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.
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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.