Essay by Eric Worrall
Still waiting for the promised climate disaster.
Australia is already 1.5 degrees hotter
By Bianca Hall
October 31, 2024 — 12.01amAustralia’s average temperatures have risen by 1.5 degrees for the first time since records began, and the world is on track to overshoot the Paris Accord’s aim to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
That’s the latest sobering assessment offered by scientists and meteorologists from the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, who have mapped Australia’s changing climate for 14 years.
Their latest biennial State of the Climate report, released on Thursday, shows average temperatures continue to rise steadily, while the average number of extreme bushfire days have risen by as many as 25 days a year in parts of the country.
Two years ago, Australia’s temperatures had risen by an average 1.47 degrees since records began in 1910. This year, average temperatures in Australia have risen by 1.5 degrees, while global averaged temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees since “reliable” records began in 1850.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/australia-is-already-1-5-degrees-hotter-20241029-p5kmb1.html
“Beginning” the records in 1910 conveniently misses what may have been the worst heatwave ever in recorded Australian history, the Federation Drought of 1895 – 1903. But despite claiming temperature records before 1910 are too unreliable to include in official records, government climate scientists are confident that more recent droughts are hotter.
435 people died in an 1896 heatwave — but scientists say the extreme heat events of today are still hotter
By Sophie Meixner and Daniel Nancarrow
Sat 21 Dec 2019In the late 19th century, Australia was struck by a heatwave so intense that 435 people were killed and hundreds more were sent fleeing for their lives.
Key points:
- Bourke, NSW, is recorded as hitting 48.9C three times in 1896, with a maximum temperature of 38C for over three weeks straight
- But climate scientists say the methods used to record temperature in 1896 were flawed and heatwaves today are hotter
- They say the high death toll in 1896 was due to the community being more vulnerable to heat events
The 1895-1896 heatwave during the Federation Drought holds the record as Australia’s deadliest heatwave, closely followed by 2009, which recorded at least 432 heat-related deaths.
The town of Bourke lost at least 40 people — 1.6 per cent of its population — during the 1896 event, while Sydney authorities reported hospitals at breaking point and pedestrians collapsing in the streets.
Newspaper reports describe temperatures in Bourke reaching 48.9 degrees Celsius on three occasions, and the maximum temperature remaining above 38C for 24 consecutive days.
As Australia endures a series of intense and record-breaking heatwaves this summer, the 1896 event is sometimes viewed as evidence that Australia has always experienced extraordinary heat, and that the effects of climate change are overblown.
But climate scientists say that is an oversimplification, and the heatwaves we experience today are significantly hotter than those in the past.
…
A Stevenson screen was not installed in Bourke until August 1908, meaning temperature readings from before that could be inflated by as much as 2C.
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-21/1896-heatwave-killed-435-climate-scientists-cant-compare-today/11809998
…
The implication of the article above, that modern temperature recording is rigorous compared to the old days, ignores a lot of problems with modern temperature records. Australian climate scientist Jennifer Morohasy has fought a long running campaign to force the Aussie Bureau of Meteorology to admit they are less than perfect.
Whatever the truth about past heatwaves compared to the present, there are indications Australians are getting fed up with climate fear mongering. The greens suffered a major setback in the recent Queensland State Election.
The breaching of a 1.5C climate disaster limit which nobody notices is unlikely to add to the faltering credibility of climate doomsday pronouncements.
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Australians are still alive !?
Most of them very much so.
It’s just the academics and leftists (tautology?) who are brain-dead when it comes to logic, numeracy and rationality.
But that’s a global problem, n’est-ce pas?
I mistakenly hit the down vote when I wanted to do just the opposite but my iPad is very intolerant of fat fingers. Sorry.
I inserted a + for you. I wanted one for myself but the machine won’t allow it.
Still here.
Been a very pleasant and slightly mild winter.. bought to us by the long-lasting 2023 El Nino.
Bit too much rain though.
brought
(bought to you by Pedants R Us.
See what I did there? 😜 )
ok.. 6am here when I typed that. 🙂
excuses… suggest a ‘read’ prior to posting.
Pedantry is omnipresent, ubiquitous and simultaneous.
(as is tautology 🙂 )
Pedantry tolerates no excuses.
And once smitten, there is no cure for sufferers.
(just ask my missus)
For me.. its a Rhett Butler moment. 🙂
It’s been quite cool here in South Eastern Australia, my local weather station (a rural site) has shown a small but steady downward trend in temperatures over the last decade, mostly flat with some noticeable warmth in 2016 and 2019. The last notably hot Summer was 2019, since then there have been zero days over 40C (there may have been one very early in 2020).
I would strongly suspect that the supposed 1.5C warming is found in the ACORNSAT v2 dataset, the revised data of the already revised data where the revisions always seem to cool the past and warm the present (even more so in the v2 version). While logical analysis would suggest that any corrections should be strongly downward in the more recent record due to the large influence of Urban Heat Islands in major metropolitan areas that have dramatically increased in size in recent decades.
I concur, in part where I live (Blue Mountains NSW) the last four years were very wet and cold. This year winter was a bit warmer than the last few years but overall no warming what so ever.
This will become another nail in the climate alarm coffin. According to PIK, 1.5C is definitely when bad stuff starts to happen. When it doesn’t, PIK will go down like Hansen on sea level rise acceleration, Wadhams and Gore on Arctic summer sea ice, and the USNPS on Glacier National Park Glaciers.
Accumulating failed predictions eventually have consequences for supposedly settled science.
My favorite face-palm prediction is Viner’s 2000 pronouncement that –
“children just won’t know what snow is”
50 years of failed predictions and they are still going strong.
1.5C? just move the goal post.
There are going to be a lot of these headlines, the land is warming faster than the oceans so getting closer to a global average of a 1.5C increase is going to send any land mass higher than 1.5C. Its the same as all these ‘The temps in XXXX are rising higher than YYYY’ headlines purely due to land masses temps increasing faster than the oceans.
This will not be mentioned.
Heat capacity
Simple physics suggests that when you put more heat into the climate system, land should warm more quickly than oceans. This is because land has a smaller “heat capacity” than water, which means it needs less heat to raise its temperature.
I think you mean thermal mass.
Which is determined by heat capacity and mass
The peak sunlight over the total global land surface, excluding Antarctica, has been rising for 500 years. Given the higher thermal response of land to oceans, it is obvious that the global average has to be going up.
They use temperature and not energy to hide their lies.
From the GUM.
Funny how the uc(y) is always forgotten along with detailing how it was calculated.
It’s well known I think, the BOM data are more than suspect.
Ken of Ken’s Kingdom has shown that over half of the BoM surface sites are very badly effected by urban and site contamination, making them basically UNFIT-FOR-PURPOSE of measuring changes in temperature over time.
On top of that, BoM’s manic homogenisation routines, which of course, have the effect of cooling the past, you end up with a highly suspect end product.
Australia has ALREADY Experienced 1.5C of Warming
It’s alright for some.
Extended beach weather period.. 🙂 🙂
And nobody really cares what happens in the middle of Australia.
From the above article:
” ‘Beginning’ the records in 1910 conveniently misses what may have been the worst heatwave ever in recorded Australian history, the Federation Drought of 1895 – 1903. But despite claiming temperature records before 1910 are too unreliable to include in official records, government climate scientists are confident that more recent droughts are hotter.”
Let’s assume we should consider Earth temperatures as being “meaningful” since the time life is believed to have first appeared on Earth, which is about 3.7 billion years ago (ref: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/life-science/early-life-earth-animal-origins ). Therefore, the records since 1910 represent a sampling of at most 115 years/3.7 billion years, or 0.000003% of the appropriate interval of concern.
As an alternative way to look at this, the current Ice Age (the “Quaternary”) began about 2.5 million years ago, so “recorded temperatures” have never considered “Hothouse Earth” conditions and repeated, spontaneous recoveries from such!
(ref: https://climate-xchange.org/2018/08/hothouse-earth-what-is-it-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ )
“Hottest” ever—even referenced to measured temperature records—is meaningless BS when talking about Earth’s climate.
Starting the temperature records for Australia in 1910 is like starting Arctic Ice coverage in 1978–sorta defensible from a records keeping basis, but deliberately deceptive in result.
More good news. These people truly are shameless liars.
CCC – Catastrophic Climate Change – it’s out there.
FAR OUT!
It is interesting to plot the BOM temperature record against Dr Roy Spencer’s UAH satellite stuff. The trend is the same over the 40+ years, but BOM is much spikier
Interesting when you look at UAH Australia between major El Nino events.
1… From 1980-1998
oops… no graph at all in this post. D’oh!
oops.. Grabbed the wrong graph
1… From 1980-1996
Mate, a pro tip for you –
set your alarm to 8 am.
You need that extra sleep time 🙂
Hey.. I got there eventually. 🙂
Try again…
Sorry about multiple posts, correct graph refused to attach.
2… From 2000-2016
3… From 2017 to just before 2023 El Nino
Given that rain gauge data is harder to subtly manipulate than minute temperature changes, the continent overall is certainly wetter (or less dry) with the average annual rainfall increasing from 1900: 400 – 500 mm (BoM).
What a journey we have been through!
In the early days, skeptics hoped the world wouldn’t warm up because it gave the alarmists ammunition.
The alarmists curiously, having predicted doom if the world warms, celebrated any sign of warming. They’d rather disaster happen than be proven wrong.
Fast forward and the skeptics have given up the warming argument for the most part, because the doom we knew would not arrive, hasn’t. So we celebrate every fraction of a degree above the mythical tipping point because it proves that the tipping point is in fact a myth.
Alarmists on the other hand are now lost, they don’t know what to hope for. If they hope for more warming and it happens, they are busted. If they hope for no warming and that happens and stays below the mythical tipping point, then sensitivity is low and they are still busted.
So they are now between a rock and a hard spot of their own making. They will of course move the goal posts (yet again). 2.0 will become the new 1.5 in the next few years.
Their only hope is trying to play up weather catastrophes that have been happening for all of recorded history as ‘proof’ everything is going (or has gone) to hell. Humans have a natural tendency to believe ‘this time it’s different’ and try and ascribe extra meaning to their little slice of history, so the easily influenced will be receptive to this message.
Well they are royally screwed on that front. Hurricanes, flooding, drought and wildfires have all been flat globally for as long as we have good data. Those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse as Forbes called them. That Forbes admitted this in print is telling. They’re not waking up per se, but they are mumbling questions in their sleep.
I would add to that agricultural production is at an all time high. Infant mortality and famine at all time lows. Pick a measure of the human condition, any measure, and we’ve never had it so good.
Whew! I was getting tired of stepping over all those bodies in the street. At first I thought it was due to fentanyl, but it turned out to be the 1.5 degree global mean surface temp that we can all solve by paying an air tax.
Paying an air tax. Nailed it.
Reality prevails given time. And science is never settled.
There is one certainty in climate, tropical oceans can never sustain more the 30C with the current atmospheric mass. Changing atmospheric mass takes millions of years.
The situation may not be as bad as you characterized.
We’ve hit a high point due to El Nino and the HTe effect. The El Nino is already over and the HTe effect appears to have peaked. We are likely to slide back under the 1.5 tipping point and alarmists will pretend we never went over it. They will continue to claim we are warming even though we aren’t. They did it for the 18 year pause so it won’t be a problem for them. This could carry them for many more years.
The only real fix to this situation is cooling. Fortunately, that is likely to begin very soon as the AMO moves into its next cool phase. It might also happen as the HTe effect fades away making the cooling look even more significant.
As a father of 3 kids (including a 5 year old), I’d like to thank everyone who drove their SUV over the last 40 years.
In my 45 years, I don’t remember a Halloween in Toronto this warm. It’s usually 5-10 degrees C at night. Far too cold for me to want to walk around with my kids outside or for the kids to flaunt their fun costumes without jackets on.
Today it’s a perfect 22 degrees C (going down to 17C overnight). If this is caused by your CO2 emissions, I’m all for it!
I strongly encourage all alarmists to come to Canada! (preferably the Northwest Territories or Nunavut for ideal protection from Global Heating)
and yet – on the left (far-left?) side of the country, it’s only going to be 8C for trick-or-treat capers this evening. (So my grandkids inform me).
Climates and weathers, hey?
There’s thousands of the buggers all around the world, all doing their own things, in their own ways, in their own times, etc etc
What’s the point in trying to “average” all their activities again?
How can such a construct possibly hope to enlighten any of us as to real-world goings-on?
No. I did a ‘climate attribution study’ that found our above-average temperature was made 3 trillion times more likely by human CO2 emissions.
The same study proved that the below-average temperature in western Canada is completely natural.
(/sarcasm in case it wasn’t obvious)
You should be praising the sun and Earth’s precession cycle. Nothing to do with driving SUVs.
“Australia’s average temperatures have risen by 1.5 degrees for the first time since records began…”
The way that’s written- sounds as if it happened all at once. Truly dumb writing.
Intelligent writing in today’s media is incredibly difficult to find. Even coherent writing is very difficult. Understanding of basic statistics is non-existent. Understanding of basic physics is as rare as hen’s teeth.
The ‘3 Rs’ have been replaced with ‘feelings’ in schools, so it’s not really surprising.
This is all because there’s not going to be any climate disaster just as there wasn’t going to be another Ice Age beginning in the 1960s. Nor is there any climate crisis because as the temperature gradually increases we’re seeing, among other things, a rising global population, a tripling of agricultural production, an increase of life expectancy, a decline of infant mortality rates, a rise of national GDPs, falling worldwide poverty levels and all the things that eco-alarmists wish would happen so that their “we told you so” admonitions became realities. Instead they’re just greeted with derision.
And now in the west decarbonisation and deindustrialisation will steadily cause all those parameters to reverse as we fall into energy and food poverty, no jobs, no ability to produce anything tangible or saleable….. Meanwhile we will create more pollution and burn/waste more carbon energy on replaceable energy junk, and the deep freeze of the ice age will still come within the next 1500 to 2000 years and all the solar and wind junk will be under miles of ice…. and all the green morons will be dead.
The average has gone up in Australia but as a result of the winter temperature increasing and the summer temperature reducing but not as much as the winer temperature has gone up:
?fit=720%2C1040&ssl=1
Most winter warming is occurring across southern half of the country. These trends are consistent with changes in peak sunlight resulting from the precession cycle. At 30S, December sunlight down 4W/m^2 and winter sunlight up by 2W/m^2. Australia’s climate is moderating with warmer winters and cooler summers. The NH is, on average, experiencing warmer summers and snowier winters.
That map appears to take one season’s temps in a single year (2023) and then take away another single years seasonal temp (1980).
That will not show a true long term trend as, of course a single year has all the natural variables of climate/weather unsmoothed.
These paps show the seasonal trend from a base period of 1951-1980 vs the trend for period 1993-2023.
I see very little difference in the seasonal warming between Oz winter vs summer seasons.
Yes, It is the surface record and not an atmospheric one.
Junk mal-adjusted surface data, and imaginary ocean data.
Show us where all the measurements were made in 1951 for the bright red areas in the Arctic ocean… or in fact the whole of the oceans.
And of course the 1951-1980 period takes in most of the “new ice age scare ” period, with 1979 being the COLDEST year since the warm 1930s/40s in raw data from many areas.
The one question I have had for years is, when am I going to feel that anything is scarily different? I live in Adelaide and am 71 yrs old. All my friends say not much has changed except perhaps we don’t have as many cold winter’s nights and summer warm periods may be a day or 2 longer but not hotter. No-one, but no-one, thinks that summers have got worse. We used to call off golf because of high temperatures years ago but not these days. Perhaps we have adapted. Oh, no!
That’s the real-world take on global warming / climate change 4Eyes.
“Nothing to see here, Jim”.
And why it just doesn’t make the top 10 first-order concerns of ordinary people in a all surveys carried out, even the UN’s 7-million people survey. (there gw/cc rated last – 16th on the list).
ps –
living in Adelaide for just 1 year can feel like 71 years.
That’s just the way it is there 🙂
If anyone is really scared of 1-2 degrees of warming, there is plenty of cheap real estate in the Canadian north.
No tropical storms, guaranteed.
Commiserations. I can only hope you have not been there all 71 years.
BOM has a long history of lying like a rug.
During the 1895 -1903 heat wave the temperatures recorded we so unusually high the government sent out specially calibrated thermometers… and they measured the same high temperatures – so it was not a problem of measurement it was as hot as reported. This was reported in the Newspapers at that time so that is why the climate cult do not report this era… it exposes their lies….