Essay by Eric Worrall
Senator Malcolm Roberts schooling the green Aussie Senate Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change Inquiry on the evidence.
One Nation Senator’s wild climate change claim
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One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts asked a series of questions about science, including data showing cause and effect, when Dr Karl had an issue with his line of questioning.
“Let’s see if we can agree on something. Do you agree that the climate records show that the last 10 years have been the hottest on record worldwide?” he asked.
Senator Roberts immediately disagreed, claiming the past decade had been “cooler than the 1880s and 1890s in Australia”.
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Dr Karl was left dumbfounded by the response.
“I feel like I’m talking to a schoolchild who says seven times two is not 14, but instead seven times two is a bicycle,” he said.
Senator Roberts said that response was “one way to make me look like a fool”.
“No, but all the scientists disagree with you,” Dr Karl hit back, adding that “99.999 per cent of the scientists” had a different opinion.
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Read more: https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/one-nation-senators-wild-climate-change-claim/news-story/76d8ab81f626ebff36324b9ae8e4411f
A more complete record of the conversation is available on Senator Malcolm Roberts’ facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1200025185620305
There is substantial evidence Australia was scorching hot in the 1890s. The following is a picture of the Murray River, part of Australia’s largest river system, running bone dry at the height of the 1895-1903 Federation Drought. Imagine the Mississippi running so dry you could drive a horse and cart over the river bed, and you will get an idea of how devastating this event must have been.
The Federation Drought caused large scale ecosystem collapse;
Megadrought caused mega biodiversity loss
Researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, have painstakingly reconstructed the nation’s ‘once in a century drought’ in the early 1900s, revealing that it caused mass ecosystem collapse and dramatic declines in plant and animal populations across more than a third of the continent.
16 JULY 2019
NEWS RELEASEAs part of efforts to prepare for and adapt to future droughts, CSIRO ecologists recreated the megadrought through historical records, including the study of tens of thousands of newspaper articles, to build a picture of the event’s effects on the nation published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
“With many of Australia’s landscapes more fragmented and degraded, and species under pressure from invasive plants and animals, a similar drought today could spell disaster on an even more devastating scale,” CSIRO researcher Dr Robert Godfree said.
Australia’s Federation Drought, spanning 1895 to 1903, was one of the world’s worst recorded megadroughts. Much of the country received less than 40 per cent of its average rainfall, and 1902 was the driest year on record.
“Australia saw widespread economic depression. In New South Wales, most rivers stopped flowing. Dust storms filled dams, buried homesteads and created ghost towns as people fled,” Dr Godfree said.
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Read more (includes video): https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2019/July/Megadrought-caused-mega-biodiversity-loss
Huge dust storms devastated farms and entire regions.
So, we have evidence that something pretty terrible happened in Australia, but is there evidence which can provide a global dimension to this Aussie megadrought disaster? Turns out there may be.
In the early 1900s, California suffered a series of severe flooding events.
1904, 1907 & 1909 – Sacramento Valley Flood
1905-1907 – Salton Sea Formation
There were also a bunch of other flood events in the USA during this period, such as flooding associated with the USA’s deadliest natural disaster, the 1900 Galveston storm which claimed 8000 lives.
The Wikipedia El Niño page lists 1903-1904 as a likely El Niño event, and National Museum Australia suggests the Federation Megadrought was caused by a strong El Niño event.
There are other ocean cycles such as the Indian Ocean Dipole, which also influence Australian rainfall. It would fit the narrative to claim all these cycles combined into a super cycle, but I didn’t find sufficient evidence to support this proposition.
There were other factors, such as poor agricultural practices, which likely contributed to the devastation, just as poor agricultural practices likely contributed to the devastation of the 1930s US dust bowl. But if human activity was the main cause of the Federation Drought, the drought wouldn’t have ended.
Were conditions during the Federation Drought hotter than today?
Despite this evidence of extreme conditions, possibly coinciding with an unusually strong planet warming El Niño, Dr Karl is claiming only 0.001% of scientists are prepared to consider the possibility that whatever caused the the Federation drought, a scorching hot prolonged drought which dried up Australia’s largest river system, also caused a significant spike in the continental temperature of Australia.
For the sake of open scientific inquiry, I sure hope Dr Karl is wrong. I don’t know that the years leading up to the drought and the Federation Drought itself were hotter than today, I haven’t seen Senator Roberts’ evidence. But given droughts in Australia are normally associated with hot, dry weather, and the Federation Drought is regularly referred to as a megadrought, the proposition that temperatures during that period were hotter than today seems plausible.
Why didn’t Dr. Karl provide a reasoned response to Senator Malcolm Roberts’ temperature claims? Perhaps Dr. Karl responded with bluster rather than reasoned argument because he didn’t know what Senator Roberts was talking about. Maybe Dr Karl sensed an intellectual trap, but he hadn’t done his homework, so he didn’t know where Senator Roberts was leading. Or maybe Dr Karl did know what Senator Roberts was talking about, but couldn’t think of a convincing response. Either way, Dr Karl provided a disappointing performance for someone who claims to be a public climate authority.
Despite the availability of temperature records stretching back into the mid 1800s, the official Australian instrumental temperature record starts in 1910, seven years after the official end of the Federation Drought. Though to be fair Aussie temperature records were sparse in the 1800s, and it is likely the Federation Drought itself was the motivation for a substantial expansion in Australia’s weather monitoring infrastructure.
