than can just get published and therefore earn funding from government). He is also a co author of the now discredited Gergis et al antipodean hockey stick paper that came back to whack them on the backside ( we call it the boomerang effect – its a local specialty). He is in other words IMHO a two bit (two bob here) activist hack. He, Lewny Lewandowsky and John Cook the Books probably follow each other on Twitter like puppies following and sniffing each others backsides.
John Marshall, the article should have said the 2012 / 2013 summer. You know summertime?
Things like Christmas, New Year, lazy school holidays at the beach, cold beer, cricket, cicadas and sunburn. Anyone who doesn’t experience this must be living in the wrong hemisphere.
@- TomRude
“Permanence of high pressure agglutinations fed by powerful anticyclones of dense polar air hardly makes a case for a warming world…”
Actually….. It does.
One of the predictions from adding more energy to the system IS more extreme weather cause by disruption to the circumpolar jet streams.
The effect of this has been evident in the N hemisphere, and this effect on the Australian summer is a similar process. While it might be possible to find some data set for mid troposphere temps that does not show the extremes recorded at ground level, and there may have been LOCAL events that exceeded the maximum from the whole of the continent, there really isn’t any basis for claiming the last Australian summer was within the average range.
I love when people attempt to make the argument that models should trump satelites in reliability of temperatures. Is there any wonder that this theory of theirs is falling apart?
Nick,
My point was the ‘dumbing down’ of the temps in the new ACORN data set which means that the temp record is being corrupted.
In Jan 1896, Bourke had a Jan average of 43.4C. There was a major heatwave, especially in the eastern states – over 400 people died.
Of course, any weather records before this are not recognised by the BOM.
In 1923-1924. a heatwave of 160 days of over 100F was recorded in Marble Bar.
Australia’s hottest temp was recorded in Jan 1960.
What caused these?
2013 seems to be caused by a late and poor monsoon season and blocking highs.
i was so excited about Gillard going I forgot the SH summer period. I retract all I blogged above, it is wrong.
But the paper was model led so wrong just for that reason.
izen says:
June 28, 2013 at 4:28 am
“One of the predictions from adding more energy to the system IS more extreme weather cause by disruption to the circumpolar jet streams.”
Please cite your source. I am interested in the date of said source. I am pretty confident this “prediction” was made after the fact.
To correct you: The prediction was that polar regions warm up faster than tropical regions, therefore diminishing the energy differences that are necessary to drive “more extreme weather”.
BTW, please cite the IPCC’s definition for “more extreme weather”.
Nick Stokes says:
June 28, 2013 at 1:23 am
“And exactly as I said, the states did not individually set records, but since they were all well above average, for the country it was a record.”
You wouldn’t have written that sentence if you knew about Simpson’s paradox. Because it’s a meaningless statement.
Nick Stokes says:
June 27, 2013 at 7:02 pm
“I live on the ground, and report what was recorded. All I see offered elsewhere here is lower troposphere.”
A prediction of the CO2AGW theory is that the troposphere should warm faster than the surface.
So, are you saying that the CO2AGW theory is bunkum because you observe a hotter surface while the tropospheric record shows no warming?
That’s great, Nick. We can agree that the CO2AGW theory has been falsified.
Now, the climate scientists must come up with a new theory and make predictions that can then be verified.
Agreement at last.
Izen, right more cold air expulsed from the poles is a result of global warming… LOL What’s next? The Polar Front?
Al Gore’s crazy weather is metastasizing into angry summer, and it is indeed a tumor on all our science communities and public awareness of science.
“One of the predictions from adding more energy to the system IS more extreme weather cause by disruption to the circumpolar jet streams.”
Where is this from, no observed science supports this.
The more energy in the system the difference between the pole and equator is reduced. The jet stream is pushed north in the NH or south in the SH. The further south the jet stream is the more surface area weather is disrupted by this. When energy is increased pushing the jet stream north, this lowers the surface area in contact with it.
Nick (Stokes), you’ll love this one. You’d said that all you saw was lower troposphere. So I went to get the data from the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT). This is their network of high quality reference stations shown here. I wrote a short program in R to download the data, and after much futzing around got it all downloaded … only to find out that the latest data in their dataset is for December of last year …
That means that when Karoly said
he was only talking about the privileged few allowed access to such secrets, not common plebians like myself.
So Nicky me hearty, whenever the Aussies extract digit and actually post the data, I’ll get back to you. I can tell you right now, however, that it’s not looking promising. This is because I do have the data for the first month of the “angry” summer, December … and far from being the warmest December on record, the ACORN-SAT stations averaged 1.7° cooler than their warmest December …
w.
The summer in Oz was dry and sunny, so average temperatures were up a bit, but the extreme heat was short lived in every capital city, and lots of people are sceptical about the ‘angry dummer’. Here in Hobart we scored our hottest day ever, (41.8C on Jan 4), followed by a cool period during which the temperature failed to reach 20C on seven occasions. We had a couple more hot days in February and March. Overall summer was warmest ever, but there have been summers when the individual months were hotter. There was sunshine on the cooler days, so instead of scoring a lot of 16 and 17 we had 18 and 19 instead, That was our ‘angry’ summer. The Hobart BOM was relocated before summer. The office at Ellerslie Rd was demolished and was replaced by a substantial block of luxury units. The equipment is still located on the same patch of grass, but the microclimate might’ve warmed a little thanks to the new building acting as a wind break and a reflector of morning sunshine from its ample windows.
Sydney had fewer days over 30 than usual, but one of them was the hottest day ever at its very long term site – a site which must surely be one of the world’s best examples of UHI. Observatory Hill is completely dwarfed by tall buildings on one side, it lies next to a huge traffic artery, part of the adjacent harbor is now a vast concourse, North Sydney lies just a mile across the water, and the land to the west of Sydney is urbanised to the foot of the Blue mountains. Every wind that blows at Observatory Hill picks up urban heat. It’s surprising that the 1939 record stood so long – it should’ve been broken sooner than this year if AGW was really happening.
If we want to be pedantic Australia’s summer started on Dec 1st 2012, and ended in February 2013, obviously our hottest months are January and February, and we are now in the beginning of winter. And some states are hotter than others, gosh, we are an island continent. Melbourne is not a city directly on an ocean front, but Sydney is. So two months of temps dictate an angry summer, what about the rest of the year! I give up! Roll on the next general election, because Kevin Rudd the returned prime minister is a not going to change our weather even if he constrains the present carbon tax.
Exactly. That’s why the average temp for Australia is not determined by a thermometer in Geelong. Where do you get your data for surface temperatures from? Your backyard? Anecdotes from the media or friends? Or do you have a comprehensive data set from weather stations that tells you that average temperatures across Australia last summer was “one of the coldest”?
jimmi_the_dalek,
December 2012 was the 5th warmest in a century. January 2013 was the warmest ever, and February was about 20th warmest in 100 years. Together they made up the warmest summer on record for surface temperatures.
Spreading the data across the three months lowers the impact of the 10 days in January. The top 5 hottest summers are ranked:
2012
1998
1982
1972
2005
The mean surface temp trend for Australian summers is definitely positive, so it should not really be a surprise that we have seen a record-breaker. If temps continue to go up in general, then we’ll see that happen again.
The temperature measurements derived from Sydney were measured at a location well known for UHI effects
The hottest places in were generally inland, where there is not much urban buildup. You can see from the anomaly map that the major cities do not show up as hotspots.
http://www.bom.gov.au/web03/ncc/www/awap/temperature/maxave/3month/colour/history/nat/2012120120130228.gif
No real wonder why Australia got seduced by modelling. Seems to go back to the 1980’s when Dr Neville Nicholls was encouraged to release his excellent work on predictability of Monsoonal rain patterns based on the discovery of the El Nino and La Nino phases of the Southern Oscillation. Scientific observation based on changes in atmospheric pressure, direction of prevailing winds and changes in sea surface temperatures.
His work gave great credibility to the Bureau of Meteorology and that didn’t suit the C.S.I.R.O. who were trying to promote the supposed superiority of weather predictions using the magic of “forcasting” by using “mathematical modelling” and acording to the C.S.I.R.O. its division of Atmospheric Research was “actually calculating the weather scientifically” proving better than the Bureau’s “seasonal forecasts” which rely on historical trends”
At the time this type of statement quite angered the B.O.M. weather scientists and In my view the era of “sciency sorcery” began though in a subsequent review, it said the CSIRO mathematical approach had shown “some predictive capacity”, it concluded the work suffered from a “fundamental problem” since it was based on the mistaken assumption that the atmosphere was “completely deterministic” and could be reduced to a series of mathematical equations”
Page 416 -418 100 Years of the Bureau of Meteorology, The Weather Watchers by David Day as the Official history, complete with the endorsement of Geoff Love the Director of Meteorology and published by Melbourne University Publishing. (complete with biliography of original source documents)
In the end under the Hawke Labour Government the sciency rather than scientific has been said to have been used to promote the modelling as fact and easier to fudge and confuse, which is helpful to Politicians and attracts funding and easily “sold” as hard weather science even to the weather oriented citizens of Australia.
The end result is that B.O.M. could hardly be blamed for embracing such a deceptive sciency computer aided agenda to secure fundin. The rivally still exists with each trying to outdo the other in producing scary reports, hence the publication of the CSIRO notorious pamphlett confirming an ongoing spate of drought in the future, used to promote the building of over priced, over sized desalination plants 13 years late.
With enough years of rain now, they are to be mothballed for years? Decades? but with locked in political deals so that current water users will be saddled with hugerecurrent costs, when a series of river dams that “non qualified climate commissioner” Tim Flannery famously said would NEVER fill? would have saved flooding, and provided stored water for years to come at a miniscule cost of the overpriced mothballed desal plants !!.
Politically the nonsense and no science aspect, has been a wasted opportunity of money and effort that could have been better directed, and it is sad that so much worldwide waste has compounded the serious state of science and that this government is wasting further money embracing the rediculous fiction of the likes of John Cook, Lewandowski and University pal review that allows poor science,like this extremist c laim as propaganda fodder to be regurgitated by media and government propaganda arms like the Australian Broadcast Commission that flaps in left wing circles, in ignorance of its charter.
Of course the vandalisation of historical temperature methods to lipstick the propaganda by lowering past high temperature records, is just one aspect in this whole foolish agenda by self serving grant hunting organisations, and compliant media in this country.
How despondent they were at Julia’s demise as Prime Minister and will the average Australian be fooled by the boyish return and “glad handing” facade of the recycled Kevin Rudd with the same old, same old agenda, of a tired party, pushing a left of centre unscientific line. Time will tell I guess, if the Australian voter can be fooled into accepting this modelled mess as anything approaching science
Nick Stokes said:
“…exactly as I said, the states did not individually set records, but since they were all well above average, for the country it was a record.”
‘barry’ said essentially the same thing.
Give it up. The planet shows you’re wrong.
What have global stratospheric temperatures to do with the topic?
dbstealey
Don’t worry Nick Stokes just tries to earn his place in the “guilty party” who will wear the badge of shame along with the dodgy science propaganda that has been churned out. They earn’t it, they should wear it as the CO2 bubble fades and they try a new scare. Unemployed politicians, unemployed climate commissioners and others not worth their salt.
dbstealey says: June 29, 2013 at 1:33 am
“The planet shows you’re wrong.”
Not from your link, which shows cooling in the lower stratosphere, one of the signs of AGW.
To Nick Stokes:
I think you might do well to check whether the average of all the states gives a record because there are more stations then previously.
In other words, more stations measuring heat means averages across an area can go up because they are denser spatial readings, not because the actual amount of heat has gone up..
To be even clearer: say you have two stations 100km apart which both give 38C. The average is 38C. Add a station in the middle which reads 40 C and the overall average has gone up, even though the temperature might have been 40 there before anyway. The effect of adding stations may increase the average even if the temperature doesn’t change, especially if these stations are in warm areas such as the desert, or you guessed it, on excessively hot days.
thingadonta,
Why would newly added stations perforce bring about warmer readings? What is inherent in adding new stations that must bring the average up instead of down, or unchanging? Without giving a reason for this behaviour, woudn’t you expect that newer stations could raise or lower the average temperatures equally?
The Bureau of Meteorology was established in 1908, and immediately standardised procedures, placement and equipment. There are 60 weather station records from 1910, and 112 currently in use. The weather station network has comprehensive metadata on station movement and changes in the nearby natural and man-made environment.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/ACORN-SAT_Observation_practices_WEB.pdf
If you want to check station start dates at a glance, this is a good page.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/#tabs=Data-%26-network
REPLY: And yet, they can’t be bothered at BoM to fix problems like Tmax/Tmin reversals – errors go unrepaired in BoM climate reference network
http://wp.me/p7y4l-n90
– Anthony
This is a more comprehensive review of the Australian weather monitoring network
http://cawcr.gov.au/publications/technicalreports/CTR_049.pdf
It is possible to have a warmer temperature at 9:00 am than at any other time of the day. It’s rare, but can happen. 917 readings out of 4 million seems feasible. TimTheToolman mentions this, citing the BOM paper I linked above.
Willis posted a 0.02% error on the basis of T-Min exceeding T-Max. The BOM states;
which is greater than Willis’ by an order of magnitude.
Willis seemed to think it was enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but error of a few tenths of a percent is very good considering the amount of data, it’s age, and that most of it was recorded by hand. Had he the patience, he could simply have flipped the data for the 917 measurements. But the impact on min/max/ave seasonal temperatures would be totally insignificant, and the impact on the question of the angry summer would be the same. Willis’ point that the data set is perforce unusable is simply rhetorical.
REPLY: No, wrong, you don’t get it. The minimum temperatures listed are HIGHER than the maximum temperatures for the same date. That’s not a synoptic condition, nor can you “flip” it to make it right.
But as we’ve seen, like Racehorse Stokes, you’ll defend most anything as long as it trends to warmer. Nick at least has the integrity to put his name to his claims. – Anthony
Nick Stokes posts a nonsense link about “signs” of AGW, which include lots of ‘climate change blogs’. Of course, all of those blogs parrot the nonsense threatening runaway global warming, and citing their 97% “authority”.
But the only real “sign” of AGW has failed to appear: as CO2 steadily rises, the planet has been in a protracted stasis — there is no global warming. The central belief of catastrophic AGW believers has failed to appear.
As KenB comments:
“Don’t worry. Nick Stokes just tries to earn his place in the ‘guilty party’ who will wear the badge of shame along with the dodgy science propaganda that has been churned out.”
Stokes’ link is to always-wrong propaganda blogs, which have been unable to explain the lack of global warming following the rise in CO2. It is no wonder that the public is losing interest in the global warming scare. The planet is not doing what was predicted by Nick Stokes and the rest of the alarmist crowd; it is not warming.
Barry says:
“What is inherent in adding new stations that must bring the average up instead of down, or unchanging?”
It doesn’t have to go up, it could also go down, although if one is only presenting data of warm periods such as summer, it will more likely go up for a variety of sampling, statistical, and spatial reasons. I can give some examples from my own field of mineral exploration.
Several points:
The search radius between stations changes. If you change the search radius between datasets because you now have more stations, (which some software does automatically) you can sometimes increase the average even if the temperatures are the same. This may be because you use statistical methods which downgrades values past a certain distance, so once the distances have shortened, then obviously the values are no longer downgraded in those areas. Also, other methods give blank readings past a certain search radius (which doesn’t look good on maps), others keep the values the same with distance. Inappropriate and different statistical methods can change the average not only with different distances between stations, but also between datasets with different numbers of stations, especially if you change the method between datasets.
Let me give some examples from my field, which simply makes me very suspicious. I work in mineral exploration. If a company finds a gold anomaly on surface, it takes samples at a certain spatial distance to give an indication of both surface distribution and average grade. From experience, I can tell you, that you can increase the apparent average grade by taking more samples where you know the gold already is (especially if you mishandle the changed spatial density). (With climate, not only can you take more readings WHERE you know its already warmer, but you can also take more readings when you know WHEN its already warmer, such as in summer). The amount of gold hasn’t changed, all you have changed is the average grade due to selective sample density. Note that gold is very sensitive to these sorts of factors, for a variety of geochemical and other reasons, which is also partly why it is extremely difficult to explore and find. (Diamonds are another one which is extremely difficult to find, but that is another story).
Some companies do this routinely to claim they find more gold each time they have to report to the stockmarket, when all they are doing is increasing density of sampling. Sampling is not a perfect science, and neither is detection of microscopic gold distribution, so what one tends to get when one samples areas where one knows there is already gold is increasing amounts of high outliers due to sampling defects, which further increases grades. Such grades are then spatially modelled to give an apparently increasing grade, but at no point has the average gold changed, it is only the way the sampling density has changed, which are also in areas where high sample outliers are more likely to occur in the first place. Not only this, you get differential effects near surface due to differential weathering effects on gold distribution (high iron at surface for example tends to give you high readings, so to increase grades just take samples with more iron in them). You can begin to see how complicated it is to determine how much average grade one has near surface. Drillholes to depth clean up a lot of this, but as far as I know, there are ‘drillholes’, so to speak, in climate science.
This is only a few ways such can occur, which I show from my own field. But Nick Stokes also states that in no Australian state has a new individual high record occurred, even though the overall average is a high record. This is a red flag. It is quite plausible that this indicates an artifact of changed spatial density and distribution over time, as well as selective sampling methods.
As a general rule, with most datasets in mineral exploration, if you increase sample density in areas with weak mineralisation the average grade tends to go down unless you deal with the data very carefully, and the opposite happens when you increase sample density in areas with stronger mineralisation, the average tends to go up.
The whole process is actually extremely sensitive to sample methodology, changes to density of sampling, and number of stations etc. Do you think the climate modellers are always diligent in their quality control, or even understand all the complicating factors? I doubt it.
That’s what I understood.
It took a while for stations to use the same time of observation protocol. Measurements were taken and/or thermometers reset at different times of day. Nighttime temps can be warmer than daytime, depending on weather conditions. I wondered if some of the recorded temps may have been a result of twice-a-day recording practises and unusual weather patterns. No, flipping the values wouldn’t necessarily make it right, excepting in cases where the temps were hand-written into the wrong boxes. Can’t assume that’s what has been done for each of these anomalies, of course.
Could BOM surface data error in the order of one tenth of 1% account for a 0.2C increase over the previous warmest summer? I doubt it.
REPLY:Weather conditions don’t cause Tmin to be higher than Tmax, only error in recording or collating can cause that. This is what quality control is for, and obviously none was done, or these errors would not exist. – Anthony
“Weather conditions don’t cause Tmin to be higher than Tmax, only error in recording or collating can cause that.”
No, it’s a matter of definition. They record, and state, the min/max as read for a 9-9 24 hour period. If you want to align that with a calendar day, you have to make an assumption about which side of midnight each fell. Their convention in the absence of other information is to assign the max to the previous day, and the min to the current. That can lead to the max assigned to yesterday being less than the min recorded yesterday..
This matters very little for calculating monthly and annual averages. They just average the max’s and min’s separately.
So much bull dust here, I can hardly see beyond smoke and mirrors. These scientists think that we are all gullible and quite honestly, temps go up and down, and one city does not make Australia. We have alpine, tropical, sub tropical, desert and temperate regions, even a monsoon region. Weather flucuates all the time, and weather kills us, not climate! OK, warmer temps suit us better and we do have heat waves and unseasonal cold snaps. We had snow in November in NSW years ago, that fell upto the Qld border, I remember writing to relatives in UK, sending them a picture and stating “See we have had snow earlier than you”. But we didn’t all get on the band wagon, saying ‘the next ice age cometh’. But if you want to lay a bet, I would say from historical and archaeological evidence, we are heading more towards a mini ice age again. And hopefully not. One thing is correct, from evidence, a exceptional warm period precedes a glacial period.
But there is more to this, and the thing is, scientists and academics have reaped billions to prove global warming is a disaster awaiting us because of fossil fuel burning, sea rises (will lower if it gets a lot colder) and that is the only solution they can give. It is now proven without doubt, carbon emissions (not CO2) do not effect the climate, but create pollution. Has anyone now been given grants to create strategies to improve soil fertility and water conservation in Australian soils. Well I have a diploma in organic agricultural production, and we can make our soils more productive rather than less productive, but the academics think they know better.
One university (the UNE) is given a grant to remove nitrious oxides from soils, we laughed, it is easy add Gypsum and make sure the soils don’t get waterlogged (too much clay impactation and natural drainage. Then add organic minerals (rock phosphate instead of super phosphate) lime etc., after a soil test. We sent some of our early soil tests to America by the way. And within 3 years our soil horticultural area was almost perfect. Sorry to go on, but it amazes me that there is so much self serving bullshit from those who receive money to prove their original poxy hypotheses had substance and credibility.