Essay by Eric Worrall
Should we shut down Western industrial civilisation to bring back the frost?
‘Global weirding’: How our ‘normal’ is becoming more extreme
Fires in winter and devastating floods — the weather is getting “weirder” and more extreme.
David Karoly remembers regularly seeing frost when he was a young boy on his way to school in Melbourne — now it’s become an unusual sight for the city.
The decline in frosty days is one of many weather-related changes that people around the world are noticing and describing as “weird”.
Climate change has already driven global temperatures up by an average of 1.55C compared to pre-industrial levels, and 2024 was the hottest year on record.
Individual “global weirding” events may or may not be linked to climate change but Karoly, who is an internationally recognised expert on climate change, says they are happening more often.
…
Read more: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-is-global-weirding-how-normal-is-becoming-more-extreme/rl8k19za5
Karoly goes on to describe some big storms and other events, but I’m pretty sure severe storm events also happened before the industrial age. As the article said, events “may or may not be linked to climate change”.
I think we should look for a little more confirmation before spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a problem which “may or may not” exist.
As for frost in Melbourne, I lived in Melbourne for a while as a kid. I remember frost in Melbourne – living in a cheap uninsulated wooden house, you felt the frost before you saw it. Frost may be fun if you are watching from a warm room with a roaring fire, but experiencing frost in a cheap 1950s house with a small fireplace and an asbestos sheet outdoor toilet somewhat diminishes the magic.
We were not especially poor – lots of people lived in low quality houses.
Unfortunately lots of people in Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia still live in low quality houses. With Aussie energy bills skyrocketing thanks to Australia’s green energy zealotry, one in four Aussies struggle to pay home heating bills.
Even those lucky enough to still have a fireplace which works, providing fuel for that fireplace is more challenging than when I was a kid. You potentially face severe penalties in today’s Australia for collecting firewood from wilderness areas. And while using a wood fire for home heating is not illegal in Melbourne, clean air laws are much stricter than when I was young. If you burn anything other than expensive kiln dried wood or smokeless fuel, you could face legal repercussions.
Frosty mornings in Melbourne are certainly not something I would fight to preserve.
The alarmist desperation is getting palpable.
I too remember being a kid in the 1950s going with my dad on his early morning milk delivery runs around the suburbs of Brisbane and marveling & freezing with all the frost on the lawns and footpaths / sidewalks.
Brisbane is a subtropical city.
But back then, the footpaths were not all concreted, just grass.
The streets mostly just had a strip of asphalt down the middle, not gutter to gutter.
And the density of infrastructure genrally was much thinner.
So if David yearns to see frosty mornings again, just drive 150 clicks out of Melbourne.
Go visit Nick at Moyhu.
My son in law is from Mansfield.
My old stamping ground too Scissor.
I lived in the hills just 40 kms from Mansfield for nearly 20 years.
Never been there but it looks beautiful. This is the family property (for sale).
https://youtu.be/Jw19gfwQ65g
And not a wind turbine in sight ! 🙂
Although, you could de-forest the top of those hills, and install some 🙂
Your last sentence would be your suicide note to the locals there Bernice 🙂
It is a beautiful area.
I’ve fly fished in the Delatite and Howqua Rivers there numerous times.
And further down the road, the Jamieson and Goulburn.
And even over the mountains to the King River near Nick’s place.
Not just that, the population of Melbourne in 1960 was 1.85m, now it’s 4.85m, so of course there are less frosty mornings, it’s called the urban heat island effect
I’m guessing Mr. Karoly has never heard of the Urban Heat Island effect that the extra asphalt contributes to.
In the Santa Clara Valley, I remember having to help backpack food to my aunt and uncle snowed in in the Santa Cruz mountains in high school. That was the early 1970’s. They could not get their car up a rather steep driveway.
But we are told the “The Next Ice Age Is Coming” scare of the 1970’s and 1980’s never really happened, and it was Global Warming always and forever. Sure.
Since CO2 has little or no effect on the temperature and climate change is continuous and inevitable, “shutting down western industry” will similarly have little or no effect on the temperature.
What it probably would do is send all of us back to medieval standards of living.
But the Chinese and Indians have sussed that out and are not joining that party.
Fewer frost : is that an ICCP officially defined “extreme weather event” criterion ?
As far as I undersdant it, it’s rather a BS detector criterion.
ICCP? Did you really mean IPCC?
No, he meant the Intergalactic Clown Car Parade.
Send the hallucinating dude to spend the next week with me. Each of the next three mornings will be about -15°C [ 5°F ]. I’m in central Washington USA. Actually, I’m lucky. Over in Montana it is -10°F and headed for -25°F [-32°C]. That cold air is pushing south and spreading out in all directions. Almost all of Canada has cold Arctic air. The USA needs to build a wall to keep out the invader. Someone tell Trump.
Sounds like you,d do better to spend the week with Karoly.
Send me a plane ticket!
Another over inflated ego bruised badly by reality
Another Untrue Allegation by Karoly
https://climateaudit.org/2012/07/14/another-untrue-allegation-by-karoly/
Alarmists talk of truth while doing their best to avoid it. Wasn’t this guy a Gergis hockey stick man?
A decline in frosty day is absolutely beneficial for crop production.
Late frosts after planting are responsible for large losses of yield and can totally destroy some crops.
Karoly should be cheering.
David Karoly’s personal ‘life’ observations are a totally invalid measure.
The BOM has pre-debunked (May 2023) the notion that frosts are becoming rare in Australia – showing a 60+. year increase in this event.
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/05/thats-a-big-climate-surprise-frost-season-growing-longer-across-australia-and-for-years/
I am all for this. After many years of pruning, spraying, harvesting, and then processing many many fruit trees, everyone needs a year off once in a while.
A milder climate is a great deal. Does this moron not understand that?
His paycheck depends on him not understanding that.
“…internationally recognised expert on climate change…” Translated from alarmist to modern realist means “Can be counted on to deliver the narrative come Hell or high (or low) water.”
A simple factual observation from David. No-one here seems to dispute it. I grew up in Melbourne and can confirm it. The frosts have virtually dosappeared.
“Individual “global weirding” events may or may not be linked to climate change but Karoly, who is an internationally recognised expert on climate change, says they are happening more often.”
He said more than the frost thing.
I think the theme of this response article and the comments is: “No frost? Great!”
Yes, I don’t miss the frosts. Wildfires can be a problem, though.
How many critiques of slipshod forest management in Victoria have we covered Nick? And lets not forget radical Victorian greens obstructing burn offs, cheered on by the government funded ABC.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/01/jonova-aussie-abc-hiding-evidence-they-helped-climate-activists-campaign-against-controlled-burns/
Every time there is a really bad bushfire, there is an investigation. Every investigation makes the same recommendations. Every recommendation is studiously ignored.
Eric,
Every time we get a really hot day and the forests are dry, we get a bad bushfire. 1939,1983,2009. It doesn’t matter what the burnoff regime is.
But you greatly exaggerate both the effect of protestors nd the role of the Greens. Greens generally support controlled burns. As for protestors, you keep trotting out this dozen folks of Nowa Nowa, who wanted to preserve a particular bit of forest. The mainlimitation on controlled burns is window of opportunity. Too cold and it won’t burn, too hot and it’s dangerous. We have been getting crimped at the warm end. Controlled burns have gone wild and burnt homes etc. Much blame and so much caution.
What?Just how cold does it have to be? 90K?
You may have noticed that we don’t get wildfires in Victoria in winter. The forest just won’t burn.
April-May and September are the burnoff windows.
Here is a report from the National Parks and Wildlife Association, explaining among much else why controlled burning is not the ant’s pants.
That’s because it’s wet, not because it’s cold.
Bushfires need flammable fuel and wind. Jim Steele has posted some really good information on US fires, which say much the same thing.
My IQ dropped 30 points just reading that, and I got “bingo” at least once in each section.
From the propaganda in question
Somebody needs to tell our cattle that they don’t eat shrubs. Or seedlings. Or trample them.
Since the Labor firefighters union took over the volunteer Country Fire Authority network, fire fighting in the regional areas turned to shit.
Who would ever have foreseen this?
(apart from everybody with a pulse)
Here is a report of a case where a controlled burn at end September went rogue and burnt several houses and much damage.
It covers the fire fighting and aftermath, with a litany of errors papered over by official bafflegab.
A big burn on the last day of September, inexperienced fire fighters, ignore local knowledge, poor traffic management, bureaucratic centralised organisation, restrictions on fuel management near houses and sheds, unclear authority and responsibility.
And none of it says how the fire got away on them.
Was that report titled – ClusterFuck in September?
That was the subtext.
Here are numerous reports where properly managed controlled burns did exactly what they were intended to do –
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made AustraliaBill Gammage
https://www.amazon.com/Biggest-Estate-Earth-Aborigines-Australia/dp/174331132X
There’s doing it right and doing it wrong. Controlled burning of forests and fields is very common in the American southeast and we don’t hear about the fires getting out of control.
Not true Nick. More fuel = more intense fire.
It follows that controlling fuel buildup by preemptive hazard reduction (burning accumulated fuel at times of the year or on days of the year, when other factors are less conducive to rapid combustion), reduces the likelihood of out-of-control bushfires. Even clever-dicks at CSIRO knew this:
e.g., https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIprocite:96d88e42-6798-4f25-9e9a-b3b306fe4736
also,
https://www.wellesu.com/10.1080/00049158.1976.10675654
Oh wait …. they sacked the good ones and put the climate kiddies in charge.
For an overview see: https://www.bomwatch.com.au/nsw-bushfires-2019-2920/
Yours sincerely,
Dr Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Both the CSIRO and Western Australia (DPI?) did some excellent work on bushfires and fuel build-up rates.
Absolutely correct. When the CSIRO was a recognised scientific body. And WA still cool burn around four times more forest every year than Victoria or NSW. As a consequence, have less major bushfires. Simple really.
I love the smell of frostless mornings.
Smells like – alarmism!
Yep
Do You Want Frosts back?
The no-frost observation is just another validation of the UHI effect.
Yes indeed, simple.
and the population has gone from 1.85m to 4.85m since 1960
The author missed the most important POIT WHICH MAY UPSET THE CO2 DOES NOTHIG CROWD HERE.
Frost in one morning is weather
The trend of frost in the morning disappearing over the past 50 years is climate change
Specifically global warming
And a PRIMARY characteristic of the increasing greenhouse effect (higher TMINs between dawn and 30 minutes after dawn.)
No frost in Melbourne mornings is one of the benefits of greenhouse warming, along with warmer “winters”, better plant growth and longer growing seasons.
The lack of frost in the mornings is MORE evidence of greenhouse warming, which can explain most of the warming since 1975. Except to people who refuse to examine any of the evidence collected about CO2 over the past 128 years. The deaf, dumb and blind CO2 Does Nothing crowd.
Are we a greenhouse?
or does 8 billion + people have another say?
No frost in the mourning in Melbourne is most likely due to the well-known “urban heat island effect”.
The trend of frost in the morning disappearing over the past 50 years is climate change – or evidence of urban heating caused by Melbourne growing from a low density city of just over a million people in 1950 to a higher density city of five million people.
There is still plenty of frost in rural areas adjacent to Melbourne.
Melbourne population has more than doubled since 1970, and become more densely populated.
“Less frosts”, has absolutely nothing to do with “global warming” or CO2.
Out of the cities, frost season is getting longer, to the great detriment of farmers.
That’s a big climate surprise: Frost season growing longer across Australia (and for years!) « JoNova
Richard Green.
You claim that the lack of frost is a sign of greenhouse warming.
So is there any data that shows that the first frosts have been getting later in the season. Or the last spring frost has been getting earlier in the season to back up that claim.?
Also what is the weather patterning and wind direction which are linked to the cause of frosts in Melbourne?
Has the weather data shown a decline in the weather patterning and wind direction along side the decline in frosts.?
data
Richard doesn’t need no stinking data when a voice in his head will suffice.
Come on Richard – third time of asking now – the best publication showing the role of CO2, and in your words:
“And a PRIMARY characteristic of the increasing greenhouse effect (higher TMINs between dawn and 30 minutes after dawn.)
A real publication please.
Last time I asked you Anthony Banton obliged with a decent paper on temperature trends, but it didn’t have the words carbon and dioxide in it.
This sounds snarky I know, but I really am looking for the best paper claiming what you claim.
In the lower 48 US the growing seasons have been getting longer.
They have been getting longer at an increased pace in the West compared to the East. Can’t find much explanation as to why that is.
It just goes to show that climate science, as it stands today, can’t predict climate anywhere, let alone globally.
[let’s just put RichardG out of bounds ~ctm]
So RG can slang off as much as he likes to everybody.
Or do you mean he is going to get put into moderation as well?
Richard, stop that.
No, just you.
RG….. a protected species?
No, I’m just protecting all targets of your relentless harassment as I see them happen. It’s a cumulative thing.
Yes, you are being singled out due to your abusive behavior.
“harassment”
You mean asking people to present evidence to back up their comments ?
Then watching them constantly run away from presenting any.
That’s one way of phrasing it. Still looking for that empirical evidence on fossils.
So you now admit there is no empirical evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2.
Well done. ! 🙂
And yes, fossils do exist, plenty of visible evidence.
For at least the third time and last time, what is the empirical, not theoretical evidence that fossils represent the morphology of ancient living things?
Eh?
“Eh?”
Precisely ! 🙂
Carbon dating. !
I said empirical evidence, not postulated hypothesis or plausible mechanisms.
1.5C yet here we are.
Yep, still waiting for the apocalypse
Yes, and please, am I the only one pointing out the pre-industrial lie again?
Sometimes even shows up with 1850 in it, but what’s a hundred years when you’re saving
the planet your bank account.CO2 started around 1950-ish, so they’re deliberately stealing close to a degree and lying about the baseline being flat in one short lie.
Apart from the ever increasing expansion of Melbourne and other regional cities and population centres, there is an increasing trend to build houses with dark or black walls and roofs that are effective heat sinks adding to the heat island effect. In the post WW2 years houses were generally built to reflect solar radiation and with little or no insulation in the walls or ceilings.
If anyone is fond of frosty mornings, move to a rural area at a higher elevation where farmers still endure losses through frost damage to their crops.
Also brick walls and tiled roof replacing weatherboard or fibro walls and corrugated iron roof, and a higher proportion of concrete footpaths and driveways.
As Jayrow said below, no frost is a validation of the UHI effect. I grew up and live in Melbourne. Recently had an early morning maintenance job in an outer suburb – Berwick. Noticed kangaroos hopping over frosty fields.
In the middle of a growing city is not the best place for studying any changing trends in the number of frosts. Due to the UHI effect.
The rural area surrounding Melbourne is a noted wine production area, surely they will have data on the frost season for the area and so will make for a better place to study any changes in the frost season for the area.
Karoly – yet another captured ‘climate scientist’. An x-bureaucrat, paid by the Australian taxpayer working at the government’s CSIRO located in the Canberra ‘bubble’, utterly removed from reality.
He’s an international ‘expert’ don’t you know?! No wait, a recognized international expert, not just an expert, or indeed a national expert, but an international expert.! Just another member of the increasingly irrelevant hypocritical ‘credentialed class’ touring the world lecturing to the proletarius about ‘lifestyle choices’ & ‘saving the planet’.
No doubt he drives his Chinese made Tesla to his speaking engagements (when he is not adding to his frequent flyer points) to sprout the latest climate computer simulation games and the very latest crystal ball climate prediction nonsense.
Associated with the Climate Council, a radical left, green FF hating Marxist de-growth ideological organisation.
I live in the Adelaide CBD inside the ring of parklands around the city. On cold mornings in winter when I go for my 6:00 am walk it is chilly down at the street but there is never frost. By the time I get to the middle of the parkland which is about 1 km from home there is sometimes frost – frozen grass. UHI anyone? Anyone with nerves in their body can feel the 2 to 3 degC difference between the built-up streets and the undeveloped park. In summer one can also easily feel the difference in temperature between the streets and the parkland. I suspect UHI effect in Melbourne, which is a biggish city, is probably higher than Adelaide
Whilst Melbourne is bigger than Adelaide, Adelaide is further north, closer in latitude to Sydney, but I do agree about the difference between built-up areas and open grassland which may well have more influence than the north south geographic location.
Adelaide is a little closer to the latitude of Sydney, but being on the Great Australian Bight it doesn’t have much between it and Antarctica. Melbourne is on Bass Strait, so has Tassie in the road for due southerlies.
Southern NSW gets pretty cold, too.
The basic condition for frosts is an atmosphere with little water vapour or zero cloud cover, a clear sky and no wind that provides ideal conditions for any heat at the surface to radiate off before it begins warming again. A frosty morning is generally followed by a pleasant or warm day with little or nothing to reflect incoming solar radiation.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but still air and clear sky are the main factors. And getting down to freezing at ground level, of course.
There are a few spots in valleys or hollows which are notorious frost traps as well. We’re on a bit of a slope, and we get more and heavier frosts on the flat than around the house.
It was mostly a comment about Adelaide and Melbourne both getting cold air up from the Southern Ocean, though, despite Adelaide being further north.
The Victorian Government nominates locations for firewood collection each spring and autumn.
There are basic safety rules to follow but plenty of wood; often freshly felled diseased tree or blown down in a storm.
https://www.ffm.vic.gov.au/firewood/firewood-collection-in-your-region
Many tracks do not require 4WD so anyone with a vehicle and chainsaw can collect wood..
It’s mainly fresh-felled green eucalyptus Rick.
Needs a year to season to burn properly.
David Karoly…. ”I got noth’n”
Worth adding that Melbourne’s population has doubled in the last 45 years, with the suburban sprawl now stretching out to envelop what were, back then, country towns. Along with that, the density of housing has also greatly intensified, with backyards disappearing and being replaced by yet more housing. Naturally that all means more concrete, more bricks, more tiles, and a lot less grass and far fewer trees. I’d suggest to Mr Karol that that is an environment far less conducive to frost. He should get out more – out of town, especially – if he wants to see frosty mornings, because they still exist.
Let’s try an experiment using data for the West Wyalong automatic weather station located at Latitude -33.9382, Longitude 147.1962; Bureau of Meteorology ID 50017. There is no evidence that the AWS moved since records commenced at the site on 10 April 1999.
After downloading the data from Climate Data Online, I aligned Year, Month, Day, Max, Min, and rain, remembering that because data are reported at 9am, daily Tmax is for the (afternoon) of the day preceding Tmin, which occurs around dawn on the day it is measured.
I also prepared a column headed IfRain, a factor identifying that that if rain was reported at 9am, IfRain = 1, and if not IfRain=0. All missing data were infilled by “NA”. (Incidence of rainfall is used as a surrogate for cloudiness.)
Ignoring rows containing missing values (NA), I used the R package “dplyr” to randomly sample each year at the rate of 20%, without replacement.
Experiment 1. Tmin ~ Tmax (no rain or IfRain):
Min = -7.65 + 0.728*Max
F-statistic: 5239 on 1 and 1866 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16; R2adj = 0.7372
This suggests that at Tmax = 18oC, Tmin = 5.45oC; if Tmax = 20oC, Tmin = 6.91oC; and if Tmax = 40oC, Tmin = 21.47oC.
Experiment 2. Tmin ~ Tmax + rain (continuous variable)
Tmin = -8.09 + 0.734*Tmax + 0.215* Rain
F-statistic: 2972 on 2 and 1865 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16; R2adj 0.7609
To make it easy, if Rain = 0, and Tmax = 18oC, Tmin = 5.1; if Rain = 0, and Tmax = 20oC, Tmin = 6.6; and if Rain = 0 and Tmax = 40, Tmin = 21.24 (all virtually the same as above).
So, while rainfall explains a little more of the variation in Tmin and causes Tmin to be higher by a function of rainfall, the outcome is not particularly useful.
Experiment 3. Tmin ~ Tmax + IfRain(Factor)
Here are the coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -9.1065 0.2632 -34.60 <2e-16 ***
Max 0.7584 0.0097 78.19 <2e-16 ***
IfRain1 2.6412 0.1740 15.18 <2e-16 ***
—
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 3.249 on 1865 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.7663, Adjusted R-squared: 0.766
F-statistic: 3057 on 2 and 1865 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Again, for IfRain=0 (no clouds):
For Tmax = 18oC, Tmin = 4.6oC; for Tmax = 20oC, Tmin = 6.1oC and Tmax = 40oC, Tmin = 21.23.
Should there be rain (which in this case is a surrogate for cloudiness), add 2.64 to those values.
It is safe to say that Tmin depends on Tmax, and that average Tmin is 2.64oC warmer on cloudy days (IfRain = 1) than days without cloud.
The explanation is simple. Incoming radiation warms the landscape, causing sensible heat to be advected to air in contact with the ground, which is measured by maximum thermometers (or probes) held in the Stevenson screen. During the night, sensible heat stored by the landscape is dissipated as long wave radiation according to the Steffan-Boltzmann law, causing the air in contact with the ground to cool and temperature to decline to a minimum around dawn. Irrespective of rainfall amount, the process is moderated by cloudiness associated with rainfall.
The difference (Tmax – Tmin) is usually referred to as DTR – the diurnal temperature ratio, but the process is more dynamic than suggested by a simple ratio.
So, what about frost?
As I recall, in the absence of there being a terrestrial minimum thermometer (or probe), frost is declared if Tmin measured in the screen is less than 2.2oC. If there is a terrestrial minimum thermometer, frost is declared if ground temperature is less than -0.4oC. In this case only have screen temperatures. So dry years are frostier than wet years and overall, there is no trend.
All the best,
Dr Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Woops,
Diurnal temperature range not diurnal temperature ratio.
b.
They used to burn witches for climate being too cold… In the end, it kind of helped, as it started getting warmer. Now, if they shut down Western economies to make climate colder, we just need to find enough witches when it gets too cold again.
The last few years the first frost of fall has come later in calgary. As a result, my tomatoes live longer
no other discernible changes