Guest Essay by David Archibald
According to an article in The Australian, the Greens have blamed bushfires and cyclones on the Government’s inaction on climate change. Well the good news for the Greens is that they are wrong and therefore they can worry about something else instead, if they wanted to. Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit so climate can’t be the cause for bushfires and cyclones. Exhibit A is Australia’s lower tropospheric temperature anomaly as measured by satellites with the data available from Dr Roy Spencer’s group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville:
Figure 1: Australia Lower Topospheric Temperature Anomaly 1978 – 2018
The satellites that measure atmospheric temperature went up in 1978. The great thing about the satellite record is that it can’t be fiddled with. Figure 1 shows the monthly departure from the 1981-2010 mean. As at February 2018, Australia’s atmospheric temperature was 0.18°C higher than that 30-year mean. The range over that period was 3.83°C so the February anomaly was only 4.7 percent of that range. Now the Greens are sensitive souls but not one of them – man, woman or equivocal – would be able to tell a difference of 0.18°C.
Some parts of Australia have missed out on global warming altogether. A large part of Australia’s coal production comes from the Hunter Valley which has only just got back to the temperature it was at Federation:
Figure 2: Nobby’s Head, Newcastle Annual Average Temperature 1862 – 2017
Figure 2 shows that Newcastle was much warmer in the second half of the 19th century than it was during the second half of the 20th century.
If Australia hasn’t warmed, has anything warmed? Well not really. If you follow the link through to Dr Spencer’s site you will find a graph of the global temperature anomaly. As at February 2018, the anomaly for the globe was only 0.20°C. Luckily we have instruments with such precision otherwise we would not be aware of the warming that is supposed to have happened.
Well the Greens are going to worry about something and perhaps global warming is the most innocuous thing they could occupy themselves with, even though our power prices have gone through the roof and industries have started closing. But Clive Hamilton shows that a climate idiot can be repurposed to something useful. His case is in fact inspirational – he used to go on about droughts and floods, just repeating himself endlessly, but recently came out with a book that details how Labor is selling out this country to China. Sam Dastyari wasn’t an isolated case. Though he was a senator in the Australian parliament, he prostituted himself as a sort of personal servant to his Chinese handler. Some would call it treason.
It is more likely though that Clive Hamilton’s damascene converion won’t be repeated. The Greens are completely impervious to evidence. Even if there is no substance to global warming they can still believe that it is coming, eventually. More concerning are the grinning loons who should know better. If you take yourself to pages four and five of BHP’s 2017 annual report, you will find photos of Ken MacKenzie and Andrew MacKenzie respectively, Chairman and CEO respectively. Then take yourself to page 52 in which BHP states its “position on climate change”. BHP, via the IPCC, has found that “warming of the climate is unequivocal”. So, Messrs MacKenzie, 0.2°C is unequivocal when the temperature range is almost 20 times that?
The CEO MacKenzie was once trustee of a Marxist-oriented UK think tank, Demos, and thus it is likely that his belief in global warming is ideological rather than based on careful consideration of the evidence. This is a matter for BHP’s shareholders who should consider the parallels with Rex Tillerson’s Exxon. Rex Tillerson, as the US Secretary of State, was a believer in global warming and wanted the US to sign onto the Paris climate treaty. He was undone by wanting to preserve the Iranian path to nuclear weapons. In his prior role of CEO of ExxonMobil, he dropped US$30 billion on the purchase of a shale gas company, XTO Energy in 2009. BHP followed ExxonMobil’s example in 2011 by plunging into US shale gas production. According to this ABC article, BHP put $50 billion into shale gas production. That investment is now worth about $20 billion. Witness this graphic from a BHP presentation from 20th February 2018:
Figure 3: BHP Return on Capital Employed
From Figure 3, it seems that BHP’s shale gas investment in the US is providing a return of about minus three percent. Of course BHP is now selling this asset. According to the ABC article, BHP did a trial run by selling some shale acreage in 2014 and from that article:
As the oil price tanked in 2014, BHP dumped a chunk of its holdings in the Texan Permian basin for just $US75 million to an outfit called Silverback Exploration. As the hedge fund Elliott Management pointed out in its scathing critique of BHP, Silverback sold the same reserves last year for $US855 million as prices started to recover.
Messrs MacKenzie did not buy into the US shale assets, but the people who did also selected the MacKenzies to follow them. And their track record is no better. Everything is pointing to belief in global warming as being a reliable indicator that a person is a mindless fool, a witless idiot. If they can’t get global warming right and persist in believing in something for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, then how can they trusted to make the right decision in any instance? They cannot. BHP shareholders, Australian voters – please bear this in mind.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.
Data won’t change many minds – it’s about politics not science.
How is making a claim based on the current spot temperature in relation to a long term mean any more meaningful than an alarmist screaming at the peak of the recent El Nino that we are now more than half way to 2 degrees of warming?
Rather than challenging this kind of unscientific stupidity, its seems that WuWT is now endorsing it.
Sad.
By eye, I would be fairly confident that there is a small upwards drift in that data. Probably about 0.5 deg C over the full record.
And also
“As at February 2018, Australia’s atmospheric temperature was 0.18°C higher than that 30-year mean.”
It actually refers to the troposphere above Australia. And, of course, cherrypicks a cool month influenced by La Nina. Which was, in fact, fairly free of bushfires.
Nick Stokes – it also happens to be last month
The latest complete month, i.e. up to date, most recent, does not seem like a cherry-pick to me.
Nic Stokes What do bushfires have to do with global warming? If you say they are directly related then there was no global warming cause there were no bush fires. Is global warming like a ghost who pops in and out to do his damage; now you see it and now you dont? Something like the missing heat that is supposed to boil all our oceans eh Nick?
” cherrypicks a cool month”……….you’re right…should have picked March 2024
All bush fires are started by global warming.
Even the ones that started in the cold ice ages and the ones that started in the much warmer Devonian.
(Global warming, however, is not to blame for bush fires in the Cambrian period because there were no bushes then and, consequently, there were no bush fires. In addition, global warming is not to blame for the bush fires in the Archean because there were no bush fires since there wasn’t enough oxygen to start a fire).
According to the best data sets we have, there is no warming.
The raw US temperatures are flat. The USCRN is flat. The satellites are flat.
Once you start adjusting things, all bets are off.
“does not seem like a cherry-pick to me”
If you pick February, it was 0.18° warmer then that average. If you pick Jan, it was 0.42. If you choose last October it was 0.86. Try last July? 1.03. You may prefer November, -0.12. Take your pick – there are cherries.
Or if you want the latest month, there will be another one soon.
I’ll read on, but I wonder if it has been noted that David Archibald is not WUWT, nor the voice of WUWT, nor endorsed by all the readers of WUWT. “Unscientific stupidity” rarely goes unchallenged by the commenters here.
Post such as this are about the same as an ‘Op-Ed’ in a newspaper.
Originally the meaning of Op-Ed was ‘opposite the editorial page’ and, thus, not the position of the editor(s) of the newspaper – although it might be either nearly the same as, or nearly the opposite of.
Bush fires are caused by ignition from whatever source. It is the quantity of available fuel and prevailing weather conditions that determine how manageable they are and therefore how big they become.
Nicks knowledge of Australian bush fire history does no equate to his knowledge of science. The largest and most destructive fire on the east coast occurred ion 1851 at temperatures that exceed anything that we have seen during the last few years.
The most destructive fires that have occurred during recorded history in Western Australia occurred in 1937, 1951 and 1961.
“Nicks knowledge of Australian bush fire history does no equate to his knowledge of science. The largest and most destructive fire on the east coast occurred ion 1851 at temperatures that exceed anything that we have seen during the last few years.”
If true, that would only reinforce the connection between heat and bushfires. But there is very little evidence that it is true. The 1851 fires occurred soon after Victoria was first settled. Twelve people died, despite a total absence of fire fighting capability, or even transport to flee.
A link to BoM’s Australian climate change site networks.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/#tabs=Tracker&tracker=site-networks
large amounts of data free.
Climate Change is a Political Battle, Not a Scientific One
Real climate scientists have been arguing against the climate alarmists for years, and they have done a great and helpful job. With basically zero resources, they have been able to at least fight the extremely well-funded climate alarmists to a stand still. With the recent election of President Trump, the balance has definitely tilted towards … Continue reading
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/climate-change-is-a-political-battle-not-a-scientific-one/
We havent exactly been winning this war. All the politicians are implementing carbon taxes Until we get all the anti CO2 legislation annulled we have to consider we are losing
True, but the tide is going in the right direction
All the politicians are implementing carbon taxes
================
it is a rare politician that doesn’t raise taxes while telling us it is for our own good. How much better off we will be with the new taxes.
The peasant revolt in England was a result of the crown taxing the peasants 1 part in 7 annually. 14%. In Canada that is about the rate of our Harmonized sales tax. On top of that we have Property taxes, Provincial Income Taxes, Federal Income Taxes and now Carbon Taxes.
We also have a thing in Canada called “Tax Free Day”. This is the first day of the year when you have finished paying your taxes and start actually putting money in your pocket. If you paid no tax at all, that would be Jan 1. And if you paid 100% tax that would be Dec 31.
In 2017, Tax Free Day was June 9. 159 out of 365 days paying your taxes. 43.5% tax. 3 parts in 7 annually. Triple the tax rate of the year 1381 AD when the peasants revolted.
In 2017, the average Canadian family with two or more people paid $47,135 in total taxes. Luckily those were Canadian $$ which aren’t worth very much.
Not winning? Are you kidding? $billions have been spent trying to prove and promote it; fully half the political class including the President for eight of the past ten years pushed it like the Gospel truth, the vast majority of the mainstream media not only promotes it but actively suppresses contrary views, and yet the citizenry isn’t buying it. That sounds a lot like winning to me.
Science is that virgin that needed to work in the whore house to get by. Now every one bangs her for a few bucks. She’s seen a few campaigns.
Rhoda- Perfectly correct and succint.
Actually with regards to bushfires they are now worse in Australia partly because of green policies themselves; large areas which used to be logged thus keeping fire loads to a minimum are now designated conservation areas. One can’t even collect firewood in many areas to save vital habitat for various creatures, but the whole bush burns down from top to bottom every decade or two anyway, wiping out pretty much everything. In addition, in many areas it is now illegal to clear vegetation adjacent to property and businesses to reduce fire hazards. This policy has led to greater loss of property and life.
add the repeat burning of some areas as they’re easiest to access to make the required total acres “managed” in the accounting..so it looks good
meanwhile the trees that are just starting to recover in 5yr after or so then get damaged and cant produce blooms, which IS a serious issue for apiarists who have to pay fees yearly to hold the areas that they havent been able to use for honey production for 10yrs or more in some areas in Victoria especially.
” large areas which used to be logged thus keeping fire loads to a minimum are now designated conservation areas.”
That is what happened to Tathra last week. And yet nothing we say or do will force the greens to face up to the direct consequences of their own policies.
When was there logging around Tathra?
“Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit so climate can’t be the cause for bushfires and cyclones. Exhibit A is Australia’s lower tropospheric temperature anomaly as measured by satellites”
Australia has some tall trees. But they aren’t affected by temperatures in the lower troposphere. Nor do the seas evaporate there. Cyclones and bushfires respond to temperatures at the surface.
‘Cyclones and bushfires respond to temperatures at the surface.’
I thought it had more to do with wind and droughty conditions which required a lightning strike.
In the old days before Europeans came to this country the local people would go walkabout and picked up dead wood as they went, to have a camp fire.
Over 50,000 years they would have successfully minimised the danger of bushfire along those walking trails.
Admittedly cyclones require the correct SST to come into existence.
In the last century we have had three exceptionally devastating days of widespread bushfire in Victoria. The first was on Black Friday, 1939, when the temperature in Melbourne reached 45.1°C, the highest to date, and which stood for nearly forty years as the highest temperature ever recorded in a state capital. The second was on Ash Wednesday, 1983, when the temperature reached 43.8°C. And the third, Black Saturday, was the new record for hot days in state capitals, at 46.4°C.
The native population of Australia burned the country from top to bottom regularly, this did three things it burned the ground freeing the fuel load, killed the baby eucalypts and wattle that are feral and allowed grasses to grow for the native animals which was their food source. The first explorers were wondrous at the beautiful open forests that you could drive wagons through. Now we have the greens wanting the forest to be feral like before the aboriginal population sorted it.
To the contrary, the they used “firestick farming” whereby they burned the bush to flush ot or kill game. This resulted in the destruction of the vast central Australian rain forest and the extinction of the large marsupials. Most remaining forests consist of fire resitant plants such as eucalyptus.
Nick Stokes writes “In the last century we have had three exceptionally devastating days of widespread bushfire in Victoria.”
Those days were hot in Melbourne because of a regular feature, hot winds from the North, the arid Centre. The winds often damage power lines and start fires. They spread fast because the winds are strong.
These hot winds are usually part of a large weather system whose temperature is sensed by satellite-borne technology. They are probably too short in time and too rare to make a meaningful difference to satellite temperatures.
Nick, I cannot see any connection between this bushfire mechanism and global warming hypotheses. Can you?
Geoff.
Nick
Contemporary records had 117 F Black Thursday, February 6, 1851. Numerous 120+s F across country in 1896.
Erasing the 19th Century is the best way to set records. And the 18th Century. And the 17th Century. And the …….well, you get the idea.
Geoff,
“They spread fast because the winds are strong.”
They spread fast because the winds are hot and strong. We get plenty of windy days, and yes, they can have bad bushfires. But our megafires have been on the hottest days. That is not a coincidence.
And AGW means more hot days.
“Contemporary records had 117 F Black Thursday, February 6, 1851. Numerous 120+s F across country in 1896.”
Can you substantiate any of that? The top temperature in Melbourne in 1896 was about 42°C. There are places in Australia where temperatures of 120+F happen, but they do not have a lot of forest.
Nick Stokes at 4.15 am,
Yes, Nick, strong winds and as I had already written, hot winds. We agree on simple observations, but we disagree with your assertion that our megafires occur on the hottest days, ergo AGW is involved.
At least one megafire was likely caused by fallen electricity. Another by lightning, another perhaps from arson. Some have been burning for a day or more before the thermometer soared high. There are many other days as hot ( within error measurement) in many other years that do not have megafires. So in terms of cause and effect, AGW seems not a cause of some fires, and very hot days, although occasionally coincident, do not give anything like a correlation.
In simple words, the megafire will happen again irrespective of any global warming mechanism. It does you no good to try to scare children and/or the ABC broadcaster with easy tales, but false.
You need to deliver science that shows that a temperature difference of under a degree can somehow influence fire intensity and frequency. I say, pull the other one, you logician in training. Geoff
Re the comments on fire-stick farming . There was an ABC Science item on this , admittedly 2008 , but Google (in its wisdom), apparently still thinks that it is relevant:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/06/19/2279784.htm
to quote
-“Man vs megafauna
Theories around remnants of extinct “megafauna” species captured the public imagination when Professor Tim Flannery’s 1994 book, The Future Eaters, controversially suggested that Aboriginal people were primarily responsible for the extinction of many species of megafauna through firestick farming, which had radically changed Australia’s ecology.
But Hiscock argues that extinctions of megafauna occurred primarily because their habitat disappeared due to climactic change, and not because of large-scale human hunting or fires.
“Attempts to explain Pleistocene extinctions as a result of the use of fire by early foragers assumed they acted in the same way as historic Aborigines,” Dr Hiscock says. He argues that archaeological evidence doesn’t support these assumptions.
While Flannery declined to comment on Hiscock’s criticism, archaeologist Judith Field agrees that “the history is not really all that simple.”
Field has been involved in extensive excavations at Cuddie Springs, an ancient lake bed in the north-west of New South Wales, where many fossils have been found in a claypan in the centre of the lake floor. Field says that this is so far the only site that has a demonstrated overlap between humans and megafauna.
“We couldn’t place most of the megafauna fossils within 100,000 years of human arrival,” she says.
“The megafauna debate has been problematic because it has homogenised Australia’s history, in a way. Most people pushing the human overkill theory are not archaeologists, because there is little archaeological evidence,” Field says.
Hiscock agrees. “In many ways the megafauna debate has had the effect of trivialising and obscuring 50,000 years of cultural life in Australia, and making natural sciences the focus of stories about the Australian past, when the history of Aboriginal people here is so dramatic and noteworthy,” he says.”-
Nick
No, I wasn’t personally there in 1851. It was reported by local papers. I understand that the thermometer devices might not meet today’s standards. That could be a fair point. But how far off could substandard devices be off. No one really knows, although the establishment thinks they know. The problem with the establishment in the entire global warming debate is they have deluded themselves into believing they are omniscient. Thus the pandemic sense of hubris. Some things are unknowable. This might be an unknowable.
Here is my larger point. History did not start in 1900. The temperatures might have been warmer pre-1900 than recorded since. Or they might not. But it’s naive to believe there were not similar Warm events before we had the modern equipment.
I fully support being skeptical about anecdotal accounts. I get it. We should rely when possible on the best scientific data, when available. But if the anecdotal accounts become so voluminous and the evidence so overwhelming, regardless of the issue, maybe it should be time to pause and rethink that tradeoff between so called spurious historical anecdotal evidence versus the more typically accepted scientific evidence.
I’ve gone down too many rabbit holes where I’ve found the establishment narrative simply wasn’t true or was incredibly more complex than portrayed on the surface.
Nick Stokes said
“The first was on Black Friday, 1939, when the temperature in Melbourne reached 45.1°C, the highest to date”
So now Nick is pushing back the date when mankind put significant CO2 in the air to cause global warming. Pretty soon the greenies will attribute the invention of fire that caused global warming. It was those damn cavemen that caused global warming. They should have stuck to just eating plants. Somehow the connection to vegetarianism and greenies is pretty solid and the ones that arent vegetarians are then hypocrites because raising cattle produces a lot of methane. Mankind has been eating animals since the invention of fire. Without it we couldnt have survived in cold climates. I guess the greenies want us all back to living in caves in tropical climates eating plants. Well i am not moving to a cave thank you
“And AGW means more hot days.”…..
“And AGW means more hot days.”…………..
Latitude you show a plot with, “Percent of days above 90.0”. What parameter is 90.0? What are its units?
right click…follow the link to Tony..and ask him
The two plots that Latitude posts are self explanatory, save that it is not clear on what basis the running average (the red line) is set, but then again one does not need to see the running average to see what the plot is showing.
The first plot deals with the number of days above 90 degF, the second with the number of days above 100 degF
So for example (by eyeball) in 1900 some 29% of days, say 105 days total, recorded temps of 90 degF or above, whereas in 2017 it was only 22% of days, say 80 days, that recorded temps of 90 deg F or above.
The same trend can be seen with 100 degF days. In 1900 some 8.75% of days ie., about 32 days were 100 degF or above, whereas in 2017 the frequency of 100 degF days had fallen to about 6%, ie., only about 22 days were recorded as at 100 degF or above.
As I understand matters, Tony has set out the source code for download on his site, so that anyone who is interested can access GHCN station data and perform their own plots, for whatever criteria they wish to look at.
Further Tony has invited Nick and Mosh to check the source code and access the GHCN data should they disagree, but as far as I am aware, they have not taken him up on that proposal
Richard, you say:
“The two plots that Latitude posts are self explanatory”
They most certainly are not.
First, there are no units in the plot. 100 could mean anything.
Second, who seriously still uses Fahrenheit? How would I know what archaic measurement system Tony uses?
Third, what adjustments to the data has Tony made? They don’t seem to be documented.
Fourth, why do Tony’s plots seem to differ from all other official records? It’s hard to assess the validity of his method without any documentation.
…the units are in Martian tanpi
“follow the link to Tony..and ask him”
IOW people just parrot this stuff. Nobody knows. Richard V says “As I understand matters, Tony has set out the source code for download on his site”. He hasn’t downloaded. Nobody has. If you actually try, you find it is a 600+ Mb download.
For my part I don’t bother, because Tony H does not seem to grasp that you have to pay some attention to the consistency of the set you are plotting. The stations in his set in 1900 were not at all the same as the set in 2000.
‘to pay some attention to the consistency of the set you are plotting. The stations in his set in 1900 were not at all the same as the set in 2000.’
I agree, neither are the Goulburn dodgy temperature readings.Time for an audit of the BOM.
This would be a good place to start.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/bom-it-staffers-questioned-by-police-over-cryptocurrency-mining-486546
‘In 2016 it replaced its critical supercomputer with a new Cray XC40 machine that boasts peak performance of 1.6 petaflops, 16 times faster than its former high-performance computer.’
The allegation is that BOM staff use this publicly funded machine to mine Bitcoin.
If true there is insufficient oversight into its use.
Time for an audit.
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/03/the-witchdoctors-at-work-abc-fourcorners-parades-four-farmers-and-a-fireman-who-believe-in-climate-change/
For those in the US and Europe the second article is instructive.
There is a lot of water going under the bridge in Australia on accuracy and repeatability of BOM records.
In the meanwhile, Australia, a net carbon sink, is rapidly greening.
http://1ggye33lc4653z56mp34pl6t.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Tutorial-Professor-Presentation.pdf
See page 20.
A boon for us, our farmers, agricultural export industries and food for the World.
“The stations in his set in 1900 were not at all the same as the set in 2000.”
…and neither are any of the sets now….but yet the claim is it doesn’t matter….because if you add them all up and average…they average out
amazing how that works…isn’t it
‘But how far off could substandard devices be off.’
They lacked a Stevenson Screen, but that is neither here nor there, they were good.
“because if you add them all up and average”
No, you create anomalies to restore consistency. Then you average the anomalies.
“No, you create anomalies “…makes it easier to hide what’s been done
…and then you create algorithms that adjust past temps every time a new data set is entered
whalah…and call it a temperature history….
“Nick Stokes March 23, 2018 at 2:18 pm
No, you create anomalies to restore consistency. Then you average the anomalies.”
Confirming “climate” is simply made up rubbish.
“One way of measuring the severity of a fire is to look at the loss of property. While raw losses from bushfires, as for most other natural disasters, show an increasing trend towards higher costs, the graph below shows what this history looks like after losses have been “normalised” to take into account that we now have more homes in harm’s way.”
?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-and-bushfires-youre-missing-the-point-19649
@Clive Bond – everything I’ve read says that Ecalyptus trees are extremely flammable – more so than the majority of trees. For example, in a list of the most flammable trees:
And what started the Black Saturday fire Nick .
A lot of bushfires start in Australia. Only on the hottest days do they burn whole towns.
Nick Stokes: “A lot of bushfires start in Australia. Only on the hottest days do they burn whole towns.”
That’s an interesting conjecture. Do you have a dataset to back this up?
they aren’t affected by temperatures in the lower troposphere.
=================
nonsense. The surface is tied to the troposphere by the lapse rate, which is determined by the gravitational constant and the amount of moisture in the atmosphere. The surface being warmer than the troposphere.
The more moisture, the closer the surface temperature to the lower troposphere temperature. The less moisture, the more the surface warms in relation to the troposphere.
Since climate science predicts an INCREASE in moisture due to global warming, this means that the surface temperature should shift closer to the cooler troposphere temperature.
If the global warming predictions are correct. Which they don’t appear to be, because according to surface records, the surface is warming faster than the troposphere. Completely at odds with what was predicted.
“Since climate science predicts an INCREASE in moisture due to global warming, this means that the surface temperature should shift closer to the cooler troposphere temperature.”
This is all theorising. The fact is that surface temperatures determine bushfire danger. When a total fire ban is declared here in Vic, it isn’t because of a forecast in the US. Or in the troposphere. It is a forecast of hot weather for the surface, in the forest area, here.
If the surface is hot, and somewhere else isn’t, and you have a theory that it should be, then you should examine the theory. It doesn’t mean that the surface isn’t hot.
In fact, you are oversimplifying the lapse rate issue. It doesn’t depend on moisture content, it depends on whether moisture is actually condensing and releasing LH. But it also depends on the interaction with IR transport. The lapse rate is created by air movement, which pumps heat down by compression effects. That is countered by LH transport, and also IR transported via GHGs.
so far nick, you have claimed that agw creates hot days, and the surface temperature (climate) record will be different than the satellite lower troposphere temperature (climate) record. a different anomaly? really? what was talked about here was perfectly reasonable and correct. for agw to be a reality, the warming should show a higher anomaly in the upper troposphere than the surface.
as for the lower troposphere, the surface records are corrupted beyond use, warmed by people who failed to program a computer correctly, and wont acknowledge it. the lie that is the homogenization process must be corrected for anyone to take our so called surface temperature record seriously. it is only going to become more obvious over time just how ridiculously wrong it is.
showing people the difference between the raw and homogenized records creates sceptics.
“Do you have a dataset to back this up?”
In Victoria, in Feb 2009, when the temperature reached 46.4°C in Melbourne, Kinglake and Marysville burnt. On Black Friday, 1939, when it reached 45.1°C, Woods Point burnt. On Ash Wednesday, 1983, we were fortunate that most towns could be defended, but Warburton was a very near thing. I don’t know of any other comparable losses.
Nick Stokes: “In Victoria, in Feb 2009, when the temperature reached 46.4°C in Melbourne, Kinglake and Marysville burnt…”
Ok then, no dataset just some anecdotes. That sounds like a really sound scientific basis for your statement.
“And AGW means more hot days.”
Actually, it means more hot nights. That’s been the case so far, in the NH, no?
Re the satellite lower tropospheric reading of Australia being 0.18C above the 1981-2010 mean in February, it’s worth comparing with the BoM’s official ACORN ground station readings.
They show Australia’s min 0.62C and max 0.66C above the 1961-90 means in February … i.e. 0.64 mean warmer. The 0.46C difference with satellite readings can largely be attributed to screen size changes, 1972 metrication, UHI, BoM reading electronic sensor maximum in one second rather than a minute or so as per slower response times in LiG thermometers, etc. Of course, there’s also a 1961-90 vs 1981-2010 baseline difference, so the warmists might claim it was hotter from 1991 to 2010.
Here in Western Australia, covering 2.65 million square kilometres, the ACORN February min was 0.19C and max 1.15C below average … i.e. February mean temp 0.66C cooler than 1961-90.
WA entered a cooler phase in early 2016 and seems to have settled on a new plateau about 0.5C lower mean temps than in the previous decade.
waclimate
Thanks for that info. I was actually wondering as I read down what the SW Aus region was like, because not that long ago it was touted as the never-ending drought portending the frying of the rest of the country.
Specifically, is SW Aus now back to its regular temps and precipitation (whatever that means)?
I believe Darwin is still substantially cooler than it was 1930-1940.
Crispin anecdotal evidence suggests that south west WA is now back to cooler summers and I think it might have something to do with the collapse of the subtropical ridge.
For my patch in SW — very close to the extreme bottom left — December was slightly warmer than average [+0.3C max and +0.7Cmin] however January was cooler [-1.2C max and -0.4C min] as was February [-1.5C max and – 0.7C min]. So a summer a bit cooler than usual.
Perth was cooler and wetter than usual
https://wamnetwork.com.au/news/perths-unusually-mild-rainy-summer/
Rainfall has declined in the SW since the early 20th century. You can dispute some of the temperature data from the SW but you can’t argue with the rainfall figures.
Was it a wetter than “normal” during the early 20th century or is it drier than “normal” now?
What’s normal ?
We’ll won’t know until our records are long enough.
1000 years will give us some idea.
Wac,
Be alarmed but not afraid of Acorn. Ask the BOM what the total error is, for a typical Acorn daily temperature. So far as I know, they have not published, especially not published prominently, any estimate of total error of daily readings.
Readers in other countries, can you report official estimates of total errors associated with the daily readings of temperature that eventually find their way (without proper error terms) into the customary and frequent official reports that seem to spread fear in some people/
Geoff.
That certainly explains why I didn’t get a tomato crop.
Messing with temperatures to make us avoid fossil fuels is bad.
Choosing SAAB Gripen to avoid fossil fules is good .
We in Europe have a cool spring and thus our radio is full with news of wildfires i Australia. That is a proof of an agenda!
Where is Nick .He can dispute any thing .He is the gate keeper of temperatures in Australia.How dare Roy Spencer tamper with our temperatures .Just accept that the temperature is NOT racing away and natural climate variation can not be ruled out for the very small warming in some areas of the world .Despite what Ben Santer James Hansen and Mike Mann tell the world the signal of so called warming caused by CO2 cannot be identified from natural cycles .
Well thank goodness for that. I was worried that CO2 was going to warm the whole atmosphere! That makes my whole day, maybe even my whole weekend.
Today it is 11 C in Ulaanbaatar (-6 at night) which is pretty decent. Some of the ice is even melting off the side roads. We will have a blistering +16 on Sunday!
But back in Waterloo it has been 10 C below normal and the sub-zero daytime highs are preventing the maple syrup from running. Gotta worry about those Mennonites.
Snow forecast for next Friday. I am going to strangle that Feb 2 groundhog.
When an ordinary climate catastrophist tells us the world is warming that means the world is either warming, staying about the same or cooling. If Clive Hamilton wrote a book saying the Chinese are misbehaving it means the Chinese are probably cleaning our streets, comforting our sick and about to announce the end of world hunger.
He’s the Michael Mann of public ethics.
Its all true but try not to be too hard on them. There is a real reason for that behaviour – although ultimately it is of course each individual’s free choice.
It was and is ‘something they eat’
Carbohydrate food. Or, sugar in all its manifestations
It is a (chemical) depressant and addictive to boot.
It’s their diet wot dun it.
Not helped by washing it down with strong beer, wine and spirits.
(Should I have put the booze bit there? You’ll only use it to miss-the-point and throw an Ad-Hom at me, won’t you? Gorgeous positive feedback – bound to end happily)
Like it does for these people – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43195977
Because mendaciousness (and paying tax) is a stressful business, but guess what, sugar fixes stress.
See the loop? See the death spiral we’re in now?
In case not, what is the most widely touted cure for Global Warming if not to: Eat More Carbohydrate?
Just as your mate will tell you when you’re feeling down, “Aw c’mon have a drink, it’ll make you feel better”
EXACTLY what any addict of any drug will tell anyone who’ll listen.
Archibold presents us with Figure 1 and makes some inference that there is nearly no warming. We can check this from the source. This is the result:
This shows the linear warming trend over Australia is 0.18°/decade. UAH measurements take in some of the stratosphere, so warms at a slower rate than other satellite data, however this is still a significant warming trend. IPCC project future warming rates at the surface of 0.15-0.30°/decade, although troposphere records shouldn’t be compared directly with surface projections. However, Archibold’s own data invalidates his claim that the troposphere over Australia has not warmed in the satellite records.
Here is the Python3 code used to plot this: https://codeshare.io/5XlwBo
Wouldn’t even buy into the argument.
It is the nature of the fuel that has changed. The composition of the flora is no longer the same. nearly all Australian grasses are not perennial for example. The remain green all year round and cannot be compared to the invasive fast growing perennial species which brown off each year…as just one example of a complex subject matter being, the nature of the vegetation and how it has changed.
Man Made Vegetation Change. (MMVC)
Is your time period just a thirty year upswing, ie, a natural warming cycle, to be followed by thirty years of cooling? It is too short a temperature series to prove anything.
No. Global averages have been trending upwards in 30-year periods since records begun. Additionally, the time period and data chosen is identical to Archibold’s. I use it to invalidate his claim.
The satellite record that is. Surface records do have a few periods of cooling, but overall trend is up throughout the records.
Mat, what is the warming trend between the two El Nino peaks 1998-2017?
Eyeballing it, it seems to be zero. I have concerns that if CO2 goes up 20-30% and the continental average of a place as big as Australia does not budge, there is something wrong with the CAGW theory.
Weather-wise there is nothing interesting happening in Australia. All things considered, I can’t see any reason to spend $1.5 trillion per year ‘fighting climate change’ to keep the temperature where it is. If Australians spent a lot more time on reclaiming desert regions, they might get something in return. Let’s say, eradicating rabbits. That might have some influence on the weather.
Bill Mollison (who passed away in September last, was at one time a rabbit catcher on a spread that had an estimated 6,000,000 rabbits. He said they left not a blade of grass uneaten. That seems like a good place to start.
Crispin, for your question about the trend between the 1998 and 2017 El Nino, the UAH lower troposphere record over Australia shows an increase of 0.05°C/decade.
For your other points, you can legitimately argue about the best ways to spend our limited budget. But what I am showing here is the main claim of Archibold’s: “Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit”, is false. I’m focussing on the science, but I encourage a robust discussion on policy grounds.
Mat,
What does it look like with proper confidence limits attached?
Geoff
Geoff,
The trend is 0.18°/decade with standard error confidence limits of ±0.02, and a two-sided p-value for the null hypothesis of zero trend of p=7.2E-13.
You cannot put a trend line on that graph. The vaiation is many times what your trend line is. That is false trend lining. In any case the actual difference .is miniscule
The confidence limits and p-values suggests you can put a trend on this data.
Here’s a small homework assignment for you, Mat. Plot two trend lines. First one from the start until 1997 and second from 1997 until the present. Now tells us about a “warming” climate. What you will see is two pretty much flat lines. Does that mean all the warming happened on one day in 1997?
Do you now see why drawing linear trend lines through data can be deceptive?
Richard, I’m simply refuting Archibold’s claim that the Australian troposphere has not warmed in the satellite era, the whole point of this article.
Mat, looks to me like you are trying to claim there is a trend. Let’s see the lines I ask you to draw.
” Let’s see the lines I ask you to draw.”
Yes, Sks noted what can be done with this:
Note: From the above graphic, “realists” (global warmers/climate changers/climate weirders/etc) acknowledge that they only view global warming based on the time frame beginning in 1970.
(thanks for the honesty)
Nick the escalator graph is valid, but as you know what goes up must come down. Convenient start point, the great climate shift of 1976 is clearly visible.
We were on a plateau (which some called a hiatus) but that is all behind us, global cooling has already set in.
Can you tell me the oscillations involved?
Nick, Didn’t Trenberth come up with a similar graph at the Royal Society? Does that make him a believer or a sceptic?
From the data displayed there is clearly a trend. However, it is one thing to have data and quite another to properly understand how it all fits together. The major problem besetting Climate Science is the lack of fundamental understanding. There is, of course, a mighty mountain of conjecture.
In fairness, the same observation can be made about many other branches of what passes for Science, these days.
A reasonable (but by no means infallible) method of gauging understanding would be to note the predictive accuracy of proposed systems. So far, we aren’t scoring too well.
For Climate Science, the likely existence of long-term trends means that one may earn a tidy income making dire predictions and enjoy the assurance that one will be safely retired (or dead) before being exposed as wrong. In a reasonable world, this would be called ‘charlatanry’.
Yes, UAH in its V6 tabular data give the trend for Australia over the record, and it is 0.18°C/decade. Considerably higher than global. And for fans of satellite consistency, V5.6 said it was 0.15.
Science Fiction: X Files material in the subject matter of the “Greens have blamed bushfires and cyclones on the Government’s inaction on climate change.”
Australia is increasingly becoming covered in fast growing weed species that brown off each year, coupled with plantations of fast growing juvenile pine and gum mono-culture. If the weed species invasion was not enough, the plantations of juvenile plantations are the final nail in the coffin.
The moronicity of blaming climate change outright is the height of ignorance. It would pay to study the nature of the fuel and how it has changed faster than weather.
6ft high phalaris and native weed thats protected aka prickly acacia as well as bracken fern in large areas -nothing but bunnies n foxes n mice heaven- abounds in Victorian SW areas and they dont burn or slash the majority as the damned trees also along and close to roads make getting machinery into it damned near impossible except for small zones.
“The satellites that measure atmospheric temperature went up in 1978. The great thing about the satellite record is that it can’t be fiddled with. Figure 1 shows the monthly departure from the 1981-2010 mean.”
The changes to the satellite record are enormous in comparison with all other records
Wanna see what un adjusted satillite data looks like?
” changes to the satellite record are enormous in comparison with all other records”
Enormous? I see +/- 0.1 degree.
Seems small for about 35 years.
J march
But up above, Mat March 23, 2018 at 6:56 am quotes error as “The trend is 0.18°/decade with standard error confidence limits of ±0.02, and a two-sided p-value for the null hypothesis of zero trend of p=7.2E-13.”
You can see +/- 0.1 deg, he quotes +/- 0.02, which shows that in the present state of climate science mythical treatment of error terms, the error is what you wish it to be.
A proper error estimate would encompass most of the range shown in the top illustration in the lower box of Steven Mosher March 23, 2018 at 5:24 am. More like +/- 0.5 degrees, and even that assumes that there are no other significant errors. Geoff.
“enormous in comparison with all other records”
is english not your first language
The only thing enormous is the Y……..
enormous in comparison with all other records”
The adjustments to land records … near zero
Compare THAT to the change in UAH
you cant even see the facts
They can worry about this: Mass human extinction from global warming!: https://www.indy100.com/article/humans-are-sleepwalking-into-a-mass-extinction-8269776
Linked at Drudge this morning. What a LOL!
I’m still looking at the data, but so far what I’ve seen of the US Climate Reporting Network (USCRN) is close to chaos. The stations don’t have very long records — the longest is only 18 years. I’ve generated a baseline of sorts using the years 2006-2015, far short of the 30-year baseline normally used, but the only range that all the stations do have in common. As usual for me, I’m looking at the TMAX values, so see if things are really getting warmer and colder, instead of TAVG. To USCRN’s credit, TAVG is the average of hourly temperature measurements, not just the mean of TMAX and TMIN.
However, the slopes I’m seeing — and I’m cross-checking my results with R and Excel — are crazy, in the range of almost -11C to +15C per Century. Some of these rates occur in stations fairly close to one another: for example, Lincoln, Nebraska station (ID #94996, Lincoln 11 SW) shows a -8.6C per Century trend, while Manhattan, Kansas (ID #53974, Manhattan 6 SSW) shows a +16.0C per Century trend.
Of course, these are only 18-year records at best, so the trends are suspect. Also, some of the TMAX average monthly high plots contradict the overall plot. But I’m far from done, with lots left to look at.
Here’s a URL to a Google map of the stations with at least 15-year records, and the trends R calculated for them. They are color-coded, though I don’t have a legend up yet — but clicking on the icon shows the station id and the trend R gave me
https://www.sandbistro.com/uscrn
Looking at TMAX is not very smart. Since GHGs reduce the ability of the plnet to COOL ( at night) you should look at Tmin, tmax, and the average.
like professionals do.
I’ve never seen a “professional” use anything but TAVG. If on Day 1 TMAX is 30°C and TMIN is 15°C,TAVG = 22.5°..If on Day 2 TMAX is 30°C and TMIN is 16°C,TAVG = 23.0°.. Was Day 2 hotter than Day 1?
Not in my mind. The average was higher, but that’s a statistic, not an actual temperature. Besides, what’s wrong with examining TMAX? Was it because those warming trends were so high? Was it because those warming trends were so geographically near to equally severe cooling trends?
Other than your ad hominem attack on me for not being a “professional” (Professional what? Number averager?), do you have anything to say pertinent to the results I plotted?
Once upon a time we used to say that fires and cyclones were acts of God
But now the Greens, having replaced belief in God with belief in man-made climate change attribute these natural calamities to the latter
This was recently explicitly stated by Greens leader Richard DiNatale in the Australian senate after the damaging fires in south west of the state of Victoria and the South east of the state of New South Wales
The causes seem to be more prosaic than either God or AGW and comprise a complex of causes including falling and sparking electricity wires, lightning, changing vegetation,and every now and then the odd firebug plus lagging clearing of forest floor flammable material plus encroaching habitation into fire- prone areas and local government prohibition on clearing the bush surrounding houses-for which they probably should never have given building permits in the first place plus regular dryness in southern Australia in the summer months plus the intense flammability of eucalypt forests ( also occur in Portugal and California with eucalypts imported originally from Australia ) all contribute to enabling or causing property destroying bush fires in this dry brown continent, (at least the southern two thirds)
As for cyclones there is no evidence of any increased incidence and the 2013 IPCC report stated there was no provable connection between global warming and cyclones/hurricanes
So you are saying they are still acts of god just a different god the AGW god
The fallacy in Nick Stokes claims about hot days and cyclones is his inability todemonstrate the how and why and level of “hotness.” Just because cyclones occur generally on the hottest days doesn’t mean that a small increase in average temps would provide more cyclnes, which obviously depend upon a lot more than just a “hot day.” So, little emprical scientists, let’s calculate the percentage of hot days when there are and are not cyclones and get some sort of an idea of how much heat contributes to cyclonic activity. Even if AGW causes more hot days, and even if that has some effect on cyclonic activity, no one can start ranting about the dangers of AGW without some
evidence of significant increase in cyclonic behavior. And there is also the fact that the Earth is and has been warming more or less continuoulsy since the last ice age and AGW is but a part of the whole. UNless one can demonstrate that elimination of the AGW warming component will significantly reduce cyclonic activity,AGW is irrelevant or, at best, likely insignificant. As stated
by alarmists, the argument linking AGW and cyclonic activity is pretty damn vague, and weak.
Remember that the next time anyone says RSS has been tampered with.
“The great thing about the satellite record is that it can’t be fiddled with.”
Bellman, I agree with you that the satellite records can be just as fiddled with as any other dataset and as you point out, RSS is proof of that fact.
UAH has done far more fiddling.
https://www.iceagenow.info/record-cold-brazil-2/
BHP stumbled badly in the U.S. in more plays than the Permian. Management was AWOL during that time.
Admittedly it’s hard to see, because the author hasn’t added a linear trend line to his UAH TLT chart for Australia (the line across the middle just marks the anomaly base zero), but there is in fact a warming trend of 0.179 °C/decade in Australia since Dec 1978, according to UAH. Adding a linear trend line to the AUST data makes it look like this:-
That’s a total warming of just over 0.7C. That’s faster than the global trend in UAH over the same period which, at 0.128 ±0.059 °C/decade (2σ), is statistically significant. Therefore the claim that “Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit” since 1978 is flat wrong, even according to the data source cited.
UAH is also the cooler of the two satellite data sets, so it is likely that RSS would show more warming than this for Australia using the same satellite data, but unfortunately RSS doesn’t provide separate TLT data for Australia. (Just on that, if two TLT data producers using basically the same source materials can manage to come up with such radically divergent outputs, then so much for the simplistic claim that satellite data “can’t be fiddled with”.)
The link below is to the current UAH data set (v6.0). Australia is the column on the right marked ‘AUST’; the global figures are on the left. The decadal trends are shown at the foot of each column: https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Eucalyptus trees dominate Australia’s bushland. My understanding is that they are almost all resistant to burning. There are 112 varieties. They re-shoot after a fire event.
This is the only evidence I need to substantiate that bush fires have been a regular natural event in much of Australia for a very long time.
Linking bush fires to any change in long-term temperature is folly IMO.
Regards
M
They are resistant to burning, if you consider that they will grow back from stumps. The oils in Eucalyptus burn hot and bright. In CA, they cause considerable devastation when a Eucalyptus forest catches fire.
California Redwoods and Sequioa’s are resistant to burning, in that, unless it gets really really hot, they don’t burn.
Aren’t Aussie thermometers set to disregard temperatures below a certain minimum? If it is less than -10C, just call it -10C? That really helps boost the warming to 0.18 C
Nick Stokes. “And AGW means more hot days”.
According to AGW hypothesis, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is supposed to also cause an increase in water vapour levels which will contribute most to rising temperatures. Climate scientist, David Karoly, noted that during the record/near record maximum temperatures in South Eastern Australia in 2009, humidity levels were low. In Australia and elsewhere, hot deserts have very high maximum temperatures and very low humidity (water vapour) levels. If there is less water vapour in the atmosphere there should be less back radiation (down-welling) and therefore lower surface temperature, ie the opposite of what occurs.
The hot days Nick refers to also had low levels of humidity.
++1 especially so if/ when decadal humidity is changing. How much more irrigation have we seen in the last 50 years. I have read the math where someone already did thus but not found the link yet.
Even some satellites struggle with surface temperature….http://joannenova.com.au/2018/03/mystery-solved-rain-means-satellite-and-surface-temps-are-different-climate-models-didnt-predict-this/
Water wins again, this time through moisture in the ground evaporating. Ie surface temp influenced by rainfall. Duh.