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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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.