Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Australian CSIRO, Australia has already warmed by 1.4 ± 0.22C. But the CSIRO assures us bad things are happening, really. And they’re going to get worse. But they admit tropical cyclones have decreased, and while overall river flow is down, tropical wet season rainfall is up.
Key points
Australia
Australia’s climate has warmed
on average by 1.44 ± 0.24 °C since national records began in 1910, leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events.There has been a decline of around 16 per cent in April to October rainfall in the southwest of Australia since 1970. Across the same region May–July rainfall has seen the largest decrease, by around 20 per cent since 1970.
In the southeast of Australia there has been a decline of around
12 per cent in April to October rainfall since the late 1990s.There has been a decrease in streamflow at the majority of streamflow gauges across southern Australia since 1975.
Rainfall and streamflow have increased across parts of northern Australia since the 1970s.
There has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and in the length of the fire season, across large parts of the country since the 1950s, especially in southern Australia.
Anomalies in annual mean sea surface temperature, and temperature over land, in the Australian region. Anomalies are the departures from the 1961–1990 standard averaging period. Sea surface temperature values (data source: ERSST v5, www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/) are provided for a region around Australia (4–46 °S and 94–174 °E).
Australia’s climate has warmed since national records began in 1910. The oceans surrounding Australia have also warmed.
2 Report at a glance
There has been a decrease in the number of tropical cyclones observed in the Australian region since 1982.
Oceans around Australia are acidifying and have warmed by around 1 °C since 1910, contributing to longer and more frequent marine heatwaves.
• Sea levels are rising around Australia, including more frequent extremes, that are increasing the risk of inundation and damage to coastal infrastructure and communities.
Future
In the coming decades Australia will experience ongoing changes to its climate. Australia is projected to see:
- Continued increases in air temperatures, more heat extremes and fewer cold extremes.
- Continued decrease in cool season rainfall across many regions of southern and eastern Australia, likely leading to more time in drought, yet more intense, short duration heavy rainfall events.
• A consequential increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days and a longer fire season for southern and eastern Australia.
• Further sea level rise and continued warming and acidification of the oceans around Australia.
• Increased and longer-lasting marine heatwaves that will affect marine environments, such as kelp forests, and raise the likelihood of more frequent and severe bleaching events in coral reefs around Australia, including the Great Barrier and Ningaloo reefs.
• Fewer tropical cyclones, but a greater proportion projected to be of high intensity, with large variations from year to year.
Read more: https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/state-of-the-climate
As someone who lives in a warm part of Australia, I’ve got to say 1.4C warming since 1910 does not feel like the end of the world.
There is substantial evidence Australia experienced warm spells in the 1800s comparable to today. 435 people died in a heatwave in 1894, a few years before the starting point of the CSIRO’s warming trend. Even more people died in the early 1900s (see the top of the page). JoNova has some information about extremely warm Australian temperatures recorded in the 1800s which the CSIRO and BOM usually seem to leave out when preparing climate reports.
If the drop in rainfall in the south is a genuine trend rather than just an example of Australia’s multi-decadal climate noise, the CSIRO has a solution on the drawing board which would drastically increase water availability for Australian farmers; a tropical megadam scheme which could capture some of that increased wet season rainfall, instead of continuing to allow it flow out into the sea.
If our politicians stopped frittering cash on renewables and pumped hydro schemes which cannot possibly have a measurable impact on global warming, there might be some money to spare to ensure water security for our farmers, regardless of any changes to Australia’s rainfall patterns.
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Stream rehabilitation time? Isn’t it always?
Funny how the record always starts at 1910, well after the Federation Drought and associated extreme temperatures….
Australia has temperature data going back to 1841.
See here
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/station-list/region/australia
Most of these temperature records show a decline from 1860 to 1950 then a rise after 1980.
Overall the temperature rise since the mid 19th century is less than 0.2 °C.
See Fig. 26.1 here
https://climatescienceinvestigations.blogspot.com/2020/07/26-temperature-trend-in-australia-since.html
Spot on Roy. This is the key failing in the CSIRO/BOM “study” which invalidates all of its key conclusions.
And the CSIRO/BOM have been doing this for some time now, frantic to avoid any meaningful discussion of the 1896-1903 Federation Drought which saw extreme temperatures, numerous business failures and a sizeable human death toll.
The CSIRO/BOM have used a series of arguments why the Federation Drought weather data cannot be used in analysis of Australia’s modern temperature variations, including poor quality recording, different measuring equipment, different recording enclosures, site moves, lost data etc etc etc. You get the idea.
And so almost all of the discussion and graphical presentation of the Australian temperature data starts in ca 1910, neatly and deliberately avoiding the Federation Drought extremes of only a few years earlier.
When the Federation Drought temperature/rainfall data is included, a different picture emerges. And horror of horrors – some of the averaged annual temperature in that period were hotter than today!
They obviously don’t take the temperature in southwest Vic , two long cold winters in a row here , so if its not everywhere then its not global and not happening.
COVID-19 scare bollox proven bollox, back to climate change.
The starting point of the CSIRO’s warming trend 1910 was the coldest year of the 20th century. Just as all the global warming presentations that I attended between 2000 and 2010 had temperature graphs beginning in 1970 and ending in the El Nino year 1998.
The year 1998 was only exceeded in temperature a tiny amount by 2016 but in the latest temperature graphs it has been retrospectively cooled to ensure a smooth uptrend.
You can confect an uptrend from data that actually conforms to a pure sine wave, i.e. actually has no real uptrend, simply by ‘creatively’ making sure you start the set in a ‘trough’. Easy Peasy and apparently its ‘science’. I actually saw it in a peer reviewed, published paper on sea levels where the sinusoidal element in the data was clear as day yet they did a trend line fit that was 80% due to the periodicity effect and maybe 20% showing an actual uptrend. If these people are being paid for schlok like that then who can blame people like me being highly skeptical?
Yes, agreed.
I demonstrated this in Fig. 4.7 here:
https://climatescienceinvestigations.blogspot.com/2020/05/data-analysis-at-south-pole.html
The gradient of the best fit to a sine wave is 3A/π^2 where A is the amplitude of the sine wave. That is why you need to do your trend fitting from peak to peak, or symmetrically about a peak. Sadly most published temperature trends don’t do this.
Eric,
There is not only the “tropical mega dam scheme” which is valid in its own right but also the New Bradfield Scheme which will be well known to you.
The New Bradfield Scheme proposes to channel some of the Tully River and 4 other rivers in North Queensland over the Great Dividing range to the Hells Gate dam and via pipelines and weirs ultimately to the Murray Darling system to re-invigorate and water vast stretches of inland Queensland, New South Wales and finally South Australia.
At present Northern Australia is getting enormous amounts of water in the wet seasons much of which is wasted in flowing into the Coral Sea.
As has been noted by all sides, Australia is getting hotter and WETTER not hotter and drier. The rainfall is in the North while it is the South East predominately with less rainfall.
Bradfield’s scheme was workable in the 1930s and 40’s but was canned because the money was not available during the Depression and post-WW11 years.
Sir Leo Hielscher ( now 93) and Sir Frank Moore have championed the Scheme for years and have slowly gained Federal and State Government support to the extent of closely investigating it and expending money for feasibility studies.
The opposition seems to come from the Green Left (“ even the rains that fall won’t fill our dams again” etc.)
The estimated cost is A$16 billion which is not excessive in these days of fantastic spending post CoVid.
Australia desperately needs this Scheme if it is to be the food bowl of Asia which our politicians repeatedly trumpet.
There is enough gas infrastructure in Western Australia to cheaply pump water from the Ord river to Perth.
Extra Desal plants might be cheaper , though.
Powered how?
During day by excess solar power … we have a ridiculous amount of excess electricity that is destabilizing the grid during daylight hours.
gas, as waza said
Nuclear like in the UAE which also produce electricity. The Nuclear reactors provide heat for high pressure steam. The high pressure steam passes through turbines which drive electricity generators and the low pressure steam is used for desalination. The UAE has started one 1400MWe unit with 3 more being built.
Australia doesn’t have any nuclear reactors bar a small one used to produce isotopes and Western Australia has none so we can hardly use that.
There is no effective gas powered generation used for any desal plant in WA they are 100% powered from renewable energy because it is in useless excess when it is being generated and they have to dump it somewhere.
The Perth desal plant gets it’s energy from the 80 MW Emu Downs Wind Farm near cervantes and the local Perth grid from Solar when in excess. Binningup desal uses excess renewable energy from the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) which is solar panels and wind farms in the south west mainly near Merredin. They both run as sheddable loads if the renewable energy stops.
It would appear to me that, although desalination is fairly expensive (energy intensive), one could use Off Shore Wind to power the process. I mean the wind is free right?
Seems that a practically “Free Energy Source” would eliminate most of the operating costs for an energy intensive project that needs to happen at the coast anyway.
Or is wind energy Not So Free
Clearly one the key findings will be increased funding to the CSIRO so they can wrap more reverse engineered BS around their predictions of doom. What a pathetic alarmist outfit they have become.
CSIRO, JCU, ABC, SBS and co, the alphabet soup of alarmist nonsense
You forgot the BOM, there are some activists employed there as well.
The CSIRO have swallowed the global warming pill,they should walk outside and sniff the air now and again.
They may be pleasantly surprised that the world has not changed, perhaps if they actually did some research into history . Then some planetary and solar studies they may come to rather different conclusions.
In the middle of OZ we have a salt lake around 32 Ft below sea level, it has been my thought for a long time to dig a channel from the top of OZ which have big tides and fill the lake. That amount of water would give rainfall and greening of a large amount of our desert could be achieved.
The channel would have to come from the south, much shorter, don’t know if it would work, the evaporation would make for a very very salty sea. Unless you could make the channel a couple of miles wide or more.
Don’t need to cut a channel, run a pipeline from whichever ocean or river source to the depression, prime the system by pumping water through it, and like siphoning gasoline from a higher tank to a lower gas can, the water will flow into the depression without further pumping and can be used to generate “green” power.
There’s been similar ideas going around to fill the Dead Sea in Israel, to generate power from the flowing water coming in from the Mediterranean and to freshen up the waters that have been getting lower and saltier, as well for other depressions in Libya, Egypt, I think even Death Valley in the USA. Australia seems to have an easier way in that water diversion project could be use to fill up the central salt flat with fresh water. The other projects I read about involved salt water being gravity siphoned into the depression and some of the electricity generated would go to desalination. Sounds like a great project for OZ, would turn the central desert areas into a paradise garden, and $16 billion is peanuts especially if GWs of power can come from from the dams.
1.44 C over 110 years is noise in the data, UHI, natural variation, inconsequential.
How accurate are the numbers before World War II?
Was the starting point or decade unusually cool?
What months / seasons of the year warmed the most?
What time of the day/night warmed the most?
An average, especially based on shaky data
from over 100 years ago, hides what people
really want to know. No one lives in
an average temperature.
Warming or cooling is to be expected.
Our planet is always warming or cooling.
Our planet has been warming for hundreds of years.
20,000 years, from a longer term point of view.
An average rise could consist of warmer winter nights?
That sounds like good news.
An average rise could be warmer summer days?
That could be bad news.
It is the details and data accuracy that really count.
Why would anyone care about +1.4 degrees C. in 110 years?
It warms +1.4 degrees C. every day of our lives after sunrise.
Do people complain about that?
Do they get depressed?
Suicidal?
I mean from the +1.4 degrees C. warming every morning.
Not from reading the CSIRO report.
With the state of Australia’s surface stations, some 40% being totally unfit for anything but propaganda,
…. I really don’t see how CSIRO could possibly make any reliable claims about Australia’s temperature.
Meanwhile UAH Australia shows no warming since 1998
(and no, it is not measured from the El Nino peak, because it didn’t exist in Australia)
There was a step change though.
Ans before that step change.. again, no warming.
Just like in the USA, there is absolutely NO CO2 WARMING SIGNAL…
.., just El Nino surge/step, UHI smeared all over the place where it doesn’t belong….
and, of course, the obligatory DATA ADJUSTMENTS and infilling.
fred250
“Meanwhile UAH Australia shows no warming since 1998”
It often pays to be suspicious of fred’s “no warming since…” claims, especially when his accompanying chart doesn’t contain a trend line. Add a trend line and you clearly see the +0.12C/dec warming trend reported in UAH AUST since 1998:
“Ans before that step change.. again, no warming.”
This time fred’s chart marked “UAH Aust 1980-1996” does contain a trend line . Alas, the data he shows actually stops in mid-1995, not Dec 1996. So what happens when you properly show UAH Aust from Jan 1980 to Dec 1996, as the chart’s title suggests? You guessed it, warming again, this time at +0.10 C/dec:
So what does the UAH AUST data tell us when we don’t chop out the bits we don’t like or don’t mislabel our charts or do show trend lines that we claim don’t exist? An overall warming trend of +0.19 C/dec; slightly faster than the UAH global land average over the same period:
You poor mathematically INCOMPETENT fool.
Actually thinking that a 0.1C/decade MEANS anything..
When the measurement error is far larger.
TOTALLY HILARIOUS !!!
And THEN you use the El Nino step to FAKE a linear trend..
Will your mathematical INEPTITUDE and totally lack of mathematical understanding never end !!!
You really have put the Final Nail in any credibility you might once have had.
“Actually thinking that a 0.1C/decade MEANS anything..”
We can agree that over a period as short as you highlighted and over a single region no trend really means anything. Makes me wonder why you brought it up though?
“And THEN you use the El Nino step to FAKE a linear trend..”
Would that be the El Nino you said “didn’t exist in Australia”? Lol!
“You really have put the Final Nail in any credibility you might once have had.”
Really? I would have said that mislabelling charts and omitting trend lines you don’t like the look of then pretending they don’t exist is more of a challenge to someone’s credibility, but there you go.
You poor muppet.. Take out the El Nino and there is no warming.
ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence of any CO2 warming signal
The fact that you have to use that El Nino shows that the only warming came from that El nino
So sad you fell straight into the abyss left for an idiot like you to fall into …
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2?
2… In what ways has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be of human causation?
See if you are as incompetent as all the other AGW apologists. 😉
“Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself” TFN, by lowering WUWT’s standards Fred’s shouty, spittle-flecked lying is inadvertently helping.
Poor loy-dumb , yes I am watching you and Rusty destroy yourselves… .
Do you or Rusty, even in your most DELUSIONAL anti-mathematical states, really think the measurements are accurate enough to detect a warming of 0.1ºC/decade?
HILARIOUS. !!
And if that is all CO2 is capable of. …. WOW !…. SCARY , hey !
You are obviously have a TOTALLY IRRATIONAL and DELUSIONAL FEAR of atmospheric CO2…..
and yet…… you have absolutely NO EVIDENCE that it is does anything except enhance plant growth.
Do you have any empirical scientific evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased the temperature over Australia by a SCARY 0.1ºC/decade ????????
You are a JOKE, loy. !
Tell us more Fred.
Loy = 🙈🙉
Pity he won’t…🙊
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2. loy?
Poor loy-child.. …… its childish distraction and evasion ADHD antics just keep shining through. !
CSIRO Key data sources
Australian Bureau of Meteorology high quality temperature dataset http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/
The you beaut adjusted temperature series because the old timers coulcn’t read straight.
BoM-
Reason for adjustment Maximum temperature Minimum temperature
Statistical 209 244
Site moves (all) 176 170
Screen change or condition 79 77
Site condition (without move) 9 5
Observation time change 2 24
Total 450 491
Table 7 ACORN-SAT version 2 adjustments by cause. Totals do not add as some adjustments have multiple causes. ”
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/BRR-032.pdf
Changing temperatures for statistical purposes. Changing temperatures of stations with data from hundreds of Km away
“You poor muppet.. Take out the El Nino and there is no warming.”
Shall we take out all the La Nina effects too? Tell you what, let’s just cut out all the time periods that contradict what we want to see in our charts. We can call it ‘selective skepticism’.
Poor rusty.. no evidence.. no thought..
The AGW shyster way. !
No warming between El Ninos.. END OF STORY.
Only warming in the satellite data era is from those El Nino events.
No amount of DENIAL on your behalf will change that FACT.
Perhaps you could help the clueless loy answer the questions he has been COWERING from.
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2?
2… In what ways has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be of human causation?
Or you could just continue to yap mindlessly behind your ignorance.
Because of the STRONG SERIES of solar cycles, there has only been one medium La Nina in the satellite period, balanced by balanced by the 2010 El Nino.
If you take them both out you are still left with a ZERO TREND .
WAKE up and try to use your brain, if you can.
Tried to load the report.
Nothing happening. Do they turn the server off on weekends?
Would like to know if they used the RCP8.9 scenario?
It’s likely using the butchered ACORN 2 data which has some crazy adjustments that have been well criticized.
LdB,
Have you discovered that we have a train of BOM historic temperature versions that cpntains at least, Raw, High Quality, AWAP, gridded, ACORN-SAT version 1, ACORN_SAT version 2 and now ACORN-SAT version 2.1.
What does an author do on discovering that the meticulous paper just written, used an outdated version? What if the newest version affects the conclusions so academically derived? Geoff S
Calling it a meticulous paper is a bit rich it is a glossy piece of pseudo junk with some random graph and drawings on it.
A 4Mb pdf file because they wanted a nice glossy look but it has sweet FA in terms of details.
Half way down on the right hand side for the link to what is described as the “Full report”
https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/state-of-the-climate
If there is more behind the report we aren’t being told and CSIRO website makes not reference to a more detailed report just the opposite it says that is the “Full Report”
LdB,
I was discussing a hypothetical author writing a report that stands or fails depending on which version of data was used.
Certainly, I was not commenting on the quality of the CSIRO report. Geoff S
Australian rainfall…..
SE Australia rainfall 1900-2019
hmmm.. is CSIRO adjusting data YET AGAIN ???
The BOM/CSIRO keep going on about “ more or less of this or that in some parts of the country”
The don’t provide any quantitative analysis.
Somewhere , there is a larger version of this
Australia ALWAYS has more rainfall or less rainfall in different parts of the continent.
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,. “Before the year is out.”” 😉
Maybe this will work
https://data.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/static/products/pdf/australiasvariablerainfall2020.pdf
The January 2009 Heatwave in south east Australia was one on the worst in recent times.
374 deaths were attributed to the heatwave.
Total Australian deaths in January 2009 – 11609
Total Australian deaths in July 2009 – 13183
A standard Australian winter causes more deaths than even the hottest summer.
Australia is similar to USA when it comes to retirement.
More citizens migrate to hot states than to cold states, when the retire,
A warmer climate is net beneficial to the health of Australians
How many hot deaths are due to electricity being to expensive for retires and the poor to run AC? I live in Arizona and am retired, in my presently cost of electricity for me is not a problem nor will it ever be. But cross over to the state line west of me it is a problem for a great may people. California electric rates are three time what I pay.
Mark
At the same time you have to ask how many people can’t afford heating in the winter.
The usual half-truths and distortions.
For instance:
“… There has been a decrease in streamflow at the majority of streamflow gauges across southern Australia since 1975 …”.
The decade 1970 – 1980 was an unusually wet period across Southern Australia particularly the SE where most of the streams are.
And the trend doesn’t bear much relationship to the CO2 trend, if that is the supposed inference.
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/rain.seaus.0112.37190.png
Similarly:
“… In the southeast of Australia there has been a decline of around 12 per cent in April to October [cooler seasons] rainfall since the late 1990s …”.
But there has been an increase during the warmer seasons resulting in no overall trend since 1900.
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/rain.seaus.0112.3863.png
In my opinion replacing legacy thermal electricity generating plant with more wind and solar farms in Australia will gradually impoverish most citizens while making bu99er-all difference to the future climate.
“….more time in drought, yet more intense, short duration heavy rainfall events.”
Virtually every government agency has been spouting this BS for more than 10 years.
It is a total BS alarmist statement with no valid evidence.
It only designed to scare.
Life has NEVER been better for humanity, but think if took the money wasted on “green” ideology and made life even better…
What rivers?
Streamflow down?
That must explain why Sydney’s Warragamba Dam is at 97.7% full !
https://www.waternsw.com.au/supply/Greater-Sydney/greater-sydneys-dam-levels
That’s just weather…
😁
Amazing to see how a little “weather” can counteract almost anything!
One might argue that the people in the 1800s were hardier than the city dwellers of today who have become used to air conditioning in their cars and buildings.
There is a photograph ‘123 degrees’ at my hometown, Mildura in 1906, and the Mildura record has been extensively adjusted and then readjusted and the location of the recording site moved and then the thermometer converted to electronic, with a period of overlap – that is difficult to access raw data from :
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjUhNujwIHtAhV07XMBHeKYDosQFjARegQICBAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fams.confex.com%2Fams%2Fpdfpapers%2F155748.pdf&usg=AOvVaw26tndfMUmTIlmaBoeR-3kr
I remember it well; 7th January 1906. In modern terms 50.7C:
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_nccObsCode=122&p_display_type=dailyDataFile&p_startYear=1906&p_c=-1157718553&p_stn_num=076077
The data is generally there but if any data violates the Gospel of Mann it gets trimmed out of the record for homogenisation purposes. Would be impossible to get a warming trend where there is none if ALL the data was included.
In fact Mildura provides a good example of why modern aircraft are the main cause of warming in Australia. The post office was replaced by the airport station around 1950. The increase in aircraft size and fast response electronic gauges meet the warming criteria.
I still don’t understand why they are afraid of the warmth. Seasonality of deaths the world over is much higher in the cold months.
https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/e4e2219d-1745-4cd9-a221-eb7ac1a1e476/bulletin03.pdf.aspx?inline=true
In Australia there is a 30% variation between low and high months.
CSIRO need to take a long hard look at the Nino34 region and ask why it has been steady for the last 40 years. This region is considered a key to forecasting major weather events in Australia.
Tropical cyclones are one of the major temperature control mechanism. The fact that there is no increase in intensity or frequency is a clear indication that there is no warming.
The only source of warming in Australia is data fiddles; or its technical term – data homogenisation. Without that there is no warming.
Oz Liberal politicians should hang their heads in shame at this D grade report.
Oh – did I forget to say I mean the Quality of this report not the state of climate that it tries to paint.
The research and analysis is so poor that it, surely, could not achieve any proper academic score.
Take a close look at the list of references.
I went straight to the “Marine heatwaves and coral reefs” section to see who CSIRO think know what they are talking about. Not a single dissenting view in the list … why am I not surprised?
This echo-chamber of “authorities” even includes a short (400 word?) puff-piece in Their Conversation by Terry Hughes and Morgan Pratchett (JCU “BS-professors”) with no data and really subjective data gathering (eg “Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.”) Is that a citable “reference”?
Yet no reports from Peter Ridd or Jennifer Marohsay that show counter positions and need to be debated or included for balance in their analysis.
Just really bad science. CSIRO has become the anti-science centre of Oz?