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.
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?