Recipe for Australia’s climate ‘truth bomb’: dubious manipulations of the historical temperature record, ignorance of the climate dynamics of the Southern Hemisphere, and ignorance of Australia’s ecological and social history.
A correspondent of The Guardian newspaper writes that her personal ‘climate truth bomb’ hit her while she was picking ash from her glass at a wine tasting event – the Sydney Harbour bridge being dimly seen through the murk of bushfires. The truth came to her, she wrote, in the eloquent rage of Greta Thunberg and also in heat, smoke and fire.
Although anthropogenic climate change sells well, especially at The Guardian, their Sydney correspondent cannot be so ignorant about the climate of Australia or about bushfires as she pretends. Put briefly, bushfires in Australia and elsewhere have two main sources: from thunderstorms or from human activity, deliberate or otherwise – cigarette butts, sparks from brakes on railway trains, from incautious welding on farm machinery and from electric transmission lines. In California, where almost 2 million acres burned in 2018 and claimed many lives, the electricity supply company now closes down its transmission lines in windy conditions to prevent sparking and fires.
As she should have known, climate change or not, that ash in The Guardian correspondent’s wine was very probably caused by the direct action of an Australian citizen. In the current drought, 36% of fires have been judged to be accidental, 37% as suspicious, 13% as deliberate and only 6% as natural. And that pattern is not new: Australia has a serious arson problem. “In short, up to 85 bushfires begin every day because someone leaves their house and decides to start one,” said Dr. P. Reid of the Australian Center for Research in Bushfires and Arson
The geography of the Australian continent is a special case, fire-wise. It has very flat terrain without major mountain ranges, and no major gulfs to allow marine weather to penetrate inland. The pattern of rainfall is driven by the wind systems over the surrounding oceans: Pacific, Indian, Southern. The strength of the SE Trades across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and the moisture they transport, are paramount for rainfall in Queensland. But periodically the trades fail during Niño events and so rainfall is intermittent and decade-long dry periods are the rule rather than the exception, especially in the eastern part of the continent.
In New South Wales and Victoria, rainfall variability is also influenced by the dynamics of the Antarctic Ocean, with blocking highs developing over the ocean; in western Australia, the dynamics of the Indian Ocean are important in carrying moisture to the continent. But, overall, the ‘canonical driver of Australian rainfall’ is the alternating state of the SE Trades, according to Risbey and his colleagues. So periodic droughts, more frequent in the east, are the inevitable consequence of Australian geography.
The indigenous vegetation and fauna was evolved to deal with these conditions and the pre-settlement human population had, likewise, evolved a lifestyle that placed sufficiently modest demands on the environment that their survival was assured. This included lighting seasonal ‘cool’ fires that prevented the build-up of dead vegetation and produced a mosaic of burned and unburned land: this technique has now been reintroduced in the Kimberly region and ‘right across the North’ [link]
But the wave of settlement during the 19th century by European pastoralists, who did not understand their new environment, changed all that very fundamentally: ‘sheep were cheap, water was available and graziers relied on saltbush and scrub to provide quality feed when overgrazing had destroyed the perennial grass [link] Rabbits, naively introduced in 1859, were in plague numbers over most of southeast Australia by the end of the century – busily digging out the roots of native vegetation, and ring-barking shrubs. After logging, the regenerating eucalypt woodlands lacked (and much still lacks) a closed canopy, a condition which encourages dry, shrubby ground cover and the propagation of fire.
In short, settlement was disastrous for the original drought-adapted environment of the interior of Australia and it was not long before the inevitable occurred, even without the help of rabbits. Since reliable records began to be kept, a ‘severe’ drought has been recorded on average every 18 years, since that of 1803 which caused crop failures in New South Wales: each was accompanied by widespread bushfires.
The years 1871, 1895-1902, 1926, 1928, 1931, 1939, 1982 and 2009 each have their own Black day-of-the-week and notable high temperatures: the Black Friday fire of February 1931 burned 5 million ha. or 25% of the state of Victoria, claiming 12 lives, plus a million sheep and many cattle.
Images of dead stock and advancing dust-storms abound from those years, local newspapers headlined maximum temperatures and wrote of hardship and abandoned farms; trains were immobilised by dust storms having updrafts so strong that they emitted ball lightning. Conditions during the Federation drought of 1895-1903 were very severe indeed, and a land surveyor recorded that he feared the heat would cause the mercury bulb of his thermometer to burst.
Today, it is widely believed in Australia that the drought and fire-storms of 2019 were the consequence of CO2-driven anomalously high air temperature; long forgotten is the fact that very high temperatures were reliably recorded during earlier droughts. During the Millennium drought of south-eastern regions from 1996 to 2010, the highest temperature recorded at Melbourne was 46.4oC in February 2009 – but on Black Thursday of 1851 Melbourne recorded 117oF (47oC) and on Black Friday of 1939 the same place recorded 45oC.
These are conditions sufficiently similar to those of the recent drought as not to make a great deal of difference to those enduring them: that is a strong statement, but it is supported by the Australian network of meteorological observations, which has a spatial coverage second only to that of the USA – and includes stations having continuous data since the 1880s. Observations were established in the early years of the Federation along with the telegraph network, and Australia boasts one of the very longest continuous records globally: observations in Adelaide began in 1856, but you will find the early data have been expunged from the currently-used Australian archives.
Note: The GHCN data is used in this text to avoid the consequences of the post-hoc adjusting of the observations by NOAA, NASA and by the Australian BOM, discussed below.
Until recently, these observations were made at West Terrace which is a large well-grassed city park with botanic gardens, open to the four winds. The station was moved 3.5 km in 1979.
Observations were obtained with mercury thermometers in Gleisher frames or Stevenson screens up to about 1910, although in some outback locations there was probably some improvisation: Stevenson screens became standard after 1910 right up to the progressive introduction of electronic sensors in the 1990s. A comparison showed that Stevenson temperatures were 0.5-1.00C warmer during daytime than in the better-ventilated Gleisher frames: night temperatures were identical in both, winter daytime differences being about half of those of summer. [link]
There has been much reluctance to accept the validity of data from the period prior to 1910, when Stevenson screens came to be used everywhere, and this example from NASA Goddard (copied about two years ago) shows an astonishing solution: adjust the earliest homogenised (black line) observations by -3oC and progressively decrease this offset until the adjusted data become compatible with the unadjusted observations (grey line).
Fortunately, perhaps because of the support given by many other rural data to the original observations, NASA seems to have come to its senses since then, and now in 2020 (right plot) offers a more sensible interpretation that accepts the original data as having been correct. But this now contradicts the interpretation of the Alice Springs observations by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) in their much-criticised ACORN-SAT archive (to be discussed later).
The problematic air temperature data
A common feature of the reporting of the recent drought has been an insistence that air temperatures have been anomalously high because of CO2-forced warming of the lower atmosphere; however, the original observations – prior to processing by some US and UK agencies – do not always concur.
Australia, like all nations, submits its observations annually to WMO for archiving, whence they are obtained by the US/NOAA National Climatic Data Centre and incorporated into a Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN); they become accessible also from US/NASA Goddard as the GISTEMP (global) data set and from the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office as the CRUTEM data set. Unfortunately there has been much informal grumbling that homogenisation of individual data with neighbours, and adjustment for instrument moves were not being performed rationally either by Goddard or the CRU. The processed data have a warming trend consistently stronger than in the original data submitted by nations, and as originally archived as the GHCN. The GHCN, GISTEMP and CRUTEM data have become the workhorses of climate change studies, and much hangs on their being correct.
To address this issue, Ross McKitrick compared all raw and adjusted GHCN data in grid-cells in which both adjusted and unadjusted data were present and found that for all years up to about 1980, the adjustments resulted in a temperature cooler than the observations, but in later years corrections tended to be in the opposite sense (delta T 0C, y-axis in left image below). The unavoidable consequence is that ‘a portion of the warming trend shown in global records derived from the adjusted GHCN archive results from the adjustments and not from the underlying data’.
These adjustments collectively increase the 20th century warming by 0.3-0.40C over the observations. This finding was confirmed independently and published informally by others (right, above) [link] The left-hand figure above results because the code used at NCDC/GHCN and at NASA/GISS to correct for terminal warming caused by urban or similar effects should be designed to cool the terminal, urbanised section of the record – but, instead of doing this, the code warms the earlier segments so as to bring the the record into proper alignment. This inversion of the appropriate correction is not only counter-intuitive but it enables the final temperature due to urban effects to be treated subsequently as “normal”. [link]
Fortunately, the original observations as submitted by national agencies to WMO are archived by NOAA’s National Climate Data Center at U. Alabama and these have suffered only very light post-accession processing: they are the closest we can now get to the original observations and are a solid foundation for regional climate analysis: these data are available without fuss at the KNMI site as the GHCN.all file and are used in what follows.
This finding is consistent with a computation of the degree to which the pattern of trends in a homogenised, gridded data set is independent of socio-economic factors: this hypothesis is rejected (P = 7.1 x 10-14) across a grid of all land-based grid cells. This means “that extraneous (non-climatic) signals contaminate gridded climate data”, the consequence of which is that the estimated 1980-2002 global mean temperature trend must be reduced by about half, if it is used to monitor natural or CO2 induced climate change. [link]
The contiguous USA is the only large region which is covered with a satisfactorily dense network of stations, satisfactorily managed: here are the annual mean surface temperatures from the unedited GNCN archive: it offers very little support for the standard plot of the evolution of surface temperature. If we had similar data at global and secular scale there would be much less debate about the nature of climate evolution.
Fortunately, Australia has a coverage of rural data second only to the USA and these may be used to demonstrate the consequences of the fact that most Australians live on, on near the coastline, while few live in the interior of the continent. The relatively lightly-edited GHCN-all data from KNMI show temperature trends from all Australian stations within each of two rectangles: (1) 20o-29.5oN 125o-145oE representing inland regions, and (2) 10oS-40oS 105oE-155oE that includes all of Australia and thus all Australian cities and large towns with very few exceptions.
The effect of the growth of the urban, coastal population, that started seriously around 1900 after the gold rush, is very clear: an almost linear warming trend in which nights once again warm faster than days. In the rural regions, air temperatures exhibit no response to increasing CO2 contamination.
Though excellent, the Australian archives have not attracted as much attention in relation to analysis of climate change as one would have expected, although one study of a file of mostly inland, rural data found that a long cooling trend from the early years was replaced later in the century by warming “that is more pronounced where irrigation development for large-scale rice cultivation has occurred. Neither the cooling nor the magnitude of the recent warming can be explained by anthropogenic global warming theory’ [link]. The much-discussed temperature series from the Rutherglen agricultural research station in New South Wales conforms to this pattern, although the surrounding flat terrain of the Murray River valley is intensively planted in vineyards.
Here, the natural terrain has gone long ago – but the air temperature of the place conforms to the general pattern. Summer maximum temperatures were higher during the 1930s than today, and heavy bushfires in the surrounding region occurred on 13 January 1939 which became one of the series of ‘Black’ days of the week discussed earlier: that summer was 2.2oC hotter than any of the ten most recent summers at the same place.[link] Here are the GHCN-all data for Rutherglen.
But the original data have now been heavily revised by BoM. In particular, the series was broken at the 1939 maximum – which has disappeared – and a progressive warming has been imposed on the whole, based on homogenised data from other stations. The break was imposed because at that time the instruments had been moved ‘from one paddock to another’.
The original Rutherglen data resemble those of a cluster of 34 very rural GISTEMP stations in Queensland and NSW, chosen several years ago and selected for their length and continuity of record.
Each place was examined in satellite imagery to check the nature of the terrain immediately surrounding it, and its relative isolation; several potential candidates for inclusion were rejected on the grounds of excessive development of building around the likely placement of the instruments. Most are very small communities, so conditions are dominated by the surrounding outback environment, which is subject to very long dry spells. Land-use change has been small, many of the sites being in flat grassland with some cattle and scattered small trees and dry rocky terrain, some including a few small fields of cereals: at just three there was irrigated farming: only one is within 50 km of the coast.
Here, as in the rural-dominated USA network, the influence of urbanisation is small, and consequently there is no progressive 20th century warming. The outlying data points in the following plot, both warm and cool, are dominated by those places with some irrigation-fed farming, using rainwater accumulated behind a small earth dam; here the original bush environment has been degraded more than elsewhere. The curious jump around 1980 has been observed in other data: it awaits explanation; the vertical line indicates standardisation to Stevenson screens.
This pattern – and that of Rutherglen – is supported by yet another multi-station selection of unadjusted GHCN data, this time of a rectangle in NSW and Victoria; the pattern recalls the very long record from Adelaide, which is located in the same region. This provides further confirmation that the end of the 19th century was at least a warm as today in New South Wales in the original observations.
So the evidence is good that the climate of the vast inland regions of Australia changed very slowly during the 20th century, cooling progressively from the warm end of the 19th century and then gently warming again from the 1970s until the present time – which probably remains cooler than in 1900. Note
But all that remains hidden from most climatologists (and from The Guardian’s correspondent) because of progressive adjustment of the temperature data by NOAA, NASA and the BoM. This supposedly corrects the data for the progressive transformation of the site and, in so doing, replaces the rather stable climate of Alice Springs as recorded by the observers (solid symbols) into a secular warming trend (open symbols). This is now assumed to be correct, and is more acceptable because it supports modeled results of CO2 pollution of the atmosphere.
We can be sure that progressive warming here is a product of progressive adjusting of the data at NOAA and NASA, and not of CO2 pollution, because we have very good information concerning instrument moves.
At Alice Springs, the Stevenson screen has been located at four sites since 1890: (1) the telegraph office in open bush country, (2) the post office in town, (3) at a first airport site and (4) at a second airport site, where it remains. But, unfortunately for the adjusted 2018 data, the four segments of the original data match perfectly, indicate no progressive warming, and resemble the pattern from six appropriate rural stations: Giles, Tennant Creek, Urandangi, Boulia, Oodonata and Hall’s Creek. [link]
All this should have become a major scandal, but it appears to be of no concern to today’s climatologists, who almost unanimously accept the CRUTEM and GISTEMP archives as being correct. But the ‘adjustment’ of the original observations by NASA Goddard and the CRU is akin to the action of a museum systematist who squashes a beetle specimen underfoot because it upsets the nice tidy classification of its genus or family on which he (or she) is the sole expert.
It is now about 70 years since I learned my how profession functioned, and became involved myself in peer-reviewed science, but until recently I had not encountered anything that I personally judged to be off-colour – not so much as a squashed beetle.
Yet the imposition of warming trends, where there were none in the original data, by meteorological agencies in the USA and Britain is squashed beetles in spades and has become an essential support of the feeding frenzy that has gripped oceanographic (and other) research institutes everywhere, and in which I participated thoughtlessly in the 1990s. [link]
It is not very surprising then if the products of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) were used – whether fortuitously or not – to support the political initiative of a Labour government that in 2012 introduced a cap-and-trade carbon tax which turned out to be as short-lived as the government itself. This editing of Australian data has generated a consistent, continental warming trend throughout the 20th century that is not present in the original data submitted by Australia to WMO in the past, and which now reside in the GHCN-all archive.
The latest version, ACORN 2, of 112 selected stations, reports the BoM, “shows that Australia has warmed by approximately one degree since 1910. The warming has occurred mostly since 1950. The frequency of daily temperature extremes has also changed since 1910. The number of weather stations recording very warm night-time temperatures and the frequency with which these occur has increased since the mid 1970s. The rate of very hot daytime temperatures has been increasing since the 1990s”.
In the technical description of ACORN-SAT on the BOM site, I can find no explanation of the abrupt change in slope around 1950, nor does there appear to be any such change in the state of the relevant drivers of Australian climate: ENSO index, Indian Ocean dipole, or in the Antarctic Ocean. Concerning this change of slope, IPCC reviewers cite CO2-forcing as sole the source of increasing temperature and consequent drought. [link] In any event, for reasons that must seem good to them, the BoM has removed all reference to years earlier than 1910 from the ACORN-SAT data. This is unfortunate, because it is perfectly clear from the historical record that devastating droughts and bushfires are not novel, CO2-forced events, but have been suffered – and were recorded – by settlers in Australia since the earliest days.
There has been some formal agitation for an official audit of the revision of its archived data held by the BOM [link], although this seems unlikely to be implemented. Fortunately, however, help is at hand, because six concerned individuals, the WA Climate group, has performed such an audit and posted the results in a series of consultable documents:
- – ACORN 2 influence on Australian temperature trends
- – ACORN 2 changes to Australian temperature history
- – Australian very hot days show no extreme climate change
- – Average temperature trends across Western Australia (all 32 stations)
- – GISS raw and BOM High Quality adjusted temperature comparisons
- – Australia raw temperature trend audit of BoM HQ static
- – September 2016 coldest in SW Australia since 1897
The first of these offers, for each state, a review of the data of every station in the BoM archive, including analyses of rates of change per decade (back as far as data exist), a detailed catalogue of changes made at the observing site, plots of annual average maximum and minimum temperatures (with associated Excel spreadsheets) and so on. One of the Queensland stations is Bourke, also included in my selection of rural sites discussed above.
For this place, I discover that “Bourke 48013 has annual max temps back to 1878: 1878-1909 = 28.62C” and that “1989-1998 raw max averaged 27.33C and post AWS 2000-2009 averaged 28.27C”, and finally that ”Observations were originally made within the Bourke township (048013). This site had trees and buildings nearby and the lawn around the screen was regularly watered. There was a small site move within the Post Office yard in May 1937, and the screen was replaced in November 1964. A site (048239) was established on the southern side of the airport near the terminal building on 11 November 1994. Observations continued there until January 1999. The current site began operations in December 1998, 700 m north of the previous airport location but with only a minimal overlap. These data are used in ACORN-SAT from 1 January 1999.”
Yet Bourke, like all the rest of the ACORN stations, has been truncated at 1910 and what happened in the previous decades – for which we have good evidence of great heat and withering droughts – seems now to be of no concern to the BoM. Others have pointed to errors in observer’s records that have not been corrected, e.g. minimum daily temperatures that are higher than maximum, or significant rounding-up errors in transcription of observers logs.[link]
Finally, BoM failed to comment on the fact that the warming trend is largely restricted to night temperatures although this is characteristically associated with urbanisation; this is a very weak point in their argument, because the influence of urbanisation is not restricted to the passive radiative effects of buildings, but also to the consequences of the heat of combustion generated in situ by transportation, heating, and industry: this is a major, but habitually overlooked, factor in urban heat islands everywhere. [link]
So, what was the direct cause of the 2019 drought and firestorms?
Finally, what was the probable cause of the conditions that led to the 2019 drought and fire storms? Do we have to invoke anthropogenic CO2 as has been widely done, or is there a more parsimonious explanation?
In fact, conditions were ripe for a catastrophic fire season in 2019. The strong Niño of 2016 and the weaker event of 2019 had created a significant rainfall deficit: in 2018, rainfall over southeastern Australian mainland was in the lowest 10% of historical observations, particularly from April onwards. New South Wales was deep in drought by August 2018 and remained so until May 2019, when more than half of Queensland was also declared to be in drought. The BoM declared the drought to be worse than the Federation Drought, the WWII drought and the Millennium drought, but presented no evidence for that doubtful statement.
But that may not have been the most important factor in the fires. Fire reduction burning had been done in only 1% of the Victoria woodlands when at least 10% was required, according to the foresters, and previously agreed to by government. But the expert advisory committee described the governments reaction to their advice as “a farce, conveniently ambiguous and deceptive to the point of arrogance”. Consequently, there were dangerous fuel loads in in Victorian bush-lands and the members of the forest fire advisory group accused the Victoria government “of tacitly neglecting its commitments to fuel reduction to appease the green lobby”.
If you want to see the resultant conditions for yourself, take a drive on Google Earth up any small road in the hills of NSW or Victoria…you will see scorched trees, a thick layer of dead leaves and abundant underbush.
Given the rainfall deficit together with such conditions in the bushlands, accidents are inevitable and, together with the propensity of some people to arson, one needs to look no further for the cause of the unstoppable fires. Today, as I write this, the BBC is reporting that a volunteer firefighter of 19 has been arrested for seven counts of alleged arson in an area south of Sydney, NSW. And another arsonist finds himself charged with manslaughter.
* * * * * * * * *
So there is really no need to complicate things by the insertion of CO2 forcing into this rather sad story – which William of Occam suggested we shouldn’t do unless it was really essential.
But that means that if Graham Redfearn, who also writes for The Guardian, happens to see this text, I shall find myself accused of being another amateur of ‘conspiracy theories’ concerning the ‘corruption’ of archived temperature data by government agencies, along with Jennifer Marohasy and others. Redfearn suggests that scientists should accept the reasons put forward by the BoM for their revisions of the temperature archive and, of course, as a journalist he is entitled to express that opinion.
But investigative journalist he proves not to be, for he has obviously not read any of the material quoted here concerning the unfortunate revision of international archives of temperature data by some US and UK government agencies. The BoM is, of course, entitled to do what it think fit with its own data, although I happen to think they have not got it right.
Failure to understand the climatic and other causes of the Australian bush fires leads to failure of implementing sensible policies to ameliorate the situation.
Moderation note: As with all guest posts, please keep your comments civil and relevant.
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“To address this issue, Ross McKitrick compared all raw and adjusted GHCN data in grid-cells in which both adjusted and unadjusted data were present and found that for all years up to about 1980, the adjustments resulted in a temperature cooler than the observations, but in later years corrections tended to be in the opposite sense (delta T 0C, y-axis in left image below). The unavoidable consequence is that ‘a portion of the warming trend shown in global records derived from the adjusted GHCN archive results from the adjustments and not from the underlying data’.”
link is 404.
The chart you show of GHCN ADJ versus unadjusted does not match
what existing data is.
the link to Mckittrick is dead.
I believe this is the paper in question:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1653928
Please correct the missing link to Ross McKitrick’s paper. See McKitricks publications on Temperature. The paper may be:
McKitrick R. A critical review of global surface temperature data products. I so, it’s available at SSRN 1653928. 2010 Aug 5. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1653928
Posted at: RealClimateScience
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/McKitrickCriticalGHCNReview.pdf
At: PSU.edu
At: Free.fr
http://tbrincou.free.fr/Doc/surfacetempreview.pdf
At: SemanticsScholar.org
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.175.4705&rep=rep1&type=pdf
If this is the Alan Longhurst – this is a quite remarkable and effective dissertation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Longhurst
“In short, up to 85 bushfires begin every day because someone leaves their house and decides to start one”
Why on earth would anyone do this? Maybe they are climate alarmists imbued with the fervor of a Greta Thunberg. Just a thought.
There are psychopaths, sociopaths and very disturbed people out there. They are probably starting bush fires more often because it’s in the news and is seen by news readers as the issue of the day.
Once, over 30 years ago, in the space of 1 month I suffered two arsons in the block of flats I lived in. Both were set by a psycho. In the first case I told him that the first fire he set could have killed someone. Most likely the children living in flats above mine. My reward was to have my flat broken into and set on fire while I was away for a day.
But, of course, they don’t. There will be an investigation of the fires soon. We can expect heated discussions over the attribution of causes and possible preventive measures.
House fires (apart from those ignited by the bushfires) will not be discussed.
I cannot understand why such a deeply flawed paper such as this is worth a mention.
The fact is, something has changed in recent years. The firefighters say so. We all wish more hazard reduction burns were increased, but the windows of opportunity for doing so have narrowed. Houses have been destroyed in recent times with burns that went wrong. It is not that the firefighters are stupid or inexperienced.
This article attempts to cover a topic begging for clear sighted analysis in smog. Fortunately it fails utterly because we know more about these fires than the author.
Greta how are you?
It is hilarious isn’t it? Hundreds of Australians deserting their houses just to help (or is that hinder) the AGW argument.
Before the Australia bushfires sink into our collective memory hole I recommend this in-depth reporting that reveal the vast scope of damage these fires caused. Excellent!
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/tracking-the-impact-of-australias-horror-bushfires/news-story/ab3f5032a6d5e9bbcab41c88c7358c34
Most of my 38-acre predominantly forested block was burned (only ash at the surface, a lot of trees down) when some youngsters lit a fire for fun in a rubbish tip some distance away, and it got out of control. It wasn’t deliberate arson, it was just very silly. (back in the early ’80s).
Amazing, that a 94 year old can do this kind of work. God bless him.
An excellent, fact-filled, analysis. Thank you. Of course, the alarmists will try to undercut it somehow with some absurd argument and will probably accuse you of shilling for some interest or another. Keep up the good work!!
Full of facts, like the nonsense about arson. Fortunately, he put that rubbish at the beginning of the article.
There are serious discussions to be had about these fires. This is not one of them.
A government report of 2008 states approx 85% of fires are man made. 35% accidental, 13% deliberate, 37% suspicious with only 6% natural.
If you have a problem with them stats take it up with the Labor gov who instigated the study
https://aic.gov.au/publications/bfab/bfab051?fbclid=IwAR1-IO93UQ0g5HgRDxy671l_JUQrNOYUBfQUV0L9DH_gPVxOGMC-fIrt1p4
Other sources put the natural causes at 50%
“Bushfires can originate from both human activity and natural causes with lightning the predominant natural source, accounting for about half of all ignitions in Australia.”
from
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bushfire
It’s that CO2 lightning.
“Full of facts, like the nonsense about arson.”
I’m all for a serious discussion. However, in all seriousness I have never met an environmental activist who was not so convinced of the importance and urgency of his cause that he would hesitate for a second in lighting a fire if he thought it might draw attention to and advance that cause. The notion that an activist would lack the required commitment is not only absurd, it is highly disrespectful and dismissive. When a cause is THAT important there are NO unjustifiable measures to advance it!
Cooling the past might be correct, but if large adjustments seem necessary, it also means that the data quality is low and we can’t really compare current measurements with old measurements. To me it seems that climate science is suffering from compulsive thinking: “if data are bad or missing it simply must be a way to correct or model them”.
Great work Alan! Most informative!
Wonderful post.
Any time I read about how AGW is at fault for some condition or event I automatically start researching from numerous other sources to find
“the rest of the story”. Invariably, it’s much more complex and there are other plausible causes. We can always count on the media to dumb down the issue, without a discussion of history, probabilities or other factors at play. It makes one wonder if they skip teaching critical thinking skills in journalism school.
Then there is the Kenskingdom blog (https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/) that very recently reviewed the Australian BoM weather station sites and found: After surveying 666 weather stations across Australia and finding nearly half (49.25%) are not compliant with Bureau of Meteorology siting specifications
Haha. My blog finds that your blog fakes its investigation.
The BOM is inhabited by meteorologists who do not fake data. I know you would like to think they do, but farmers, builders, the air force, the navy and goodness knows who else rely on and check the data.
By all means discuss climate change etc.etc. Is it or is it not happening.
But if they are faking it, how would you know that global warming is or is not occurring! Did it occur to you that they might (for some deep dark reason unknowable to we mortals) be suppressing the magnitude of the warming?!
Sydney Harbor bridge is for sale
The author wrote:
“Note: The GHCN data is used in this text to avoid the consequences of the post-hoc adjusting of the observations by NOAA, NASA and by the Australian BOM, discussed below.”
1) the adjustments reduce the long-term warming trend.
2) adjustments are done to remove biases that are in the raw data. The author prefers to keep the biases in…. Some things to read:
“Thorough, not thoroughly fabricated: The truth about global temperature data: How thermometer and satellite data is adjusted and why it must be done,” Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica 1/21/16.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/
“Understanding adjustments to temperature data,” Zeke Hausfather
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/
“Berkeley Earth: raw versus adjusted temperature data,” Robert Rohde, Zeke Hausfather, Steve Mosher
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/09/berkeley-earth-raw-versus-adjusted-temperature-data/
“Understanding Time of Observation Bias,” Zeke Hausfather
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/22/understanding-time-of-observation-bias/
1) the adjustments reduce the long-term warming trend.
(David, how so?)
Karl et al Science 2015 has a graph (Fig 2B) showing the raw vs adjusted data. I don’t have the data, but it’s clear the trend of the corrected data is less than that of the raw data.
https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf
Victor Venema also has an interesting blog post about this.
http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2015/02/evil-nazi-communist-world-government.html
For clarity here, from David’s link to Victor Venema’s post…
Land only:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lwQfxPaXFd0/VNoo9h7vUhI/AAAAAAAAAhA/iW8rexGjbgU/s1600/land%2Braw%2Badj.png
Ocean only:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HGT605CXR7w/VNoo9mjLeuI/AAAAAAAAAg8/QK_0C_L-hYc/s1600/ocean%2Braw%2Badj.png
Land + Ocean:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-opy7LoBO__w/VNoo9u5ynhI/AAAAAAAAAg4/_DCE5Rzm9Fw/s1600/land%2Bocean%2Braw%2Badj.png
“…the adjustments reduce the long-term warming trend.”
Karl was talking global. This is about Australia. The most accurate Southern hemisphere data. With an oceans influence. The two most accurate. Flat or nearly so.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304404833/figure/fig3/AS:390922962522119@1470214705137/Forest-fire-danger-index-FFDI-for-the-Australian-Alps-bioregion-since-1900-showing-the.png
Figure 5. Forest fire danger index (FFDI) for the Australian Alps bioregion since 1900, showing the annual sum of daily deviations from the mean daily FFDI, averaged across all weather stations in the bioregion. The positive trend since the 1970s (dashed line) is well documented (Clarke et al., 2013). Over the whole 114‐year record, there is no trend (solid black line), yet there are distinct phases of high and low FFDI, with a period of about 20 years (solid red line: 5‐year running mean). The years when fires burnt more than 5000 ha of E. delegatensis are shown by red dots.
– in papers: The relative importance of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in the decline of obligate seeder forests, Bowman et al., 2016. (doi.org/10.1111/geb.12484).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6033150/bin/WCC-9-na-g001.jpg
– in papers: The early 20th century warming: Anomalies, causes, and consequences, Hegerl et. al., 2018., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6033150/#wcc522-bib-0132
7.5. The World War II drought in Australia
“Also during the late 1930s and early 1940s drought conditions affected Australia. Dry conditions started in 1937 and worsening during the subsequent years. In January 1939, heat waves and bushfires (known as “Black Friday” fires) had devastating effects on eastern Australia. Drought then worsened during the 1939–1942 El Niño event and persisted through to 1945.
Drought conditions in Australia are generally influenced by ENSO, Pacific Decadal Variability, the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode, and Southern Annular Mode (SAM; Verdon‐Kidd & Kiem, 2009; see Figure S7). The strong and extended El Niño event over 1939–1942 might have contributed to worsening the drought conditions, although the World War II drought started and ended during La Niña conditions, whose effect on precipitation might have been offset by the positive PDO (Cai et al., 2010) and by a positive SAM (Verdon‐Kidd & Kiem, 2009; note, however, that the SAM indices are very uncertain in these years). A positive SAM is generally associated with a southward shift in cold weather fronts, associated with high precipitation during the austral winter months, leading to drier conditions over southeast Australia (Risbey, Pook, McIntosh, Wheeler, & Hendon, 2009). Also, relative to the southern Indian Ocean, SSTs northwest of Australia were anomalously cool, depriving southeastern Australian of a tropical moisture source as is often the case during positive Indian Ocean dipole events (Ummenhofer et al., 2009).” – SO IDENTICALLY AS NOW.
As you can see there is “no place” on the significant impact of global warming.
test
Are we testing credulity?
noun: credulity
a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true.
‘from the journal Nature Climate Change’:
“Australia’s wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country’s forests, making the blazes “globally unprecedented” following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday. ”
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-bushfires-australia-forest.html
An Australian government study found 85% of Australia’s bush fires to be man made. ie they are caused by the actions of man, whether intentional or accidental. Only 6% of our fires are started by natural means.
This was a Labor gov instigated report.
The Australian fires are history now. It’s gone and what grows back depends on what what the Aussies do. Loosing 20% of some of their best ecosystems was a price they have to bear.
Geoengineering will be much cheaper than trying to change minds it seems.
NOAA is already doing the basic R&R. ($4 million dollar program)
“The goal is to develop geoengineering as a potential backstop in case ongoing efforts to reduce the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions fall short.”
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1062405391
“Research being conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will grapple with the potential challenge of a rogue nation acting alone to address climate change by altering the composition of the atmosphere.
“Some country with large amounts of money or a collection of countries could be tempted to try to do this on short notice,” explained Andrew Light, one of the leaders of the committee studying the issue.”
These studies remind me of the military nuclear war games.
If carbon (sic) caused the Australian bushfires, what caused the cold fronts that follow?
BoM: “A change in wind direction can bring a period of dangerous bushfire activity, this is often seen as a trough or cold front – also known as a cool change.
In southern Australia, cold fronts are probably the most powerful influence on our fire weather.”
http://www.bom.gov.au/weather-services/fire-weather-centre/bushfire-weather/index.shtml
And, don’t you like how the bushfires are “global warming’, but the following cold front is just weather …
Australia bushfires: Cooler weather brings respite, situation still volatile
https://www.dw.com/en/australia-bushfires-cooler-weather-brings-respite-situation-still-volatile/a-51889829
Anyone with a an eye patch and and ouija board could predict a bushfire in an Australian summer.
What a foolish argument! Fortunately, firefighters don’t think like this.
20% of Eastern Australia’s temperate forests burned in one incident.
Something unusual happened.
Australian society for all its faults is reasonably sophisticated; an enquiry into these events will be held. Climatic effects, forest maintenance, all the possible factors will be discussed.
One factor that is always a threat are the cool changes that sweep in. In a matter of moments, a fire flank kilometres in extent is converted to a front. Do not be fooled by the word ‘cool’ as you rush to exclude global warming (or its absence) from the discussion. As the change swept through the region where I lived during the deadly fires of February 2009, the temperature dropped into the mid thirties centigrade. A relief from the forties.
I will leave ouija board prognostications to you; I have to defer to your expertise in these matters.Yes, the Australian bush is fire prone. But no, we haven’t seen fires on this scale in the time that Europeans have lived here. A failure to recognise the nature of the threat would be stupid.
Yes, you have seen fires on this scale in the time Europeans lived there. 1974-75. http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Australia-bushfires-hectares-burned-by-year-scaled.jpg
“20% of Eastern Australia’s temperate forests burned in one incident.
Something unusual happened”
sure did. Under the previous Labor government, supported by the Greens a number of land management policies were implemented that changed how farmers and national parks were managed.
Farmers no longer allowed to remove dead fall or graze cattle in national parks to reduce fuel loads. no longer allowed to graze on the verge of roads. fire access roads locked blocking access to fires by fire fighters.
This just to name a few of the reasons.
But people scream Greens were not in power. No but they propped up the Labor government and if not the 10 billion RET would never have existed.
We can thank the Greens for the policies that allowed such a build up of fuel. Deny the facts all you like.
“What a foolish argument! ”
Couldn’t even supply a BoM link to support your failed doomsday argument.
Here in Michigan, we get the same type of “news” regarding the great lakes. A decade ago, global warming was causing precipitous declines in the lakes’ levels. Now, global warming is causing record high lake levels and shoreline erosion. I’ve decided to follow that logic: a decade ago I felt a decade younger because of global warming, but now I feel a decade older because of global warming.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/29/contrary-to-global-warming-predictions-great-lakes-water-levels-now-at-record-highs/
Ah, the lakes in America prove the Australian bush fires were ho hum.
I will advise the firefighters.
Nice of you to do that, Pablo. (false paradigms abound in science and it wouldn’t hurt the firefighters to know)…
You talk as if the firefighters are all experts. They are mostly volunteers.
A number of EX experts were paid and rolled out by Tim Flannery’s lefty think tank.
The lakes help indicate the strength of the ’cause’.
Alan Longhurst, thank you for the essay.
I know the climate change topic can be controversial, but I have never before received such adverse comments after referencing this post. Obviously a raw nerve has been hit.
Perhaps that is because the post contains so many errors.
Even the people on the ground do not yet know al the facts, but here we have someone telling us already that abandoned houses ignited the fires.
Please!
Your comments on the facts may well be true. But what it does raise in my mind is how free speech is being curtailed, and tribalism seems to dominate the sciences. It sad.
Free speech can only be suppressed by a government. If your friends throw you to the curb for something you said, that is not suppression of free speech.
If one of my comments here gets moderated here at Climate Etc, that is absolutely not suppression of free speech.
If a public university throws somebody off the campus for saying something, that can be a suppression of free speech. Courts allow some discretion as public universities are responsible for the safety of somebody’s child. If a private university throws somebody out for saying something, then them’s the wages of having a big fat mouth.
If your speech does not conform the the beliefs of the left then your speech is curtailed or not published. you are harassed and hounded, you are screamed down and or abused. We see this time and again.
The left hate free speech, facts and logic unless it agrees with their sheep like group think.
So you think the government should stop people from telling you they don’t like what you’re saying?
foolish straw man comment follows: “So you think the government should stop people from telling you they don’t like what you’re saying?
The major threat to free speech in America is from the right. They want the government to force people to listen to them.
JCH
Major threat to free speech is from right. Oh please.
I can’t tell you how many videos I’ve seen where leftwing extremists come up to people with Trump signs or Trump hats or Trump T shirts or otherwise identified as Trump supporters and unprovoked, punch them out, rip off their hats, tear up their signs or otherwise accost them physically or verbally. Look at how many speeches or events at universities are cancelled because of demonstrations by the left. The modern liberal is a direct descendant of the Brown Shirts. They are totally intolerant of opposing views.
I think free speech is threatened when post that don’t conform to some popular view, get arbitrarily deleted, or result in abuse; that is an attempt to curtail freedom of speech. I also just love the response to a well referenced post the single word “debunked” or some other Anglo-Saxon term.
If somebody deletes what somebody has written, then that is them expressing their right of free speech on their blog. If the government forced them to publish what you’ve written, then that would be an unconstitutional suppression of the blog owner’s right of free speech.
Alan –
> In the current drought, 36% of fires have been judged to be accidental, 37% as suspicious, 13% as deliberate and only 6% as natural.
Obviously, the relevance of those data is largely a function of whether there is a difference, on average, in the relative size of fires from different causes. IOW, if on average the fires from “natural” causes are significantly larger than those from accidental causes, then the comparison of absolute numbers becomes less meaningful for assessing the overlay of climate change in the recent fire record. In such a case, just pointing to the absolute numbers could be rather misleading.
What data do you have on the sizes of fires from different causes?
I’m not sure I understand what benefit we get from knowing the sizes of fires from different causes. Is the size of a fire more a function of how it starts, or is it more a function of where it starts, the vegetation & weather conditions when it starts, and the magnitude and effectiveness of the response to contain and extinguish the fire? It seems that most of the value from a policy-informing perspective is contained in knowing the relative proportion of man-made vs naturally caused fires.
Consider a scenario where the fires from arson, or in particular those started accidentally, are generally in more densely populated and built up areas, and that such fires tend to be put out relatively quickly and burn far less area than forest that get started “naturally.” And relatedly, that the prevalence of such fires is relatively flat because there is no association with changes in the climate – whereas naturally caused fires are increasingly more prevalent, relatively speaking, because their rate of occurrence is related to changes in climate.
Wouldn’t that be important information to have?
> It seems that most of the value from a policy-informing perspective is contained in knowing the relative proportion of man-made vs naturally caused fires.
If “man-made” fires present much less of a problem in terms of habitat and wildlife destruction, despite being higher in number, wouldn’t that be important to know?
I do not understand how such ‘data’ enters the conversation.
The single largest blaze (Gosper’s Mountain) was ignited by lightning. Literally thousands of blazes were ignited by embers.
If we are to understand such serious events, let alone devise a strategy to deal with them, we need to deal with the facts, not this rubbish.
If you are afraid of the global warming argument (or of the counter argument) I suggest you await the outcome of the enquiry. These matters will be vigourously canvassed!
Paul –
I’m afraid I don’t understand your point.
How does a record number of high temperatures mean anything without taking into account the area associated with each record? Inform the weather services to stop such non-rellevant reporting.
In country X, in the year 2000, there were 1,000 bushfires. 50% of them resulted from arson,, and in average they burned 500 acres. So 250, 000 acres.
And 5% of those fires resulted from “natural” causes. nd on average they burned 50,000 acres for a total of 2,500,000 acres burned.
And in the year 2020, the number of arson fires went down by 10%, presumably because of better law enforcement, because the economy was better and hence less motivation for setting fires, and random noise in the data. So in 2020 there were 450 arson fires, that burned a total of 225,000 acres. There was no expectation of a signal of climate change in the data as climate change wouldn’t likely affect the number of fires intentionally set, and they mostly occurred in regions where there was no apparent trend in the climate data.
Also, in 2020, the number of “natural” fires went up by 20%, because they mostly occurred in a region where there was a significant change (increase) in average temperatures and (decrease) in rainfall – presumably because of global warming. So 3,000,000 acres burned in 2020 from “natural” causes.
So, from 2000-2020, the number of fires went down from 1000 to 910, but the number of acres burned increased from 2,750,000 to 3,225,000. And presumably climate change was relevant to the comparison of the different years’ data. (BTW, presumably millions of animals died in that increase of 475,000 acres burned.)
Asuming I got the numbers right (too lazy to check) but more importantly considering the relative comparisons, would you just ignore any consideration w/r/t type of fire? Would you just point to the number of fires and say – “See, you silly alarmist, the total number of fires went down!”)
A haphazard collection of nonsense “facts”. Let’s just start with
“In the current drought, 36% of fires have been judged to be accidental, 37% as suspicious, 13% as deliberate and only 6% as natural.”
The link is from Nov 14, 2019, but doesn’t seem to claim a time period or proper source. The only source it eventually comes back to is a wacky academic at Monash. Try googling “Australian Center for Research in Bushfires and Arson” and you only seem to get Paul Read’s web page.
“the Black Friday fire of February 1931 burned 5 million ha. or 25% of the state of Victoria, claiming 12 lives, plus a million sheep and many cattle.”
There was no Black Friday fire in 1931. There was one in 1939. But these numbers seem to refer to the “Black Thursday” fire of 1851. Both the name and the stats are creations not of the time, but of much more recent years. In 1851, 5 million hectares of Victoria were way beyond the range of settlement, or even exploration.
“In New South Wales and Victoria, rainfall variability is also influenced by the dynamics of the Antarctic Ocean, with blocking highs developing over the ocean;”
Really? Do we have the right ocean here?
And then a long and familiar whinge about temperature adjustments and all the old favorites (Alice Springs, Rutherglen etc), which doesn’t have much to do with the current bushfires.
Nick Stokes, Right on! What is needed is more research on natural climate variability instead of these nonsense “facts” and cherry-picked data. https://geoenergymath.com/2020/02/21/the-mjo/
Nick
If you read the BBC link you will note two additional links going to some six perfectly respectable studies. I found similar ones when posting something at jo novas a couple of months ago.
The figures for arson can be traced back to various properly funded research studies. I queried what I thought were unlikely arson figures but the denizens at jo’s came up with police and fire reports confirming this , although I think accidental arson such as leaving still lit barbecues in dangerous or forbidden locations were significant
I thinks the black Friday data refers to 1939
Tonyb
Tony,
“If you read the BBC link you will note two additional links going to some six perfectly respectable studies”
Yes, but they say very different things, and don’t support the claims made here. The review by Willis seems well researched and balanced. He says, for example:
“In many ways it is difficult to establish to what extent the damage resulting from bushfires is due to arson. It is too simplistic to say that because perhaps a quarter of bushfires are deliberately lit, a quarter of the damage caused by bushfires can be attributed to the work of firesetters. “
And goes on to look at the factors – arson may happen selectively in worse circumstances, or not, etc. The “quarter” seems a reasonable summary of his collection of sources.
You forgot the drought vortex.
Don’t worry, 97% of the scientists who made it up conveniently have too …
“Is a mysterious new weather system causing the drought in southern Australia?
Climatologists are desperately trying to explain the mystery of where southern Australia’s winter rainfall is going.
They’ve known the rain is being pulled south by an unexplained force.
Now they’ve devised a revolutionary new theory to explain why.”
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s948858.htm
You can stop looking for that mysterious new weather system.
They found another.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/sam-abhams.png
In my experience, the desperation in evidence is that of the people trying to say that these fires were normal.
Fires happen every year, so this is normal goes the argument.
Believe it or not, losing 20% of the temperate forest in Eastern Australia over a few months is unusual.
Satellites detect somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 individual fires in Australia per year – true or false?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_bushfires_in_Australia
Paul Tikotin
You’re furiously bloviating your alarmist predjudice without having read the article above:
The years 1871, 1895-1902, 1926, 1928, 1931, 1939, 1982 and 2009 each have their own Black day-of-the-week and notable high temperatures: the Black Friday fire of February 1931 burned 5 million ha. or 25% of the state of Victoria, claiming 12 lives, plus a million sheep and many cattle.
The “truth bomb” is that this year’s Australia fires are worth nothing more than a slightly raised eyebrow. Those desperate to milk the fires for political capital are craven scammers and transparently dishonest.
“without having read the article above”
The facts that you quote are almost totally wrong. Of the years listed, 1939 did have a Black Friday (so called originally because it was Jan 13), and so 2009 had a “Black Saturday”. None of the other years listed had a “Black” day, even with the modern enthusiasm for invoking the word. In particular there was not a Black Friday in Feb 1931; the facts cited do not fit the Black Friday of Jan 1939, but possibly a fire in Feb 1851.
“Believe it or not, losing 20% of the temperate forest in Eastern Australia over a few months is unusual.”
It’s expected given the contributing causes.
We expect California to burn based in part on policies. When you build a house of cards, you expect it to fall.
Now Robert I. Ellison is trying to be funny?
So, the southern annular mode is the mysterious new weather system?
“If the theory is right, prime agricultural land and our southern cities may face permanent drought.”
How’s that permanent drought because of SAM going, Robert?
Congratulations on being the first person to connect the SAM to the permanent drought.
No mystery. It’s the penguins wot done it. They suggest – in your 2003 Catalyst link – that it’s global warming and ozone destruction. I suggest we start with solar modulation of SAM over a millennia. Either way it’s seems to be as dry now as it has been for a 1,000 years.
Yes. It is disappointing to see a paper riddled with so much fiction being taken seriously.
Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
Also during the Federation Drought there were three el Ninos. From Garden (2010):
The lead up to the current fire season also included three el Ninos, although the one in 2019 was marginal. However the Indian Ocean Dipole in 2019 was very strong too, which exacerbates el Nino drought.
It’s worth noting also the Federation Drought occurred in the same phase of the ~60 year thermohaline cycle – two cycles ago.
There was a climate shift in the mid 1970’s to more extreme variance in Australian rainfall. It is impossible to eliminate AGW, the Asian brown haze or ozone destruction as triggers for the “Great Pacific Climate Shift”.
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/rranom.aus.0112.8128.png
And – btw – everything skeptics don’t want to know about the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT)
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/
RIE,
Likewise, it is impossible to implicate them, other than by thought bubbles. Geoff S
I’ll bow to your expertise in thought bubbles. Australian hydrology depends – however – on Antarctic surface pressure and the Southern Annular Mode.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/sam-abhams.png
Spinning up the south Pacific Ocean gyre.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/south_pacific_gyre-1-1.png
And causing enhanced upwelling in the region of the Humboldt Current in the eastern Pacific.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/vance-2012-e1520868687324.jpg
There is both data and physical mechanisms.
It’s a much better bet than natural variability meaning there is no nonlinear anthropogenic climate change. Einstein – make it as simple as possible but no simpler – trumps William of Occam. And there’s the data for nonlinear change in the 1970’s that looks very much like Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics of geophysical time series. It is noteworthy that skeptics champion internal variability but deny the implications.
Australian BOM have been pushing ” climate change ” on their nightly weather reports .
One forecast said ” well below average rainfall until May 2020 “.
Reality has been very different with a lot of Queensland flooded .
Oh, really!
So, the fires didn’t happen then!
So, the fires didn’t happen then!
No the BOM said the floods would not happen because of global warming
angech, thank you for your comment on the thesis I defended in the last “week in review” about the air temperature measuring thermometers and about the air temperature measuring in standardized Stevenson’s shelters.
I think the air temperature measuring was established for the weather monitoring and for the weather prognosis reasons.
These thermometers are not capable monitoring climate change, these thermometers are not capable for climate change prognosis required measurements.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
24/2/2020
Climate change is likely influencing this temperature outlook. Australia’s climate has warmed by around 1.4 °C since 1910.
Mostly neutral autumn outlook
While recent rainfall over parts of eastern Australia has eased the dry in many areas, drought continues. Several months of above average rainfall are required to replenish water storages and streamflows. Major climate drivers like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) are neutral and forecast to remain neutral through autumn. When these major climate drivers are neutral, widespread above or below average seasonal rainfall is less likely.
Translation JCH
Above average rainfall for several months (aka floods) is less likely (aka won’t happen) due to global warming (Australia’s rainfall variability is also influenced by global warming caused by human activities.)
Christos,
Thank you for your response.
Best of luck with your ideas.
“No the BOM said the floods would not happen because of global warming” – angech
I’ve got to read this. Do you have a link?
And, just to make your Charley Brown day, February slipping away from its cold start:
https://i.imgur.com/NuxGPHD.png
Reply above by mistake.
Yes I look at Nick Stokes map and weep. Why is a warmist the only easy reliable source. Odds on a warmer year go up massively on first 2
months . You are on a winner!.
I feel like Charlie Brown, we all do, guess we are wired to perceive the bad and ignore the good.
Several Australian colleagues and I have been studying historic Australian temperatures for more than a decade now, as an informal email group.
In essence, the essay by Alan Longhurst, an author new to me and possibly all of the group, is quite consistent with our findings. I have often written that we could see perhaps 0.4 to 0.5 deg C of national warming over the century starting 1910, not the 0.9 to 1 degree C promoted officially. We base our findings on the Australian BOM data sets, but Alan Longhurst has used international compilations, adding confidence to similar conclusions.
The scope of the BOM adjustments to raw T data is enormous. Of the selected 110 or so ACORN-SAT stations, every one has been adjusted. Some daily adjustments exceed 1deg C, over lengthy terms at times, making it clearly possible that the claimed warming is mostly derived from adjustments. The adjustments infer that the hundreds of past observers were incapable of reading thermometers, which seems to be a bridge too far.
There is a major problem in the BOM, where subjective has replaced objective science in too many instances, giving trends that support global warming hypotheses. It is near impossible to be heard, when a scientist like me tries to discuss this. Obfuscation rules, doors are closed, insults are thrown as shown in Climategate emails.
Thank you, Alan Longhurst. Geoff Sherrington
Geoff. There is no need to go into all this measurement nonsense. The cause of the fires is known. It is people leaving their houses which burn and set fire to the bush. It is arsonists.
I thought the Gospers Mountain fire was ignited by lightning. Wrong apparently. I thought wildfires ignited houses, but it’s the other way round, apparently.
All we need do is shoot arsonists on sight and the problem is solved.
Paul,
This measurement stuff is not nonsense.
As one prediction after another about global warming fails, proponents are putting a lot of reliance on the claimed 1 degree C per century of heating in this Nation as evidence that a problem exists. The remedies they propose are so unreal and so costly that I cannot let such matters pass without comment about the detailed science. Geoff.
Paul Tikotin: The cause of the fires is known. It is people leaving their houses which burn and set fire to the bush.
Even if that were reliably known, it would still be worthwhile to investigate whether and increase in burning (incidence, areas, etc) were related to an increase in mean surface temperature. That is, there is likely more than one cause for the fires.
Geoff Sherrington: Several Australian colleagues and I have been studying historic Australian temperatures for more than a decade now, as an informal email group.
Thank you for that comment.
“the expert advisory committee described…”
The quotes are from a self-appointed bunch of opinionated folk, not an advisory committee. But furthermore, they are from 2009 !
So southern Australia is warmer and has more bushfires during each warm AMO phase, which is at least during every centennial solar minimum. In 2013 I predicted that El Nino conditions would increase strongly from 2014-15 and increase Australian drought and heatwaves, that’s normal for a centennial solar minimum. That’s why the late 1800’s were so warm there.
“While considerable effort is made to keep observational practices consistent—and to keep a careful log of changes at each site—each change in methodology or technology can leave its mark on the record.
These include artificial changes in the record due to:
– a shift in the location of the station (for example, from a post office to an airport);
– a change in the environment around the station (for example a tree grows, – – a structure is built, a lawn is irrigated); or
– a change in measurement method (for example, from a manual instrument to a recording electronic instrument).
Adjustments are required to correct for these non-climate-related influences—since they may create artificial ‘jumps’ in the data over time. Correcting these biases is a key requirement for compiling and then analysing long-term records of daily maximum and minimum temperatures.
The Bureau does not alter the original temperature data measured at individual stations. Rather, the Bureau creates additional long, continuous and consistent (homogeneous) records for locations across the country.
This is accomplished by concatenating copies of individual station records and then making appropriate adjustments for artificial (non-climate related) discontinuities. Almost all locations require the concatenation of multiple observing sites—to extend temperature records back to 1910. These new dataseries are a complement to, not a replacement of, the original data.”
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/#tabs=Methods
Until incompetent amateurs show the same attention to detail and transparency – I’ll stick to the official version.
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmax.aus.0112.23685.png
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmin.aus.0112.5961.png
And it is not as if it is all AGW.
“then making appropriate adjustments ..” And Mr. John Cook is best qualified to decide what adjustments are appropriate.
The reasons for appropriate adjustments were noted. Any competent and systematic analysis would need to make these sort of station adjustments to be credible. This can be contrasted with skeptic hand waving about John Cook.
Several years ago I asked Steven Mosher for a proof that adjustments made in Berkeley Earth were appropriate. His “competent and systematic” answer was: The algorithm is the proof. Have you ever looked for a software bug in a large program written in an exotic system (Matlab?) which would cost $1,500(?) to buy?
Curious George: Several years ago I asked Steven Mosher for a proof that adjustments made in Berkeley Earth were appropriate.
The evidence cited by Steven Mosher was in the small Mean Square Error of the estimates of known values omiitted from the analysis. It is true that Mosher has never seemed to display that he knows how the algorithm works, it is also true that this is likely the best evidence that the empirical Bayesian estimation procedure is reducing the overall error rates in the raw data. This is the expected result (because of mathematical proofs) if the assumptions made by the people writing the algorithm are accurate enough for the problem at hand, and it is evidently confirmed by their testing results.
As shown in graphs provided by Afonzarelli and Alan Longhurst, neither the raw data series nor the adjusted data series are geographically homogeneous. By itself, that tells nothing about whether adjustments are either necessary or appropriately computed.
Robert I Ellison: Until incompetent amateurs show the same attention to detail and transparency – I’ll stick to the official version.
Yes it is necessary to adjust the data series for the reasons that you and other list. However, duly appointed official groups of experts make mistakes same as everyone else (due to political pressure, etc), so it is worthwhile to consider the critiques of volunteers — for example your critiques.
And it is not as if it is all AGW.
With which you basically support “skeptics”.
Evolution is a great climate observer that writes her logs in genetic code.
When numerous species take advantage of and even depend on fire to reproduce, we know regular fire has been part of Australia ( and the US, and elsewhere ) for millions of years. Understandable, but still strange how confirmation bias can lead one to further one’s preconceptions.
Jung was right – people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.
Maybe the essence of it all is that agw climate change sees control burns in terms of their CO2 emissions and that makes control burns a bad thing and everything else just follows from that. Pls see
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/02/tbgyozfire/
And please check out the “what firefighters say” link at the end
What a load of codswallop. A gish gallop of nonsense.
What has Judith got against Australians and our wonderful country that she works so hard and long to condemn us to more ecological and human disasters? I thought we’d given her something precious. That’s obviously not how she sees it.
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2020/01/its-climate-change-on-top-of-drought.html
Sou, in Australia, as in the US and elsewhere, numerous plant species have specific traits which not only take advantage of fire aftermath, but sometimes critically depend on fire to reproduce. Were fire to be absent, these species would have gone extinct – but they haven’t. This means that fire is a natural and regular occurrence, and one that also occurred when global average temperature was lower.
If that’s what you need to tell yourself so you can live with yourself so be it. You and too many others here wilfully condemn too many plants and animals to extinction and say “these things happen”. Perhaps you’re ignorant and can’t be bothered doing your own research. Perhaps you’re just a denier.
Many people in Australia and around the world weep at what we’ve lost and what we’ll lose in coming years, but not you or Judith or Alan.
I’ve lived through too many major fires this century, every day I look out of my window and see too many dead trees from past fires – more and bigger fires than in the last century, despite major advances in fire-fighting.
In this part of the world we’re worn out after a horrific summer that wasn’t, and I have no energy left at the moment to forgive you.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-do-we-protect-our-unique-biodiversity-from-megafires
Sou, evolution affected not only trees but also human thinking and left us with many biases.
One such bias is ‘Availability Bias’ – the tendency to over-emphasize what is available to our senses through experience and to ignore or minimize what happened before, but is not available to our senses.
You know that species evolved that require fire to reproduce are a record of regular recurrent fire. So there’s a long term record of regular fire in Australia.
There is also a shorter ( but still centuries long ) record of Australian fire from the first European explorers. You write: “every day I look out of my window and see too many dead trees from past fires”
But, evidently, that’s what people saw in 1642.
“Abel Janszoon Tasman’s expedition saw smoke drifting over the coast of Tasmania in 1642 and noted blackened trunks and baked earth in the forests. While charting the east coast in 1770, Captain Cook’s crew saw autumn fires in the bush burning on most days of the voyage”
“You and too many others here wilfully condemn too many plants and animals to extinction and say “these things happen”.
You evidently aren’t considering the species evolved which require fire. Were you to eliminate fire, you would be condemning them to extinction.
despite major advances in fire-fighting.
Fire fighting, is, of course, not natural.
I hope you’re familiar with the problems that fire fighting causes – increases in fuel loads that result in more intense fires in the longer term. This also happens in the US. And, this concept is also not new:
It was Aboriginal fire that prompted James Cook to call Australia ‘This continent of smoke’.” However, he goes on to say: “When control was wrested from the Aborigines and placed in the hands of Europeans, disaster resulted.”[11] Fire suppression became the dominant paradigm in fire management leading to a significant shift away from traditional burning practices. A 2001 study found that the disruption of traditional burning practices and the introduction of unrestrained logging meant that many areas of Australia were now prone to extensive wildfires especially in the dry season.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia
And too frequent fire of the 18-19 size and intensity would significantly impair the Eucalyptus forest. They are likely not adapted to that.
You could have just said something like “we need water to survive, a flood is just more water than we’re used to but no probs, drowning is necessary to survival”. It would have made as much sense and used a lot fewer words.
http://skepdic.com/motivatedreasoning.html
Sou, If you could accept all the fires that have taken place in the past, in both evolutionary and recorded history, you might have a more accurate understanding.
“You could have just said something like “we need water to survive, a flood is just more water than we’re used to but no probs, drowning is necessary to survival”.”
Death is required for life. All things balance. We cannot freeze and retain what is. If we could, that would not be life. We can move forward and embrace change and thrive. What is your message?
Nice to see you, Sou! (yer famous over at watts’) Always good to have the alarmist of alarmists at a blog so that we can all compare notes and learn. Folks, that’s the glory of having Appell around. You may or may not like him, but, one way or another, you will learn something. (ditto with the ever genteel stokes)…
We’ll not learn anything from Crazy Sou, however.
Give her a chance, and then follow the links provided.
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2020/01/its-climate-change-on-top-of-drought.html
Maybe you will drink, maybe not, if not you’re a twelfth of a Sou.
Sou:
You said nothing that had value. You can do better.
No, she can’t.
Weepy Sou, no good putting link to your doomsday junk science blog.
You block anyone who doesn’t agree.
I’ll be releasing extra carbon (sic) today just to drink in your weepy tears.
Thanks for the laugh.
Sou is struggling to come up with a coherent argument here.
1. “I can see the changes out of my window”. With associated weeping and teeth gnashing. Even though we are talking about a supposed 0.5 C change over 110 years and a hugely sporadic event: ie bushfires. A little statistical analysis may be needed here.
2. Drag out the phrase ‘gish-gallop’. In climate science you are apparently only allowed to discuss one matter at a time. Pointing out a whole series of contradictions to ‘established theory’ is apparently too much to process.
3. Avoid any discussion on fire adapted species. A pretty glaringly evident fact which is a bit hard to ignore.
4. Ignore the historical records of wide spread burning by the First Australians. Although this was likely constant (at least in the south eastern part of the continent, it may have been more deliberately seasonal in the north) and hence probably reduced the spread of large fires in droughts.
5. Trot out a strange analogy regarding water and floods. Yes, water is essential, and yes, floods kill people, and animals. And it is all normal. Exactly the point being put forward on the fires.
6. Ignoring the inconvenient fact that if the world is targeting a limit of a 0.5 C RISE in global temperature until 2050 then Australia’s solution to the next 150 years of inevitable extreme fires (by CAGW predictions) is going to require some more immediate solutions than spruiking about climate change.
Does anyone have the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) data for 2007-8 to 2019-20? A well known climate scientist and supposed fire expert has been tweeting out studies from 2007 to 2009 that projected a significant increase in FFDI by 2020 due to climate change. They’re citing these papers as proof that the recent fires were climate change related. But they’re not checking whether, since 2007, the FFDI really did rise significantly as those papers projected! The data is now in but I can’t find it anywhere! I suspect that no such rise in FFDI occurred.
The main index in the projection papers was the Annual Accumulated FFDI for all of Australia. However, seasonal versions were also used and one paper dwelt on NSW, using the relevant regional data.
Thanks in advance if anyone can find it!
Scute:
Found this …..
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222328. I g012&type=large
“ Time series of 90th percentile FFDI annual anomaly (July-June) at each station (1973–2017).
The thick line indicates the multi-station mean. The thick dotted line indicates the linear trend.”
From: doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222328.g012
Try here …..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6752822/pdf/pone.0222328.pdf
Ah, thanks Tony! However, the climate scientist was presented with this very graph! (See linked tweet below plus thread, up and down). She gaslighted the challenger by saying there was no flat or downward trend from 2009-17. She even implied a rise during that period. She then cited the short time frame as too short to be of any significance (so why cite the papers with the projections in the first place if you think that period is insignificant?). And then she fell back on that green trend line which carves through the obvious flatlining from 2009-17.
So, I was hoping to get FFDI in tabular form so that I could get the 2009-17 trend numerically rather than argue about eyeballing the graph which she can exploit for her gaslighting ploy. Also, the full table would show 2018 and 2019 too, thus spanning her full projected time frame in her cited papers.
These people really are a piece of work. She was so rude to Marco (see thread which bifurcated) when she realised she was on the back foot while he remained calm and sticking to the data.
If I ever get it, I’ll go back and take her to the cleaners (I asked for links to the cited report in her tweet above Marco’s and Marco then questioned her reasoning).
Thanks again for trying. What I need is the tabular data to 2019. This should be at the fingertips of all scientists discussing the fires yet it seems to be completely buried. I can’t find it on the BOM website. Marco’s tweet:
https://twitter.com/marcoparigi1/status/1215774633225416704?s=21
https://i.imgur.com/saRnmj9.png
@Scute
Re: “But they’re not checking whether, since 2007, the FFDI really did rise significantly as those papers projected! The data is now in but I can’t find it anywhere! I suspect that no such rise in FFDI occurred.”
“And then she fell back on that green trend line which carves through the obvious flatlining from 2009-17”
In my previous comment, I dealt with your endpoint bias and your misrepresentations of what the scientist in question said:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910164
I’ll now cite some other sources to again illustrate the problems with your motivated reasoning:
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1232374793275691010
[figure 11 on page 12 of: “Special Climate Statement 72—dangerous bushfireweather in spring 2019” ( http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs72.pdf )]
“Across Australia as a whole, spring 2019 (September to December) saw the highest fire weather danger as measured by the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI)1, with record high values observed in areas of all States and Territories, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. More than 95% of Australia by area had spring accumulated FFDI values that were very much above average, including almost 60% of the country that was highest on record for spring”
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/australia-suffers-devastating-fires-after-hottest-driest-year-record
“As with land and sea temperatures, Australia has seen rising trends in fire danger indices in recent decades.
In particular, the annual accumulated Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) – which takes into account drought, recent rain, air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed – has increased in eastern and southern Australia.”
https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/news/some-say-weve-seen-bushfires-worse-theyre-ignoring-few-key-facts
Re: “These people really are a piece of work. She was so rude to Marco (see thread which bifurcated) when she realised she was on the back foot while he remained calm and sticking to the data.”
Actually, he engaged in sealioning of a female scientist (in a field in which she had relevant expertise and he did not) as she patiently dismantled his fallacious reasoning. You then followed that up with tone trolling:
“Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity. It may take the form of “incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate”. […] The troll feigns ignorance and politeness, so that if the target is provoked into making an angry response, the troll can then act as the aggrieved party.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
“Tone policing (also tone trolling, tone argument, and tone fallacy) is an ad hominem (personal attack) and antidebate tactic based on criticizing a person for expressing emotion. Tone policing detracts from the validity of a statement by attacking the tone in which it was presented rather than the message itself.
[…]
Tone policing is often aimed at women and may derive from the stereotype that women are more emotional than men and particularly the angry black woman stereotype.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing
“And this is why science shouldn’t be left to the feelings of politically-motivated, contrarian sealions…”
Climate scientists gave us Trump. It’s a democracy more or less. What do you have against the voters? It’s the voters money and maybe even their electricity since they are buying it. They have to live with these trainwreck grids that are being weakened by renewables. Scientists don’t do money. They can sit in the corner now and come back when they have something of value. What they’ve done is terrible failure by any measure I can think of. Where is the value?
Climate scientists gave us Trump.
Astounding.
“Climate scientists gave us Trump.”
…
“Where is the value?”
Good question.
JCH:
Please claim success for climate scientists. Biggest failure I know of. Solve the problem. No, they created problems. Trump is, Enough of your B.S. Same with Sanders. In tangible stuff like power grids, failure. In results, failure with virtue signalling. Climate scientists if they want to be listened to, should take responsibility for policies. Like adults. We should do this. Anyone can say there’s a problem. Now fix it. No, they do things like put solar panels on their homes. What a failure. Point to value. Can we see value?
Re: “A well known climate scientist and supposed fire expert has been tweeting out studies from 2007 to 2009 that projected a significant increase in FFDI by 2020 due to climate change. They’re citing these papers as proof that the recent fires were climate change related.”
The scientist actually:
1) Pointed out papers going back to at least 1984.
2) Correctly noted the endpoint bias involved in cherry-picking a short-term time-period that would not yield statistically significant results.
With respect to point 2, what you’re doing is akin to saying that when I predict a multi-month warming trend in Canada from mid-winter to mid-summer, I’m actually predicting that each week will be warmer than the previous week. Of course, that isn’t what I’m doing; cherry-picking shorter-term, non-statistically-significant fluctuations don’t rebut the longer-term, statistically significant trend. So you cherry-picking post-2010 does not rebut the longer-term increase in FFDI.
https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/1215799539845779458
https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/1215777092668919813
More sources below on the type of endpoint bias you’re engaged in:
“Overcoming endpoint bias in climate change communication: The case of Arctic sea ice trends”
“Social learning and partisan bias in the interpretation of climate trends”
“A blind expert test of contrarian claims about climate data”
“Popular consensus: Climate change is set to continue”
“Leveraging scientific credibility about Arctic sea ice trends in a polarized political environment”
And a source on this from 2003, addressing earlier projections:
“Climate change and Australia: Trends, projections and impacts
[…]
Changes in fire regimes are highly likely in the future.
Increased fuel load is expected under higher CO2 levels because of increased plant growth, particularly if reductions in wood and litter nitrogen concentrations reduce decomposition rates (Howden et al. 1999d). Increased temperatures will increase fuel dryness and reduce relative humidity, and this will be exacerbated in those regions where rainfall decreases (Howden et al. 1999d). Beer and Williams (1995) used the Macarthur Forest Fire Danger Index and CSIRO (1992) climate scenarios to predict changes in future fire incidence. The Macarthur Index incorporates climatic parameters such as air temperature, relative humidity and days since rain and fuel load, to predict fire danger. The models indicate an increase in fire danger over much of Australia. More quantitative modelling by Williams et al. (2001) confirmed this general result, indicating an increase in the number of days of very high and extreme fire danger.”
Re: “If I ever get it, I’ll go back and take her to the cleaners”
You definitely seem like a person who’s genuinely interested in evidence, as opposed to being engaged in clearly fallacious reasoning in a vindictive manner.
/s
Pingback: Australian fires: Local weather ‘reality bomb’? – Daily News
Many of the points in this blogpost were rebutted weeks ago by potholer54 (a.k.a. Peter Hadfield) in his video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0x46-enxsA
To summarize some of the points from that video:
– the fires that are doing the most damage and burning the most acres are not directly caused by arson, but instead natural factors such as lightning
– the BoM justifiably excludes pre-1910 in various official records due to large uncertainties from factors such as non-standard temperature measurement practices
– climate change affects indices such as the IOD, further increasing wildfire risk
– incompetence with respect to fire reduction burning is not even close to being the main factor in this wildfire season; the majority of the burns that could be done safely under the environmental conditions in question, were done
Now on to some other claims in the blogpost.
Re: “Note: The GHCN data is used in this text to avoid the consequences of the post-hoc adjusting of the observations by NOAA, NASA and by the Australian BOM, discussed below.”
Non-experts got about the same warming trend as those agencies, when working with the raw data and accounting for known heterogeneities. That’s been known for around a decade:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/romans-temperature-reconstruction-higher-trends-than-hadcrut/
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/comparing-global-landocean-reconstructions/
https://treesfortheforest.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/better-late-than-never/
https://skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurements-advanced.htm
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/global-update/
pages 45 – 49: http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
Multiproxy analyses also confirm the instrumental warming trend, as do other indirect measures that do not use thermometer data. For instance:
Figure 3: “Last Millennium Reanalysis with an expanded proxy database and seasonal proxy modeling”
“Independent confirmation of global land warming without the use of station temperatures”
“Global warming in an independent record of the past 130 years”
“Global and hemispheric temperature reconstruction from glacier length fluctuations”
We’re long beyond the point where people should continue casting false doubt on the validity of the surface temperature record.
Re: “The contiguous USA is the only large region which is covered with a satisfactorily dense network of stations, satisfactorily managed: here are the annual mean surface temperatures from the unedited GNCN archive: it offers very little support for the standard plot of the evolution of surface temperature.
[…]
Here, as in the rural-dominated USA network, the influence of urbanisation is small, and consequently there is no progressive 20th century warming.”
The warming trend for USHCN has been validated over and over. It shows 20th century warming that is not due to urbanization. For instance:
“On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record”
“Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States”
“Quantifying the effect of urbanization on U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperature records”
“An evaluation of the time of observation bias adjustment in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network”
“An intercomparison of temperature trends in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network and recent atmospheric reanalyses”
Re: “Finally, BoM failed to comment on the fact that the warming trend is largely restricted to night temperatures although this is characteristically associated with urbanisation”
False. The impact of urbanization was addressed, and the surface warming trend was also confirmed with weather-balloon-based data. For instance:
“A daily homogenized temperature data set for Australia”
“Homogenized monthly upper-air temperature data set for Australia”
Also, it’s expected that greenhouse gas increases would reduce the diurnal temperature range by warming nights more than days, including GHG-mediated impacts on cloud cover:
“Detection and attribution of anthropogenic forcing to diurnal temperature range changes from 1950 to 1999: comparing multi-model simulations with observations”
“Global diurnal temperature range (DTR) changes since 1901”
“Evaluation of historical diurnal temperature range trends in CMIP5 models”
Re: “Finally, what was the probable cause of the conditions that led to the 2019 drought and fire storms? Do we have to invoke anthropogenic CO2 as has been widely done, or is there a more parsimonious explanation?”
The impact of anthropogenic, greenhouse-gas-induced climate on wildfire risk was predicted decades ago, and the mechanisms for it explained. We’re again long beyond the point of entertaining false doubt on this:
1995: “Estimating Australian forest fire danger under conditions of doubled carbon dioxide concentrations”
2001: “The sensitivity of Australian fire danger to climate change”
2003: “Climate change and Australia: Trends, projections and impacts”
2005: “Climate change impacts on fire-weather in south-east Australia”
2007: “Bushfire weather in southeast Australia: recent trends and projected climate change impacts”
2008: “The Garnaut climate change review”
I think climate scientists can justifiably say “we told you so.” It’s about time more people started listening, instead of coming in after the fact to try and rationalize it all away.
Thanks for adding so much laughter and humor to my day Atom[-ant]sk’s Sanakan. It is always fun to see someone who thinks he has all the answers trying desperately to get the round peg to fit into the square hole.
As Richard Feynman once said: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Re: “It is always fun to see someone who thinks he has all the answers trying desperately to get the round peg to fit into the square hole.”
Let me know when you’re done pretending that knowledge entails omniscience, and that discussing what the published evidence shows entails claiming that one is omniscient + has all the answers.
Your response is the same sort of nonsense I get from contrarians like flat Earther, anti-vaxxers, etc., where they pretend that people must be claiming to be all-knowing and have all the answers, just because they cite evidence the contrarians find inconvenient.
Says the person who thinks Atomsk’s cannot question the Climate Etc. nonsense.
“– climate change affects indices such as the IOD, further increasing wildfire risk…”
Tip: Qualify the statement.
You have an assertion. So the IOD changed over X years. Then stop claiming. Show me one forumula for wildfire risk in Australia. Now define risk. Now having defined risk in a useful way, show me anyone doing a bleeping thing 1 month beforehand. No one listened to the risk assessment assuming one exists. So all you can claim is, You were right. That does no good.
Re: “[“– climate change affects indices such as the IOD, further increasing wildfire risk…”]
Tip: Qualify the statement.
You have an assertion. So the IOD changed over X years. Then stop claiming. Show me one forumula for wildfire risk in Australia. Now define risk. Now having defined risk in a useful way, show me anyone doing a bleeping thing 1 month beforehand. No one listened to the risk assessment assuming one exists. So all you can claim is, You were right. That does no good.”
Evidence-free response from you, as usual, nor did you address the evidence cited in the video. From about 27:57 in the video, potholer54 cited published evidence on climate change impacts on the IOD.
Tip: Address that evidence.
If you can’t address it, then you’re better off not even responding, in comparison to providing the response you just did.
“What causes southeast Australia’s worst droughts?”
“Climate change contributes to more frequent consecutive positive Indian Ocean Dipole events”
“Increased frequency of extreme Indian Ocean Dipole events due to greenhouse warming”
“Positive Indian Ocean Dipole events precondition southeast Australia bushfires”
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1218235707078082562
So instead of just going with whatever you see in non-peer-reviewed blog articles Curry posts, try actually reading reputable sources, like potholer54 and I do, and as we’ve repeatedly advised you to do. Using expletives, moving the goalposts, making stuff without evidence, misrepresenting what others said, and your other usual tactics, won’t work, Ragnaar. You’re simply evading evidence in order to pretend that all I gave was an “assertion”. You’ve done this numerous times before, including in the comments section of potholer54’s video; he called you out on that. Do better.
Boring.
“We define as a threshold for extreme events the ERAI maximum regional average VPD anomaly, for each calendar month, from the reference period corresponding to a one-in-30-year event. To compute the risk of exceeding this threshold we compute, for each month, the fraction of the Nat15–16 and Hist15–16 anomalies that exceed it.”
– ANTHROPOGENIC FORCINGS AND ASSOCIATED CHANGES IN FIRE RISK IN WESTERN NORTH AMERICA AND AUSTRALIA DURING 2015/16
So use climate models to see what happens and exceed a threshold more often. An arbitrary threshold. Of not wildfires but a VPD anomaly. Because as we know, VPD anomalies above an arbitrary threshold translates to wildfires. Because we aren’t modeling wildfires. Though that would be cool.
Thank you. I hadn’t realized the state of climate science was so dismal. They keep coming up with new ways to prove something few care about when it’s time to pay for it themselves. A failed marketing campaign. Marketing is about providing value. Do that.
Re: “Boring.”
If you find climate science boring, then feel free to leave it to people who are interested in it and competent.
Re: “So use climate models to see what happens and exceed a threshold more often.”
You have no clue what “ERAI” is, do you? Of course you don’t. Maybe Judith Curry can simplify it to a level you can grasp?:
“This paper is also important in that it establishes the ECMWF Interim Reanalysis as a useful data set for examining regional and temporal climate variability in recent decades”
https://judithcurry.com/2016/08/01/assessing-atmospheric-temperature-data-sets-for-climate-studies/
“Though that would be cool. Thank you. I hadn’t realized the state of climate science was so dismal.”
What you consider “cool” isn’t the metric of what science should be done, what the scientific evidence shows, etc. It’s as ridiculous as someone claiming that since those don’t find basic science as cool as clinical/applied science, then the state of basic science is “dismal”. I get it, Ragnaar; you’re motivated to cast aspersions on climate science for the sake of your political ideology, just like creationists are motivated to cast aspersions on evolutionary biology for the sake of their religious ideology. But not all of us are like that. So let me know when you have something of substance to say on the research I cited, beyond you being bored by science.
“climate change affects indices such as the IOD, further increasing wildfire risk”
One cannot assume that rising CO2 forcing equates to warmer ocean phases. Positive IOD values are associated with increased El Nino conditions and the warm AMO phase, which are both normal during centennial solar minima. And warmer ocean phases reduce low cloud cover.
Re: “[“climate change affects indices such as the IOD, further increasing wildfire risk”]
One cannot assume that rising CO2 forcing equates to warmer ocean phases”
Fortunately, scientists don’t just “assume” it. Instead they given evidence on how warming (including from increased greenhouse gases) would impact the IOD. This includes mechanistic explanations, model-based analyses, and observations. Some of that evidence was cited from 27:57 in the video you’re responding to. And here are some papers on this:
“What causes southeast Australia’s worst droughts?”
“Climate change contributes to more frequent consecutive positive Indian Ocean Dipole events”
“Climate change amplifications of climate‐fire teleconnections in the Southern Hemisphere”
“Increased frequency of extreme Indian Ocean Dipole events due to greenhouse warming”
“Positive Indian Ocean Dipole events precondition southeast Australia bushfires”
My point is that negative IOD episodes are reduced during each warm AMO phase, which is at least during every centennial solar minimum, as the late 1800’s shows. Southeast Australia suffers rainfall deficits due to El Nino conditions, which also increase during centennial solar minima. If rising CO2 forcing projects onto natural variability, it would be inhibiting the warm ocean phases, not exacerbating them. The second chart at 28:15 in the video seems to be missing some considerable negative IOD events in the 1980-90’s.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ci6r5mfXEAAXlei?format=jpg
Re: “If rising CO2 forcing projects onto natural variability, it would be inhibiting the warm ocean phases, not exacerbating them.”
A claim for which you’ve provided no evidence, while evading the published evidence cited to you. You can invent whatever claims you want; it’s not impressive if you have no cited evidence for it.
Re: “The second chart at 28:15 in the video seems to be missing some considerable negative IOD events in the 1980-90’s.”
The chart is an average of various models, as you would know if you read the paper or looked at the caption shown in the video:
“Climate change contributes to more frequent consecutive positive Indian Ocean Dipole events”
That averaged modeled value is not meant to represent the IOD for each particular year, anymore than a model of seasonal temperature trends (due to Earth’s axial tilt relative to the Sun) is meant to tell you the temperature for a particular day. Instead the models are meant to capture the multi-decadal trend in response to forcing. So your point about particular years is not pertinent.
The logic is that if rising CO2 forcing increases positive NAO/AO conditions, that corresponds to faster trade winds, meaning increased La Nina conditions.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
The video says ‘Ensemble average time series of the IOD’, IOW tortured data to fit their linear model, and the model is irrational anyway as there are naturally reduced negative IOD conditions during each warm AMO phase.
“– the BoM justifiably excludes pre-1910 in various official records due to large uncertainties from factors such as non-standard temperature measurement practices”
Of course they do.
How incompetent was Sir Charles Todd?
Alan mentions “the years 1871, 1895-1902, 1926, 1928, 1931, 1939, 1982 and 2009 as having ‘their own black days, but says nothing of the 74/75 season which I understand burned ~120 million hectares; nor 1952 (4 million hectares) nor 1961 (1.8 million hectares)? Was there a particular reason for not mentioning them?
That’s tropical savannah or semi-desert areas in the north west and interior of Australia where very few people live and fires have typically gone unchecked. It’s got nothing to do with the fires in Australia’s east (Qld, NSW, Vic and Tasmania), around Adelaide, or in SW WA.
He also left out the fires in 2003, 2006, 2013 that burnt millions of hectares in north eastern Victoria and south eastern NSW.
If fires, typically large ones that may burn for months and cover 12 times the area on average in total, only occur where few people live and have gone unchecked they do not count, Sou.
They contribute no CO2 to the atmosphere and are not caused by global warming. No, sirree.
Thanks Alan for this excellent article which has clearly stirred a hornets’ nest of ecofascist outrage. The jowl-flapping from all the usual suspects fails to address any of the substantive points in your article:
– last-century Australia warming is fake
– eco activism has prevented fuel load reduction burns
– a tradition of poor land management over centuries combined with activism induced paralysis has amplified the fire damage
– this year’s fires are unexceptional in the historic context. Media film makers are skilled at creating impression however especially when it plays to their innate ecofascism
– it’s astonishing naive eye to say with faux incredulity “surely people would not start fires in their own back yard”. They are doing exactly that as the facts attest. The media political-academic climate alarmism of recent decades is directly to blame for this new phenomenon of political arson. The talebanically left-politicised media news cycle have created a new climate forced politics in which any weather event intuitively considered to be exceptional pipelines directly into the political process at the highest level with powerful effect. Every single supposed climate event results in immediate political capital for ecofascists resulting in further contraction of fossil fuel use and technology.
(They’ve already killed the internal combustion engine, what more do they want? A lot, obviously – nothing short of the Khmer Vert objective of total de-industrialisation will satisfy the new Luddite-Malthusians.)
So the environment that the media-political culture have created is one in which for the eco-left, there are huge political rewards for fires. In such an environment, are fires not going to be energetically lit by an enthusiastic army of Greta-following climate youth? How naive of human nature is it possible to get?
Re: “Note: The GHCN data is used in this text to avoid the consequences of the post-hoc adjusting of the observations by NOAA, NASA and by the Australian BOM, discussed below.
[…]
All this should have become a major scandal, but it appears to be of no concern to today’s climatologists, who almost unanimously accept the CRUTEM and GISTEMP archives as being correct. But the ‘adjustment’ of the original observations by NASA Goddard and the CRU is akin to the action of a museum systematist who squashes a beetle specimen underfoot because it upsets the nice tidy classification of its genus or family on which he (or she) is the sole expert.”
I mentioned above a number of lines of evidence validating the surface warming trend from NASA, CRU, NOAA and the Australian BoM:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910133
Now Judith Curry’s colleagues from Berkeley Earth are making about the point as well:
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1232370067360190464
https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1232375927738445825
Other sources on the Australian surface warming trend, either from surface-based thermometers or weather balloons:
“A daily homogenized temperature data set for Australia”
“Homogenized monthly upper‐air temperature data set for Australia”
I wonder why Judith Curry conveniently didn’t mention that the Berkeley Earth surface trend analysis she worked on validated BoM’s, NASA, CRU, and NOAA’s trends for Australia. That would seem to be an important point to mention when posting a blog article from Alan Longhurst incorrectly disputing those analyses. Maybe mentioning the evidence from Berkeley Earth would get in the way of manufacturing misleading doubt and uncertainty about the surface temperature record?
Try reading and reporting on the entire twitter exchange between me and Zeke
Re: “Try reading and reporting on the entire twitter exchange between me and Zeke”
Not really feasible when it’s ongoing. But it’s also not pertinent, since the rest of the discussion (so far) does nothing to change the core points I made, to which I’ll add a 5th and 6th point:
1) You posted a blog article from Alan Longhurst in which he cast aspersions on the NASA, NOAA, BoM, and CRU surface temperature analyses. He insinuated they over-estimated Australia warming due to faulty adjustments, and he instead offered a much smaller surface temperature trend for Australia. I already quoted him doing this, as per the comment of mine you’re responding to.
2) The Berkeley Earth analysis [who’s research you co-authored] validates the Australian warming trend from BoM, NASA, etc., and shows a temperature trend larger than Longhurst claims.
3) You didn’t mention that the Berkeley Earth analysis showed point 2 when you posted Longhurst’s blog article [such as mentioning this in a “JC comment” for the article] , even though you knew about Berkeley Earth’s analysis for years before posting Longhurst’s article.
4) Radiosonde-based analyses shows more Australian warming than Longhurst claims.
5) The 20CR analysis shows more Australian warming than Longhurst claims.
6) The ERA5 analysis, which you laud, shows more Australian warming than Longhurst claims.
For checking points 5 and 6:
“Web-Based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tools (WRIT) for analysis and comparison of reanalyses and other datasets”
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/testdap/timeseries.pl
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1232422689538621440
https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/1232426030197084162
Thus Longhurst under-estimates Australian surface warming, which is one way he misleadingly downplays the impact of climate change on Australian bushfire risk, severity, etc. You already had the information needed to correct that, but you didn’t share it with your audience; instead you chose to simply give them Longhurst’s erroneous claims on a serious issue.
I think we may expect some warming against a backdrop of robust internal variability – variability that looks very much like Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics ubiquitous in geophysical series. In terms of surface temperature this includes a balancing of sensible and latent heat that depends on soil moisture. In Australia in a very dry century and a bit – and with an exceptionally dry year? Surface temperature is not an unassailable metric. Argo showing unmistakable ocean responses to ‘The Blob’ – 🤣 – 1.0 and 2.0 seems more interesting.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/argo-to-dec-2018-1.jpg
The Blob is just one of the things missing in the especially cloying and smarmy art of climate discourse malpracticed by some.
htps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VbgzCahx8o
“Climate research involves a combination of approaches based on instrumental observations, palaeo-climate records and computer modelling of the climate system. Decadal climate variability (DCV)1,2,3,4—which modulates long-term global warming trends—presents a unique set of challenges to scientific community. On the one hand, observational analyses of DCV are hampered by shortness of instrumental climate record and/or general scarcity of climate data before the middle of the twentieth century.5 On the other hand, climate system is an inherently multi-scale system, which makes global climate models highly susceptible to errors associated with their necessarily imperfect representation of small-scale processes that could provide essential feedbacks in DCV.”6,7,8,9,10,11,12
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6
Re: “2) The Berkeley Earth analysis [who’s research you co-authored] validates the Australian warming trend from BoM, NASA, etc., and shows a temperature trend larger than Longhurst claims.”
A quantitative comparison illustrating that point:
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1232457804675457025
[figure 7 on page 5893, DOI: 10.1029/2018JD028355]
And satellite-based surface warming trends for Australia below (note that MERRA-2 is known to under-estimate warming, as even Ryan Maue admits):
“A high-resolution 1983–2016 Tmax climate data record based on infrared temperatures and stations by the Climate Hazard Center”
Repetition and obfuscation from a person who can’t get past talking points to underlying geophysical realities. The source of recent warming as just one instance. Until he can sort that out – it’s all a bit moot.
On the subject of the extent of Australian official warming estimates and the correspondence of estimates by various teams, there are many more questions that could be asked.
Here is but one.
The National record is obviously influenced by the choice of stations. Recently, for example, a hot station has been included in ACORN-SAT, like Rabbit Flat, about one of the hottest locations possible in Australia. This has the effect of raising the temperature trend, because its data did not exist in colder times. (Rabbit Flat data start in 1996 or so). So they add heating to the long term national record.
Question: How do the various data subsets cope with the problem of station choice, the acceptance/rejection of too many hot or cold, of warming or cooling station sites?
You are all working from the one master data set, the BOM raw data. It is no wonder your subset results agree when you compare them, because all you are comparing is adjustments. If there were no adjustments, you would get perfect agreement. Except that you still have the problem of choice of station subsets. (I can give you a subset of 50 sites that when combined, show cooling of 0.4 deg C in Australia since 1970. Cherry picking at its worst).
Then there is the far from resolved problem of UHI, the errors from metrication, the errors from LIG thermometer to Pt thermometer change, the problems of changing the volumes of screens, the problem of making a subjective adjustment in a certain direction, when the opposite choice is available, etc etc etc.
Back in the real word of hard, exacting science, there is no room for belief, subjectivity, cherry picking, selective choice of data, etc etc etc. If the standard of climate research was used for putting Man on the Moon, the odds would have been poor.
It is time to realise that the BOM historic raw data, collected for certain known purposes, is not fit for use to estimate climate changes. That is a Bridge Too Far. That is what you find when you spend the time and effort that we have on masses of daily data and its errors. It is a major problem that few people making assertions of reliability have not, it seems, dug anywhere deep enough.
@Geoff Sherrington
Re: “You are all working from the one master data set, the BOM raw data. It is no wonder your subset results agree when you compare them, because all you are comparing is adjustments.”
No, it’s not all from that one master data set. For example, in this thread I already cited surface temperature trends from weather-balloon-based analyses, satellite-based analyses, and the 20CR re-analysis that does not use any land-based instrumental (thermometer) data. None of those are just ground-based, surface, raw thermometer data from the BoM.
Also, one of Alan Longhurst’s points was that the raw data was better than the adjusted trends from BoM, NASA, etc. So if your problem is with the raw data, then you’ll need to take that up with him. If instead your complaint is about the adjustments, then there is no a priori guarantee that the adjusted trends would match each other. For example, in the case of satellite-based bulk tropospheric warming trends, there is the classic case of the (incorrectly) adjusted UAH not matching adjusted trends from other research groups. So when adjusted trends do match, especially from different research groups using different methods, that counts for something. It shows that we have a replicated trend that is robust to different adjustment methods:
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1232403794761330688
Re: “Question: How do the various data subsets cope with the problem of station choice, the acceptance/rejection of too many hot or cold, of warming or cooling station sites?
[…]
Then there is the far from resolved problem of UHI, the errors from metrication, the errors from LIG thermometer to Pt thermometer change, the problems of changing the volumes of screens, the problem of making a subjective adjustment in a certain direction, when the opposite choice is available, etc etc etc.”
Here’s the abstract from the original 20CR 2013 paper I cited before (this is the older version of temperature trend analysis that Hawkins mentioned in the tweet I showed further above):
“Independent confirmation of global land warming without the use of station temperatures
[…]
Confidence in estimates of anthropogenic climate change is limited by known issues with air temperature observations from land stations. Station siting, instrument changes, changing observing practices, urban effects, land cover, land use variations, and statistical processing have all been hypothesized as affecting the trends presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. Any artifacts in the observed decadal and centennial variations associated with these issues could have important consequences for scientific understanding and climate policy. We use a completely different approach to investigate global land warming over the 20th century. We have ignored all air temperature observations and instead inferred them from observations of barometric pressure, sea surface temperature, and sea‐ice concentration using a physically based data assimilation system called the 20th Century Reanalysis. This independent data set reproduces both annual variations and centennial trends in the temperature data sets, demonstrating the robustness of previous conclusions regarding global warming.”
And here’s the updated paper on this, which Curry mentioned on her blog before:
“Towards a more reliable historical reanalysis: Improvements for version 3 of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis system”
The ERA-20C re-analysis does something similar. I’ve already cited sources on that comparing them to instrumental (thermometer-based) surface analyses; for instance, see the papers and link below:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910133
Figure 3: “Last Millennium Reanalysis with an expanded proxy database and seasonal proxy modeling”
“ERA-20C: An atmospheric reanalysis of the twentieth century”
But despite this thermometer-independent data that adequately addresses concerns regarding UHI, etc., I suspect you’re still going to use those concerns to argue for your pre-determined conclusion on the surface temperature record being unreliable. Whatever. You seemingly worked towards that conclusion before with WA Climate’s Chris Gillham. So is it true that WA Climate is just made up of Chris Gillham, contrary to what Alan Longhurst said about it being 6 individuals?:
“This independent audit of the Bureau of Meteorology’s High Quality weather station raw temperature records in WA and Australia was a collaborative data validation analysis by:
[…]
Research journalist Chris Gillham, owner of this website
[…]
Earth scientist Geoffrey Sherrington”
http://www.waclimate.net/round/audit-team.html
From Chris Gillham:
“I feel honoured that the author has extensively cited my website, although a couple of small corrections …
The WA Climate Group (?) of six individuals is one individual – me.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-2925124
@Robert I. Ellison
Re: “Repetition and obfuscation from a person who can’t get past talking points to underlying geophysical realities. The source of recent warming as just one instance. Until he can sort that out – it’s all a bit moot.”
What’s currently being discussed here is detection, not attribution; i.e. whether a strong warming trend has been detected and what that trend is, not what caused the trend. So your complaints about attribution are a red herring. Also, you’ve already commented favorably on the Australia BoM’s adjustments (with their attention to detail and transparency), insinuating that “incompetent amateurs” were objecting to it:
“Until incompetent amateurs show the same attention to detail and transparency – I’ll stick to the official version.”
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910116
So as much as you might have a prior dislike of me, you lack grounds for objecting to my conclusion that the BoM’s adjusted trend is validated and largely correct, while Alan Longhurst is wrong when he claims BoM greatly over-estimates Australian surface warming.
The tedium of your quibbles has no bounds. The surface temperature record with its many random and systematic faults is barely credible. You imagine a silk purse in place of the sow’s ear. There should be some warming against a backdrop of large internal variability – as I said – but that’s not one of your well rehearsed talking points apparently.
In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. AR4 s3.4.4.1
All recent – since the 1976/77 ‘Great Pacific Climate Shift’ – global warming resulted from cloud radiative changes centered on the eastern Pacific. In Australia – the 20th century was the driest for a millennia. 2019 saw lowest decile rainfall over 90% of the country. When combined with changes in land use as a result of Kyoto – seen in the graph below – a transition of the landscape to woody weeds – it resulted in the perfect firestorm.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/emissions-by-sector.png
AGW can be solved. Electricity is some 25% of the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. A multi-gas and aerosol strategy is required – CFC’s, nitrous oxides, methane, black carbon and sulfate. Ongoing decreases in carbon intensity and increases in efficiency and productivity. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry. Along with reclaiming deserts and conserving and restoring savanna, woodland, forests, wetlands and soils.
https://www.clc.org.au/images/sized/files/news/170502-Burning-Trip-Karlantjipa-(161)-700×378.jpg
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/styles/width-450/private/resources/c42c11a8-4df7-4d4f-bf92-4f14735c9baa/images/fig5.jpg?itok=vSrJr0ud
Climate shifts – with concurrent shifts in hydrology and biology – are a complex dynamical rebalancing of a system sensitive to small changes.
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/styles/width-450/private/resources/c42c11a8-4df7-4d4f-bf92-4f14735c9baa/images/fig1.jpg?itok=dFI7hAAb
Australia is leading the way in pragmatic responses to anthropogenic changes to a sensitive system.
“AGW can be solved.”
There is no climate crisis, but a mental health crisis.
Parents told not to terrify children over climate change as rising numbers treated for ‘eco-anxiety’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/15/parents-told-not-terrify-children-climate-change-rising-numbers/
If you don’t believe in it, you don’t suffer from it.
Try it.
Gee – I’d suggest a realistic assessment of scientific uncertainty and a rational and pragmatic response.
Jo Nova has a wealth of data and analysis as well.
See my https://www.cfact.org/2020/01/21/jo-novas-amazing-australian-fire-coverage/.
As an interested party int he Adelaide temp record. As an FYI the Adelaide weather station has been resettled at the old West Tce site after a number of years.
Today if we look at the West Tce data there is a gap.
Can this gap be filled with data from the Kent Town station?
“The “climate emergency”, which we are told threatens the imminent collapse of civilisation and the extinction of humanity, is a dogma being enforced by a culturally totalitarian tyranny. Threatening the living standards of millions, permitting no challenge and wrecking the livelihoods and reputations of any who dares dissent, it has been created by a repudiation of science, humanity and reason: the very markers of modernity and the west. This is the real emergency.” –\\
Melanie Phillips, 21 February 2020
https://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=d3ec62cf0e&e=d3ab024ae2
“America is about to be introduced to a climate change sceptic dubbed the “anti-Greta”. Naomi Seibt, 19, will appear at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC], this week where Donald Trump is the main speaker. It is the biggest annual jamboree for grass-roots Republicanism in the United States.”
The Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2020
https://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=d6567d8644&e=d3ab024ae2
“I’ve got very good news for you. The world is not ending because of climate change. In fact, 12 years from now we will still be around casually taking photos on our iPhone 18s….Don’t let an agenda that is trying to depict you as an energy-sucking leech on the planet get into your brain and take away all of your passionate spirit. I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”
Naomi Seibt, The Heartland Institute, February 2020
https://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=1f2af8113d&e=d3ab024ae2
In fact, some of will not be around in 12 years yakking on their cell phones, because some will perish due to the 16th year in a row with a cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin, and some will not be around as they will have perished in some more wild fires, some more floods or some other natural disaster that is now more frequent due to the increase CO2 in the atmosphere.
So don’t listen to the blonde paid spokesperson of Heartland Institute.
Bob
There is a much greater chance of one of us getting dusted off by a stray bullet since Biden said last night 150 million Americans have died from gun violence since 2007. Whew, how was I so lucky as to be part of the 50% who made it.
Your statement is as absurd as Joe’s.
So Biden made a mistake, so my argument is wrong, is that the extent of your argument?
So you are going to listen to the blond bombshell hired by Heartland?
Look, hurricanes are more powerful, wildfires are more extensive and temperature increase may be accelerating, where are you going to hide?
I didn’t think anything you wrote could be more absurd than your first comment but you just did it. I will hide exactly where I’ve been hiding the last 75 years, in my house. No hurricanes within 600 miles….ever. No forest fires within 150 miles for a century and since the forests have been replaced by farmland, I have a greater chance of being whacked by an errant Tiger Woods drive than being affected by a forest fire. I experienced hotter heat waves 50 years ago than I have recently during the so called climate emergency.
Other than that, Greta would be proud of you.
So since you don’t live within 600 miles of an ocean that has hurricanes, and don’t live within 150 miles of a tree, that means that no one should be concerned with the so called by you “climate emergency?”
And you don’t live anywhere near any of these locations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heat_waves
An honest broker might notice that there have been more heat waves lately. And you may notice there were only a couple 50 years ago.
It’s all about you and only you.
Since I am not here defending Greta, why are you defending the blond dimwit hired by Heartland?
And I notice that you have no rebuttal to my statement
“Look, hurricanes are more powerful, wildfires are more extensive and temperature increase may be accelerating, where are you going to hide?”
You asked about me and I told you. A 10 foot sapling in a subdivision poses no danger for a forest fire. You need forests to have forest fires.
NASA shows a drop in fires.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.htm
In US fires were far worse in 1920s
https://www.cfact.org/2017/10/17/fires-far-worse-last-century/
The EPA heatwave index for the US shows heatwaves were worse in 1930s.
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/figure-gd-1-10.png
From the Pielke Jr paper
https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e172e9f888ec00007eac964/960×0.jpg?fit=scale
Another graph, no upward trend
https://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Maue-06-06-18-major-hurricanes.png
There are tornadoes in our area occasionally, but the trend is down
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/image-55.png
So where are the trends up? Not to worry there is one. And I remember 30 years ago the predictions that the ski industry would be kaput in 20 years. Just 1 of dozens of failed predictions.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/nhland_season1-6.png
Bob, I have copied a page out of a journal on climate in NSW 1790s. Note that Sydney was without rain in 1790. Also note other references to heat and droughts.
I don’t provide this as “proof” of anything, other than I have yet to be convinced that what the world is experiencing now is unprecedented. I have accumulated 100s of examples, which taken individually don’t account for much, but taken in totality should lead one to at least be circumspect about our current climate and be suspect about claims the world is going to end in 12 years.
https://archive.org/stream/climatenewsouth02russgoog#page/n70/mode/2up
CerescoKid,
Your NASA cite shows a drop in Human caused fires, not wild fires, try again.
It’s well known that the US wildfires chart you cited is not valid before 1960, so try again.
And yes there were heat waves associated with the agricultural bad practices in the US in the 1930s, but those were not global. Overall heat waves are up in the whole world. try again.
Nice hurricane graph, but it shows an increase in major hurricanes.
And I am not making claims about the world ending in 12 years, if you would be paying attention the claim is that we have 12 years to reduce emissions so that we do not exceed a 2 C rise over pre-industrial temperatures.
Per Pielke paper insignificant trend
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0184.1
Of course the forest fire data is reliable. Tell Department of Agriculture it’s wrong. Just inconvenient for your narrative.
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
This study says you are wrong about global fires
“The data available to date, however, do not support a general increase in area burned or in fire severity for many regions of the world. Indeed, there is increasing evidence suggesting that there is overall less fire in the landscape today than there has been centuries ago……”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0345
Read what your own cite says
“Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”
And remember that this cite claims that all the forest in the US burned up between 1926 and 1956, just total the amount of acres burned between 1926 and 1956 and compare to the total acreage of the US forests.
https://www.cfact.org/2017/10/17/fires-far-worse-last-century/
And from your second cite
“The warming climate, which is predicted to result in more severe fire weather in many regions of the globe in this century [53] will probably contribute further to both perceived and actual risks to lives, health and infrastructure.”
So that’s one of the things I am saying, your cites support my arguments.
This reminds me of other events that show similar weather to today in the same period but we can’t trust the data. Of course we know there is nothing unusual about a warming Arctic.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-05125056-down.png
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-17203529_shadow.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQXIzuLXkAMh5ic?format=jpg&name=medium
Collapse of Greenland Glaciers predicted just like now.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Image525_shadow.png
But we can’t trust the facts because they don’t have models.
There were massive forest fires during the early 20th Century just like heatwaves and sea level rise and Arctic Warming and droughts, as much as you want to avoid the reality.
Pre 1960 data excludes Alaska which excludes large forest fires involving 1 million + acres that have been documented in reports that cover the history of forest fires in that state. To quibble about not being able to confirm or not using the same methodology is not the same as saying the fires as reported didn’t happen.
On the other hand the representation of global temperatures pre 1900 with nearly 0 data for large portions of the globe is laughable. Such as this
Or this
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/stations_big.gif
With massive gaps in data how can any temperature comparison be made.
Set the globe to 1890 or any year pre 1950 and see how much of the globe has zero information
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/
Hey Kid, don’t go all steve goddard on me, there are enough lying trolls on the internet who don’t know what the triple point of water means.
Lol. They say that every time. Let me translate for you. Damn, he got me, coming up with those pesky facts. I’ve got dozens and dozens of other examples of historical facts. Although, the graph and globe showing nearly zilch coverage for temperatures in 1890 was a government report. No one needs Goddard to read the history of Australia and its climate and its association with Bushfires to know it’s nuts to say it’s all due to AGW. Nothing is all AGW. Anyone who reads the scientific literature and is aware of the LIA and has a modicum of intelligence knows it’s not all AGW, whether talking about sea level rise or Arctic warming or hurricanes or droughts or flooding or the Antarctica contribution of .27 mm/yr to GMSLR. It’s always the same story if you perform due diligence and dig really deep and do extensive research, there is always another plausible explanation. But it is fun to read things I never would have learned if I hadn’t taken a deep dive into the various topics I have, such as the so called demise of the albatross because of AGW, which I researched the other night.
LOL Kid,
You do science by anecdote?
I am not saying it’s all AGW, apparently you can not even read, or your comprehension is just too low.
The situation in Australia, is due to natural drought and the increase in temperature due to man’s emission of CO2.
Given I showed you the dreadful spatial coverage for measuring temperatures across the globe in 1890 why don’t you thrill me with your scientific acumen and tell me what global temperatures were in all corners of Mother Earth. Here is a hint…you can’t. There is no scientific evidence. It’s all guesses. You have been willfully brainwashed into thinking you can know more than is possible.
CerescoKid,
How many stations do you need to estimate global temperatures in the 19th century?
Your source looks like there were plenty.
30% coverage is good enough for an estimate.
Though I see you are making my arguments up for me, in other words you are addressing arguments I haven’t been making.
There could be 99.9% coverage in the Northern Hemisphere and it still won’t make up for the 15% coverage in the SH. It’s still a guess about what the temperature was during that period. The SH has it’s own beat, it’s own set of stacked oscillations and it’s own unique reaction to natural and anthropogenic forcings.
Even after the best mathematical and statistical machinations, what is still left is just a guess. The temperature trend for Marble Bar, a single location with thermometers, is still unknown.
BobD,
You wrote “An honest broker might notice that there have been more heat waves lately. And you may notice there were only a couple 50 years ago.”
I am an honest broker.
Here is a study of the 6 main capital cities of Australia (where many of the long weather records are to be found) that shows this not to be the case.
The official claim is that heatwaves have become (or more often, heatwaves are becoming…) longer, hotter and more frequent. There is no validity in this general statement, excepth perhaps for Perth. The other 5 capitals show no change in these heatwave properties, or small changes wandering around in a lot of noise, some positive changes, some negative changes. but on the balance nothing to make the news.
I have been covering this topic for years. Here is a mix of earlier work around 2005 and some of later date. mostly covering different day lengths of heatwaves, up to 10 day beasties.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/graphs_sydmelb_heatwaves.pdf
http://www.geoffstuff.com/capitalheatwaves.pdf
http://www.geoffstuff.com/si.xlsx
http://www.geoffstuff.com/capcentB.xlsx
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/02/heatwaves-in-australia-not-longer-not-more-common-why-wont-bom-and-abc-say-that/
It is just so hard to argue when you see the official data subjected to little more than adding up and taking away of numbers in the simplest of ways, showing that the official, generalized claims have no basis in the data.
Why do you guys who want to argue dig deep enough to see for yourselves instead of playing the childish, unscientific rumour-monger game?
The author of this post. Alan Longhurst, seems to have offended some of you for doing some dsigging and finding much the same as any hard scientist can. Why the fuss? Geoff S
Geoff,
It is offensive as he blames the bushfires on arson.
When the real best answer is anthropogenic climate change on top of a natural drought.
Bob,
If you wish to be credible, you should provide conclusive evidence that the fires you select were NOT caused by arson. You cannot just make up an assertion that is different to others and expect it to be accepted.
You have to show your data.
BTW, you use some emotional words. Emotion has no place in hard, observational science. Geoff S
Geoff,
I don’t have to provide any cites for you, it’s clear in the record that the majority of the areas burned in the bush fires in Australia, have been caused by causes other than arson.
Do your own research, find out for yourself.
But I will, the cops say it’s not arson
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/08/police-contradict-claims-spread-online-exaggerating-arsons-role-in-australian-bushfires
If they arrest all the arsonists, then they can stop doing prescribed burns.
Go back to the very basics! Climate change has always happened with warm and cold cycles alternating…… Data and History do support this!
PROVE THAT NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE HAS STOPPED AND THAT IT HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH A CONTROL KNOB THAT IS A TRACE GAS. I WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE PROOF OF THAT!
There are warm periods followed by cold periods followed by warm periods followed by cold periods forever, in new bounds for ten thousand years. MANMADE CO2 GETS CREDIT FOR 50 YEARS OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS. PROVE SOMETHING STOPPED THE NATURAL CYCLES THAT WOULD NATURALLY HAVE CAUSED A WARMING INTO THIS WARMER PERIOD NOW! THE GLOBAL WARMING KING HAS NO CLOTHES ON. Warm times are normal, natural, necessary and unstoppable. Warm times thaw polar sea ice and make it possible for polar oceans to evaporate and cause ocean effect snowfall that rebuilds polar sequestered ice. History and Ice Core Data do Prove this to be Correct.
Wow.
The determination to publish any old nonsense (on homogenisation this time, but the precise topic hardly matters) as long as it comes to a contrarian conclusion is truly heroic.
All droughts in south-east Australia are due to variability in the Indian Ocean dipole. Nothing to do with trace gases in the atmosphere:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2008GL036801
BOM may have adjusted one too many locations:
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/02/acorn-adjustments-robbed-marble-bar-of-its-legendary-world-record-death-valley-now-longest-hottest-place/
What the ? Is it me or are you arguing about comparative data only going to 1900? That is not very much to go on when making a positive statement about why someone is wrong. It would seem to belie an inherent bias toward a particular narrative…..
From the article …
“Fortunately, however, help is at hand, because six concerned individuals, the WA Climate group, has performed such an audit and posted the results in a series of consultable documents:”
A couple of small corrections …
The WA Climate Group (?) of six individuals is one individual – me.
The article link to my site is broken and should be http://www.waclimate.net
From article: “The curious jump around 1980 has been observed in other data: it awaits explanation”.
Maybe worth reading one of my pages: “Metrication influence on Australian temperature trends” at http://www.waclimate.net/round/index.html
1972 metrication saw an abrupt decline in temperature rounding whereby in previous years many observers would write X.0 in Fahrenheit. BoM studies show 51% of all temperatures recorded across Australia from 1957 to 1971 were rounded, and I maintain there’s a high probability that an unknown majority truncated down rather than rounded evenly up and down.
Analysis shows the rounding proportion was higher than 51% before 1957.
The bureau acknowledges there was a mean temp warming shift in 1972 of 0.1C (although my analyses suggest somewhere between 0.2C and 0.3C). However, the BoM has chosen not to adjust for this in its ACORN homogenisation on the basis that in the mid 1970s, starting in 1973, Australia had the highest rainfall and cloud cover since records began. It’s illogical to claim that record rainfall and cloud cover makes the temperature increase.
The heavy rainfall and cloud cover partly masked the immediate influence of metrication / reduced temperature rounding. A PDO shift occurred in the late 1970s which maintained and increased the warming, but the increase in Australian temperature trends began several years earlier coincident with 1972 metrication.
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Robert Rohde Feb 25
“Over the last few months, more than 20% of the Australian forests have burned following record drought and record heat.
That’s the largest annual loss since record-keeping began. In a normal year, only ~2% of the Australian forests are touched by fire.”
–
Sheer exaggeration by people who should know better.
“More than 20% of the country’s forests were blackened, according to new research from Western Sydney University.”
Australia’s forests cover well over 500,000 sq km.
134 million hectares or 17% of Australia’s 7.692 million sq km.
40000 sq miles burnt.
Which is less than 8 %
Western Sydney University is guilty of gross exaggeration.
Some body needs to ask them to justify their percentage.
Robert is guilty of parroting fake news.
–
I believe the 21% is a reference to the temperate forests in eastern Australia, of which, 5.8 million hectares burned.
Thanks JCH.
I agree.
“I believe the 21% is a reference to the temperate forests in eastern Australia, of which, 5.8 million hectares burned.”
–
That sounds a lot better.
If so Western Sydney University should have referenced that fact plus the Guardian etc.
“More than 20% of the country’s forests” does not sound like a reference to “just the temperate forests in eastern Australia”.
Atomsk’s Sanakan
Re: “Try reading and reporting on the entire twitter exchange between me and Zeke”
1) You posted a blog article from Alan Longhurst in which he cast aspersions on the NASA, NOAA, BoM, and CRU surface temperature analyses. He insinuated they over-estimated Australia warming due to faulty adjustments, and he instead offered a much smaller surface temperature trend for Australia.”
–
Interesting that so many oceanographers convert to lukewarmer’s, Atom, not to mention similarly highly qualified scientists who run the satellite studies you dish so readily.
Perhaps if you actually read some articles, instead of cut and pasting cherries, you might try Alan’s Wikipedia entry where you will find a link to his
Doubt and certainty in climate science E book which you could read, not to mention his 80 plus research papers.
–
Instead you choose to mix with thermometer readers, one step up from gas meter readers who use models to estimate how much gas you have used.. Sorry, I meant how much the temperature should have gone up with CO2 rise instead of actually publishing and using the metered readings.
Zeke and Gavin and their ilk, could use the real figures, and use real algorithms to correlate, congregate and compare the records but instead hide them, homogenise them, and publish them as actual data compilations when up to or over half the figures in many series are from stations that did not or do not exist or are Kroger into a zombie like reality.
–
I enjoy your word games, your dogged refusal to realise that other people can think for themselves and are entitled to have other views than dogma.
–
So instead of mounds of 10 year old Tamino quotes, the world has moved on you know, why don’t you try an actual , simple discussion of the basic points?
We both agree more CO2 gives more warming.
What is your lowest limit you are prepared to concede?
Your evidence-free speech does nothing to address the published evidence I cited. And you didn’t bother to post what you said as a direct reply to what I said, allowing you to better hide your reply.
So let me know when you can actually address the published evidence I cited on that thread, instead of wasting my time with your usual evidence-free, politically-motivated speeches:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910201
I want to read some papers by oceanographers who have convert to luckheatinism.
Reblogged this on I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog.
“Land Surface Temperature (LST) is the radiative skin temperature of the land derived from solar radiation. It is a basic determinant of the terrestrial thermal behavior, as it controls the effective radiating temperature of the Earth’s surface”.
Link:
https://www.earthstartsbeating.com/2019/08/29/land-surface-temperature/
Now, what should be said is that Australia’s drought left surface completely dry.
When land is dry its specific heat is very low, cp = 0,19 cal/gr oC. and less.
Consequently the daytime surface temperature rises very high.
Everyone who has been on the beach at midday remembers the burning dry sand very high temperature and compared it with the much cooler wet sand.
The dry Australian land develops very high temperatures which in some occasions may ignite the bush fires.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
Not only expunged, but tendentiously adjusted.
Whatever.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/images/joc3812-fig-0003.png
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/joc.3812
So what!
BTW, the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation for annual first differences indicates that that the vital low-frequencies are NOT very strongly coherent.
John321s: the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation for annual first differences
You have evidence for all that? uniformly? increasing 0 lag correlations? for annual first differences?
indicates that that the vital low-frequencies are NOT very strongly coherent.
How exactly does that tendentious conclusion work out?
Write an answer that might at least pique the curiosity of a reader of Introduction to Multiple Time Series Analysis by Helut Luetkepohl; or The Cointegrated VAR Model by Katarina Juselius.
The evidence is entirely in Tables 2 and 3 of REI’s reference itself.
FYI, first-differencing suppresses the lowest frequencies while amplifying the highest. The fact that this produces uniformly higher zero-lag correlation indicates that the contribution from the lowest frequencies is less than from the highest. The experiences eye can even see lack of strong low-frequency coherence in REI’s posted graph.
The experienced eye? Like I said – no math. I can’t even imagine what it might mean if anything.
Once again, an unmistakable sign of total cluelessness about matters analytic, such as standard cross-spectrum analysis used throughout geophysics. See the math in:
https://atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/552_Notes_6c.pdf
To me it seems a problem of gobbledegook – and dropping in some generic Fourier spectral decomposition notes doesn’t seem to add anything.
john321s: The experiences eye can even see lack of strong low-frequency coherence
ha ha ha ha ha. The experienced eye can see anything anywhere, even umbrellas in the stars.
john321s : the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation
…
such as standard cross-spectrum analysis
cross-spectrum analysis can not show “uniformly increasing” zero-lag correlation, can it?
The increase in zero-lag cross-correlation was shown clearly in Tables 2 and 3 of RIE’s reference. Nowhere do I make the red herring connection projected here. See my comment below.
John hand waves at analytics and is an eyeballing champion. 🤣
Spot the oddball claim.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/table-2.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/table-3.png
john321s BTW, the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation for annual first differences indicates
Nowhere do I make the red herring connection projected here
Of what “red herring” are you writing? The cross-spectral analysis assumes stationarity, and can not reveal “uniformly increasing” correlations among anything.
The red herring connection is glaringly obvious in the nonsensical juxtaposition of “the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation” with
“such as standard cross-spectrum analysis,” as if the latter was used to establish the former. What I actually wrote is:
john321s: The red herring connection is glaringly obvious in the nonsensical juxtaposition of “the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation” with
“such as standard cross-spectrum analysis,” as if the latter was used to establish the former.
Standard cross-spectrum analysis assumes stationarity, for which “uniformly increasing zero-lag correlations” do not exist. Stationarity assumes constant zero-lag correlations.
The red herring persists in the chronic failure to grasp that “uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation” refers entirely to comparisons between the cross-correlations for FIRST DIFFERENCES and those for the ORIGINAL time-series. It has nothing to with any TEMPORAL changes in those correlations. It’s simply a uniformly higher fixed value in separate CASES.
BTW, all this is even more irrelevant to Longhurst’s criticism of BoM’s data treatment than RIE’s response to my original comment here. Let’s not protract that. distraction any further.
The cross-spectrum is defined by the complex Fourier transform of the cross-correlation function between a pair of time-series. Unless there’s significant phase-shift between the series–a rarity in annual geophysical data–the normalized magnitude of that transform (the “coherence”) is intimately related to the magnitude of the zero-lag cross-correlation.
Experienced analysts know this and, indeed, can easily spot incoherent series by eye. Knowing full-well the value of their cross-spectral results, they’re not inclined to divulge them in blog discussions. Those who obviously have never performed any such analyses, on the other hand, are free to put their benighted commentary on full public display.
john321s: The cross-spectrum is defined by the complex Fourier transform of the cross-correlation function between a pair of time-series. Unless there’s significant phase-shift between the series–a rarity in annual geophysical data–the normalized magnitude of that transform (the “coherence”) is intimately related to the magnitude of the zero-lag cross-correlation.
Yeh, yeh, yeh, we know all that. You just restated the stationarity assumption (part of it, at least), which rules out modeling “uniformly increasing” correlations of something or other.
I’ll leave it to those who “know all that” to explain how stationarity became an issue in their mind.
“[Y]ou will find the early data have been expunged from the currently-used Australian archives.
Not only expunged, but tendentiously adjusted.”
So I gave a plot – and a link – revealing use of the so called expunged data. I receive in response eyeballing, diversion and now claims that his knowledge is too precious to share with hoi polloi on blogs. Seems rather telling.
The study I cited cross correlated reanalysis products against observations to establish the fidelity of the observations. John suggests at long last that the correlations of interannual variability compared to that of mean values have implications for ‘vital’ low frequency spectral coherence. Given the still relatively short term coverage it all seems a bit moot. I suggest that his knowledge is a pretence.
Only someone bereft of scientific understanding would claim that reanalysis products can establish the fidelity of observations or supplant decades of expunged data.
Only someone intent on deception would claim that an assertion made at the very outset was made at “long last.”
Only an amateur gripped by delusions of grandeur would make a career of interjecting his ad hominem-laced irrelevancies into discussions by experienced scientists.
I say at long last because of the difficulty in getting to the nub of the tendentious and irrelevant quibble. It turns out of course to be smoke and mirrors.
john321s: BTW, the uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation for annual first differences indicates that that the vital low-frequencies are NOT very strongly coherent.
I had thought to suggest that you might start over by clearly rewriting what you meant. But you did it yourself.
The red herring persists in the chronic failure to grasp that “uniformly increasing zero-lag correlation” refers entirely to comparisons between the cross-correlations for FIRST DIFFERENCES and those for the ORIGINAL time-series. It has nothing to with any TEMPORAL changes in those correlations. It’s simply a uniformly higher fixed value in separate CASES.
Is the increase actually a “uniformly higher fixed value” for all pairs of time series whose cross-spectra are computed?
What is the implication for the time series that RIE presented? That is, what difference does it make if the low frequencies are NOT “very strongly” coherent? Or, how strong is strong, and why does it matter in this case?
When the low frequencies are not strongly coherent (say, > 0.8) in physically related geophysical variables, the nature of that relationship is cast into doubt. Such loss of coherence vis a vis that seen at higher frequencies often points to extraneous factors, such as instrument drift or UHI, corrupting the data. That is particularly true of temperature measurements at historical met stations. On the other hand, intermittent variables, such as rainfall, have their own peculiarities and seldom show strong coherence with continuous variables in any frequency range.
Yet more abstract waffle. Isn’t it time to give it up? These are physical measurements cross correlated with 20CR output to test for for the consistence of pre 1910 data. In answer to fake claims of expunged data. His laughable overinterpretation means not a damn.
Indeed, it’s that time for the analytically clueless.
Can’t leave it alone can you? I have done hydrodynamic modelling and analysis – along with acquisition and management of water and soil data – for decades. Along with wide ranging reading in the natural sciences.
The most I have seen you do is wave your hands at spectral decomposition and drop some superficial references to solar cycles or UHI. Or extravagantly endorse an irrelevant – to geophysical series – Weiner process. And insist that highly accomplished mathematicians and scientists I have previously cited in my many references to diverse sources can’t hold a candle to your unspecified and unlikely expertise. Sophisticated analysis of geophysical time series goes well beyond Fourier or wavelet analysis into territory you don’t appear to be aware exists.
e.g. https://www.clim-past.net/12/31/2016/cp-12-31-2016.pdf
I think perhaps you protest my lack of analytical skills far too tediously and petulantly for someone with little evident knowledge or skill and a deprecating axe to grind from a fixed and very narrow skeptic perspective.
At every turn, such fanciful misrepresentions are used to mask a patent inability to grasp what analytic methods are relevant to the topic at hand. Merely citing “sophisticated analysis of geophysical time series” is a far cry from any ability to perform such. And no search engine produces any indication of RIE ever doing any scientific studies at all. There’s only the empty roar of a wannabe blog lion.
Bloggers above have tried to obfuscate about my comment that various temperature data sets should be the same because they derive from the one original, the observations curated by the BOM. Differences between modern compilations are therefore due to adjustments and to the extent they are different, some must be wrong.
Most of the Australian adjustments, such as in the BOM ACORN-SAT groups, cover the period from 1910 onwards. From then until the mid-1970s, this is essentially the only data available as a starting point for temperatures. Satellite observations started about 1978, radiosonde coverage and technology improved after then, so there might be more data to assist in adjustments for the last 4 decades, which have relatively much smaller adjustments. The bulk of the adjustment was in the 7 decades 1910-1970. In this period, there is a systematic cooling of ACORN_SAT version 1 with respect to raw, years 1910 to about 1970, annual mean T data, as shown in this graph from a Government- appointed Technical Advisory Forum reporting in 2015, page 17 of the 46 page report:
http://www.geoffstuff.com/cooling_past.jpg
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/2015_TAF_report.pdf
This is the style of graphs to which we refer when we say “adjustments that cool the past”. Except that this is official. You will see that even assessed on the more condensed annual mean data, rather than daily or monthly, the cooling can be up to 0.3 ⁰C, a substantial figure when the official warming trend for the century is some 0.9 ⁰C. We objected to this bias in adjustments and the BOM have since produced a new version of ACORN-SAT. There has been no comparable review of Version 2 and so I have no equivalent graph. It is a long job to create such a graph because the BOM have made a messy hodge-podge of certain public data.
My original point stands: There is only one data source for use by the various global temperature compilers like HadCRU, GISS, BEST (especially for the longer, more adjusted part of the historic record). With but one original source, any compilation differences have to be due entirely to adjustments, some of which are logically and inarguably WRONG. There is no way to tell which are correct, or if any are.
As an aside, with the largest adjustments shown as soon after 1910, one wonders at the large nature of adjustments required if and when pre-1910 data are stitched on to the data shown. There will be either a huge jump at 1910, or adjustments of the order of 0.5 ⁰C each year before 1910 to get rid of that jump. Interesting.
This adjustment/compilation business is very soft, mostly subjective opinion work that I hesitate to name as science.
Geoff S
“Depending on the type of analysis being sought, it is appropriate to analyse temperature data in different ways. The requirements for instantaneous event analysis, such as the spatial description of intense heat, are somewhat different to the requirements for temperature trends.
The Bureau of Meteorology therefore prepares and maintains multiple temperature analyses that are fit for purpose. This means that temperatures are analysed using more than one independent methodology, for example with and without homogeneity adjustments, as a consistency check and to provide the most appropriate tailored information for various uses.
The two main datasets are the real-time temperature monitoring system, developed under the Australian Water Availability Project (known as AWAP) and the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network–Surface Air Temperature dataset (known as ACORN-SAT). The AWAP and ACORN-SAT datasets commenced in 1911 and 1910 respectively, corresponding to the widespread standardisation of temperature instrument screens (“Stevenson Screens”); following the formation of the Bureau of Meteorology in 1908.” http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/events/january-heatwave-methods.shtml
ACORN-SAT use a smaller number of higher quality stations – AWAP uses some 700 stations across Australia and includes measures of humidity and solar exposure data for the previous day, and rainfall for the present day. The AWAP calculation stabilizes after 1950 – but as its use is for near real time event analysis this is immaterial. ACORN-SAT is designed for the purpose of temperature trend analysis.
RIE,
We know this stuff of your snips backwards.
Now, how about a response from you that shows you have some depth of knowledge from your own hands-on diligence, not the selected works of a host of others.
Refute me if you can.
Geoff S
I already have. Your typically superficial approach assumes that differences between AWAP and ACORN-SAT before 1950 have some significance. They are different products for different purposes.
Knowledge is founded on comparing and contrasting ‘a host’ of reputable sources. You should try it sometime.
RIE,
There is nothing superficial in taking official data from the original source and doing the simplest of math, adding up and taking away. You should try it some time, then argue with yourself when the results fail to fit your preconceptions. It can be cathartic. Geoff S
As I have shown – you subtract apples from oranges – AWAP from ACORN-SAT – and make nonsense with an ideological twist.
Atomsk’s Sanakan
Re: “Differences between modern compilations are therefore due to adjustments and to the extent they are different, some must be wrong.”
“Actually, NASA, NOAA, Berkeley Earth, and CRU give about the same warming trend for Australia; there is not a statistically significant difference between their trends. I already covered that:“
–
They all have access to identical data sets.
They should all be identical in trends and data barring misprints.
Differences arise due to which subsets of data they choose to use or omit to preserve their feigned independence.
Differences arise due to their handling (adjustments) of the data.
A complete waste of time pretending that any statistically significant difference could arise.
If they did it would mean someone went to sleep at the adjustments bureau.
Re: “Differences between modern compilations are therefore due to adjustments and to the extent they are different, some must be wrong.”
Actually, NASA, NOAA, Berkeley Earth, and CRU give about the same warming trend for Australia; there is not a statistically significant difference between their trends. I already covered that:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910196
Re: “My original point stands: There is only one data source for use by the various global temperature compilers like HadCRU, GISS, BEST (especially for the longer, more adjusted part of the historic record). With but one original source, any compilation differences have to be due entirely to adjustments, some of which are logically and inarguably WRONG. There is no way to tell which are correct, or if any are.”
Looks like you stuck your response elsewhere, instead of as a direct reply to what I said. Makes it easier for you to hide your response from a rebuttal.
Anyway, you addressed none of the points I made, such as there being more than one data source (ex: 20CR, proxy-based estimates), allowing validation of adjustments with other data sources. I already cited published evidence on this:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910201
I’ll throw in this paper as well:
“Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents” [“Corrigendum: Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents”]
That’s one way you’re wrong when you say “[t]here is no way to tell which are correct”. Another way to tell you’re wrong is that there are benchmarking studies for the homogenization algorithms, as has been done for homogenization methods used for US temperature records and elsewhere. For example:
“Benchmarking homogenization algorithms for monthly data” (cited in: “A daily homogenized temperature data set for Australia”)
“Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States”
“Measuring performances of homogenization methods”
So it’s clear, Geoff, that your claims are wrong. That’s probably why your claims appear just on non-peer-reviewed blogs like WA Climate, instead of in the peer-reviewed literature. It’s also probably why you can’t cite any peer-reviewed, published evidence in support of your conclusions. If you tried to submit to peer review the claims you just made, then competent reviewers would do what I did: cite published evidence showing you’re wrong.
Atomsk,
A senior scientist does not submit for publication a simple set of math calculations involving little more than adding up and taking away. The literature would be swamped with low impact amateur stuff even more than it is now.
You seem to be arguing against points on which you are relatively uneducated. Finding for your first time, observations some of us have done a lot of work on since the early 1990s. You invoke The Establishment line when we have shown bias in it time and again. They do not like simple facts that anyone can agree on, for it spoils their elevated quest to save the world. (Maybe better to save you from the wrath of the math teacher who taught you how to add up and take away).
I have never sent paper-like material to WAClimate/Chris Gilham for him to put on his blog. Not very often, bits and pieces of data, yes. So your unsupported bad comments are wrong. A decent scientist would apologise).
If you are the expert you claim to be, look at some original Chris Gilham work on his blog, especially his work on 1950s data preserved in the official Government Year Books and related, summaries of Australian weather from that era like CSIR papers. Thse preserved results show large and significant differences to the present Establishment versions, all 5 of Temperature versions.. The Establishment owes it to the people to explain this re-write of what was once published as the best available, archive ready compilations by the best people in their fields at the time. Geoff S
With but one original source, any compilation differences have to be due entirely to adjustments, some of which are logically and inarguably WRONG. There is no way to tell which are correct, or if any are.”
It really does not matter if the warming is exactly right, or about right or more rapid or less rapid.
What really matters is that whatever it was, it was natural. We came out of the little ice age and we warmed. Climate has always warmed out of colder periods and it is wrong to expect it should not happen naturally this time. To believe that natural climate change suddenly stopped and we now should achieve an new equilibrium without natural repeating cycles is beyond reasonable and it is beyond reasonable that now we can use a CO2 control knob to override natural cycles. They, you, are indicating that we can stop what has always happened and regulate the future with a trace gas. One more molecule of CO2 per ten thousand molecules did not cause a measurable and identifiable change. I will not and can not use the words that properly describe this twisted logic.
@Geoff Sherrington
“You invoke The Establishment line when we have shown bias in it time and again. “
Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, young Earth creationists, and other contrarians say the same thing about the so-called scientific “Establishment”. Sorry, but that kind of nonsensical rhetoric doesn’t work on me. I’m not a conspiracy theorist or contrarian who’s going to refuse to accept something just because it’s called “Establishment” by some people.
“Thse preserved results show large and significant differences to the present Establishment versions, all 5 of Temperature versions.”
Once again, the Australian warming trends from Berkeley Earth, NASA, NOAA, CRU, and Australia BoM are not that different, as I already explained. You refusing to admit that is not my problem:
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1232510521015967744
[from figure 7 of 10.1029/2018JD028355 ]
https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1232375927738445825
[see: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/Australia , http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/ ]
You also haven’t addressed my other rebuttals of what you said, such as:
– there are other data sources such as proxy-based analyses, thermometer-free re-analyses (ex: 20CR), radiosonde-based analyses, and satellite-based analyses that allow us to validate the soundness of the adjustment procedures used for Australian surface temperature trend analyses (note you also didn’t explain why adjustment procedures that have been shown to work post-1950s should be expected to stop working pre-1950s)
– the adjustment/homogenization procedures are validated by benchmarking studies
“If you are the expert you claim to be, look at some original Chris Gilham work on his blog”
Yet you wrote this:
“Bloggers above have tried to obfuscate about my comment”
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#comment-910289
Anyway, I don’t rely on non-peer-reviewed contrarian blogs for my information on science, regardless of whether the topic is Earth science (flat Earther blogs), vaccine science (anti-vaxxer blogs), or climate science. The reasons for that should be obvious:
“Like the vast range of other non-peer-reviewed material produced by the denial community, book authors can make whatever claims they wish, no matter how scientifically unfounded.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0002764213477096
I am someone who has read meteorological equipment for real. A maximum/minimum standard mercury thermometer of the kind used when I was at school were very hard to read ‘inaccurately’ (especially in Fahrenheit). Australia’s BOM, as others before, with and after them, have very little basis for believing that adjusting historical records is anything other than claiming that two wrongs do make a right.
Written records should stand as they are until somebody can factually prove that the original reading was false, which, of course they can do on the day and time of the reading. The other truth is that most small errors in reading (rounding up or rounding down as BOM calls them) are lost in the noise.
Standardized measurements to 0.1 degree C using specialized mercury in glass and alcohol in glass instruments have been made in Australia since 1908. ‘Homogenization’ of station records for changes in location, surrounding infrastructure, local irrigation, etc are unavoidable and have been done with as muck diligence as possible. Much more significant for the surface temperature record are changes in the balance of latent and sensible heat at the surface due to changing soil moisture profiles.
I suggest that the surface temperature record is little more than an approximate and partial empirical proof of the greenhouse gas hypothesis. The system itself is much more complex than a single cause and a single effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qQHDGA7SsA
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/cdo/about/airtemp-measure.shtml
The BoM data no longer matches the historical records at Trove.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/people/478767?c=people
You have dug deeply into this I see.
It should come as no surprise that oceanic sources of Australian rainfall comes from the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. The Pacific pattern delivers rainfall variability across northern and eastern Australia. The Indian Ocean pattern drives vast swathes of rain bearing cloud from northwest to southeast Australia. Circumpolar winds spin storms off Antarctica into higher or lower latitudes. These spatiotemporal chaotic patterns evolve over moments to eons in a Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamic of shifts between and persistence in regimes. Rain cells occur in response to topology, wind speed and direction, precipitable moisture content, etc. Deterministic prediction is not possible. Where rain falls and where it doesn’t may as well be at the whim of the Dragon Kings of the 4 seas. Indeed – extreme events at climate transitions have been dubbed dragon-kings. This accords with a broadly accepted scientific paradigm of an Earth system sensitive to small changes and apt to change rainfall regimes abruptly.
This post and much that follows by contrast is a mountain of climate trivia, heapings of motivated reasoning and lashings of agnotology on an ideological battleground unrelated to the pragmatic and risk averse aspirations of people at large.
“The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts.” https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/climate-pragmatism-innovation
I have little enough patience for what any of you call science – science in the thrall of ideology is not science at all – and none at all for a lack of effective, responsible and pragmatic policy on an uncertain and nonlinear planet.
One pragmatic response – btw – to Australian fires is to put considerably more effort into cultural burning as an antidote to the Kyoto woody weed blight of the past decade and more.
Bluster, instead of mounds of 10 year old Tamino quotes, the world has moved on.Try an actual , simple discussion of the basic points instead of attacking people all the time.
We both agree more CO2 gives more warming.
What is your lowest limit you are prepared to concede?
When measuring the soil’s temperature thermometer is dipped in the soil.
When measuring the oceanic waters’ temperature thermometer is dipped in the water.
In both cases the conductive heat transfer prevails.
When measuring air temperature in the standardized Stevenson Screens it is like the indoors thermometer measurements with open windows.
They do not measure the air’s temperature.
And, in addition, they do not measure the Earth’s surface temperature.
To measure the soil’s surface temperature they should bring thermometer in contact with the soil.
To measure oceanic surface temperature they should get in contact with the water.
And not to forget, the earth’s surface is covered with a vast ocean.
Interesting, do they measure the oceanic surface’s temperature 1,5 meters above the water?
How do we expect by using measurements for the air in the Stevenson Screens to calculate the Earth’s surface average temperature?
What average temperature, the land’s, the water’s or the air’s are we looking for?
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
They are measuring sensible heat as an expression of molecular kinetic energy using a standardized experimental methodology. One of the triumphs of the scientific enlightenment was such systematic, broadscale data collection. In Australia a system formalised by 1910.
But here we have a skeptic with little understanding of basic physics and no experience of experimental methods undermining a science invented by giants in the service of a vastly unwarranted hubris.
Is it too much to ask that such serious scientific commentators as yourselves make some effort to correct such fundamental misconceptions?
All global historic temperature compilations that use liquid-in-glass max/min thermometers – that is, about all of them up to around 1980 – have a fundamental impediment that casts severe doubt on whether they are fit for purpose. For now, that purpose can be taken as reconstructing past weather and its changes and so, climate change.
These thermometers have pegs that are pushed by the expanding or shrinking Mercury or ethanol, to positions that are everywhere taken as Tmax and Tmin, almost always with daily resets. Tmean or average is usually calculated as half of Tmax+Tmin.
There are dozens of effects that cause these thermometers to reach their tops or bottoms each day. The final push to the value used is a balance of physical effects until one finally dominates and then drops away. A short list of these effects might include the actual air temperature in the screen enclosure as influenced by the ability of the system to respond without lag to that temperature, the cooling under a passing cloud, a burst of rain evaporating and cooling the sampled air, a nearby tree casting a different shadow over time and season, an observer causing changes while reading and resetting, birds overhead casting shade at the critical moment, birds flapping wings nearby and affecting air circulation patterns inside the enclosure, butterflies doing similar and affecting the global weather through chaotic effects. Cows breathing warm air nearby, grass growing under the screen to change its effective height above ground, lawns being cut for opposite effect, lawns being watered to keep them green, grass replaced by asphalt with different thermal properties, one thermometer replaced by another with a different calibration, a bubble forming in the thermometer, an observer reading the wrong end of the peg, the observer sleeping in and recording at a wrong time of day, the observer going to the pub all day and inventing a reading. …… So many, many effects are easy to imagine.
Yet, incredibly, some researchers take this game of chance as having acceptable errors (while usually failing to show their error homework) and again, incredibly, often take the half of the sum of these transient Tmax and Tmin numbers as reliable for raising to the power of 4 for S-B type calculations to several significant figures.
These Tmax and Tmin numbers in no way represent an adequate view of the energetics of the Sun heating the Earth. We all know that the area under the daily temperature profile curve should be better than 2 spot readings each day, but we simply do not have this information from the past.
So you want to homogenise these observations? Ask yourself if you know how to adjust for all those possible effects. No, nobody recorded that flock of brolgas flying overhead that day in 1926. So you assume (without evidence) that the plus errors will balance the minus (some cannot). Then you might invoke the Law of Large Numbers ot the Central Limit theorem, both of which are seldom applicable Why, you ask?
These math procedures are based on representative sampling from a population. That population, for this type of study, does not allow a screen in Darwin to be treated as part of the same population that includes a shaded verandah in Adelaide. Those math procedures demand stringent selection of what comprises a population, a sample, a distribution, a correlation, an error. To lump in the lot, as is done, is a working example of Stats for Dummies.
Come on, guys, leave The Dreamtime behind you and smarten up your formalism if you believe in proper, usefully productive science.
Thank you Geoff Sherrington.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
Thanks to Geoff Sherrington for such a pertinent appraisal of our temperature record keeping methods and their uses/abuses.
I find it rather ironic that our overall raw recorded measurements, historic and current, of temperature by thermometer may be rather less than adequate for those who claim to research our weather and climate change data. Expected temperature increase is the central theme of the climate change debate and yet our methods of measuring it are, apparently, open to all manner of abuse and question in terms of resolution, fitness for purpose and historical method. I have often wondered why the UK’s Met Office shamefully hides much of its historical data away from public viewing. Reading some of the comments above I now understand how misleading it could be, in the wrong hands, of course.
No wonder Dr Curry advocates setting a true baseline record over the next thirty years, with as good a resolution and accuracy as we can muster, so that we may be better equipped to reach firmer conclusions about climate and weather than we are currently able to do. Perhaps we will also learn how to measure temperature etc. more meaningfully, for it seems an awful lot of people have jumped the gun, and need to be brought back under starter’s order. Dr Curry would make an excellent and more than fair controller of the race from start to finish, IMHO.
.
Does Judy want to redo Anthony’s surface station project?
She is a little late if that’s what she wants.
I thought Anthony already showed that the temperature monitoring stations are fit for the purpose.
Geoff:
All that you say is true.
However there are thousands of thermometers globally and I suggest that none occur such that the daily max temp is skewed either positively or negatively …. that is GLOBALLY biased in one direction (for the purposes of climate).
On top of that we have thousands of days also in which a = or – bias will be equalised.
It is what we have, and so long as we continue to compare apples with apples ((Tmax+TMin)/2) then the apples will be the same.
And BTW UKMO Tmax thermometers do not have a “pegs” that are pushed by the mercury to indicate a maximum temp.
They have a constriction in the capillary which Breaks the mercury thread when it cools.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/guides/10_0230_fs_17_observations.pdf
UK weather Lass:
“I have often wondered why the UK’s Met Office shamefully hides much of its historical data away from public viewing.”
Err, they don’t, “shamefully” or in any other way.
Try here for starters…..
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/library-and-archive/archive
UK weather lass
I agree with Tony Banton about the Met office, who are busy digitising many Uk weather records and hold many more as paper records in their library and archives which are open to the public. I have been there many times carrying out research whilst much material is also available online.
A thorough examination of them back to around 1200-the oldest they hold although records become better over the next few hundred years -is enlightening. The current weather we are experiencing generally pales into insignificance compared to the truly apocalyptic weather -at times- of the past, which shaped landscapes. its a wonder there were ancestors at all when you see what they went through. Mind you, bearing in mind the frequent plagues as well, probably the weather was the least of their problems
curiously and against modern thinking the wettest and wildest times were often during the Little Ice age rather than the generally more settled and calmer Medieval Warm period.
What is true however is that the giants of the past such as Hubert Lamb are no longer carrying out primary research and consequently new examination of our historic past is very limited. Dr Mark McCarthy at the Met Office is probably the best available and he tends to look at Victorian records rather than delves more deeply into the past..
What has fundamentally changed is that in the distant past there were far fewer of our ancestors to be affected by such as floods, and there would be little they could do about it anyway
tonyb
Tonyb – been awhile since these were built with bricks.
https://i.imgur.com/y0UWi92.png
Thanks for the info but …
Many items and sources of useful information (e.g. facsimile copies of monthly UK weather summaries) that were originally available online have been removed from the Met Office archives. They may be available for personal inspection by appointment but that is not the same thing. OCR could have been easily used to convert them if manually copying them into digital versions was such a big issue.
Meteorologists should be encouraging interest from as many young people as possible in weather and climate but not for the wrong reasons.
UK weather lass
The Met office are very open. Their librarians are excellent and would be more than happy to respond to requests for information. I have frequently been sent pdf’s etc of material that they have gone out of their way to copy for me
I never used facsimile copies but the amount of material now available to the public is many times greater than it was even five years ago.
Perhaps the facsimile copies have been placed elsewhere in the system or been replaced?
As I say I am sure a phone call to the librarian of the National meteorological library and Archives in Exeter at 01392 884838 would bring dividends
tonyb
Pingback: Climate denial caused the losses from Australia's fires - Fabius Maximus website
So Europeans showed up on the Australian continent, put an end to 45,000 years of cultural burning practices, and now the media blames the current wildfires on co2? Typical…
Australia is not special and unique with regards to fire ecology. They suffer from the same problems as everywhere else; altered fire regimes, invasive species, changes in herbivory, increased wildland-urban interface, changes in land use, fire suppression, etc.
What I find interesting is that it seems ecologists in Australia view 45,000 years of aboriginal burning as something unnatural and reducing “diversity.”
In the United States we view cultural burning by indigenous peoples to be part of the environment for the most part and try to maintain those fire regimes because it is proving to be best for ecological functions.
Whatever way you look at it – the world has warmed in recent decades.
http://images.remss.com/figures/climate/RSS_Model_TS_compare_globev4.png
“Global (70S to 80N) Mean TLT Anomaly plotted as a function of time. The black line is the time series for the RSS V4.0 MSU/AMSU atmospheric temperature dataset. The yellow band is the 5% to 95% range of output from CMIP-5 climate simulations.”
And anthropogenic greenhouse gases are likely to force climate in a warmer direction for some time. Despite the logarithmic decrease in the rate of forcing change with higher concentrations.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/v8kor.png
But let’s go back to temperature measurement in Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/cdo/images/about/max_thermometer.gif
“Maximum temperature has historically been measured with a mercury-in-glass thermometer which has a constriction in the neck of the thermometer tube. As the air temperature rises mercury is forced past the constriction. However, as the temperature falls the constriction prevents the mercury from returning to the bulb of the thermometer. The height of mercury in the tube remains at that reached at the hottest time of day. The thermometer is reset by gentle shaking.”
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/cdo/images/about/min_t.png
“Alcohol-in-glass thermometers containing a moveable index are used to manually record minimum temperatures. When the temperature falls, the liquid and index move down the column, but when the temperature rises the index remains in the lowest position while the liquid expands up the tube. The position of the index indicates the lowest temperature reached since the last reset – which is achieved by tilting the thermometer, bulb end upwards.”
These were precision instruments of an earlier day. Maximum and minimum temps are measured to 0.1 degree C. These are not influenced by a passing seagull. The methods for dealing with site exposure, moves or instrument changes are fully documented.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/#tabs=Methods
Site by carefully selected site.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/stations/#/23090
The result speaks for itself.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/images/temperature-trends.png
Robert
Interested in your toing and froing with Geoff.
Bearing in mind your interest with old instruments should I put you both down for this forthcoming meeting?
Where should we meet? Should I book you into the Hostel the Aussies seem to like?
“The weather, measur’d 400 years of meteorological instrument technology
A joint meeting between the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers (WCSIM)
Scientific Instrument Society (SIS)
Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS)
Prior registration is required for this meeting;
MEETING PROGRAMME
The weather, measur’d: 400 years of meteorological instrument technology
Saturday 13 June 2020 ‐ Glazier’s Hall, 9 Montague Close, London SE1 9DD
Time Topic/title Speaker
0945 Registration, tea/coffee
1000 SIS AGM [no fee to attend AGM only]
1030 Welcome and introduction Master, Worshipful Company
of Scientific Instrument Makers
Session one – Temperature measurements (WCSIM Chair)
1040 The first thermometers in England and the Central England Temperature series Stephen Burt FRMetS University of Reading
1105 From mercury to silicon Dr Simon Bell University of Birmingham
1130 The challenges of making temperature measurements in Antarctica
Steve Colwell British Antarctic Survey
1155 Morning session speaker Q&A panel
1210 LUNCH
Session two – Pressure measurements (SIS Chair)
1330 Early barometers: instruments, scales and makers in England to 1851
Dr Gloria Clifton National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory at Greenwich
1355 Luke Howard’s barograph clock and urban climate studies Alison Boyle FRAS Science Museum, London and Stephen Burt FRMetS University of Reading
1420 Early barometer observations and their use in modern climatology
Dr Richard Cornes FRMetS National Oceanography Centre
1445 Using historic pressure observations to reconstruct extreme weather
Dr Philip Brohan Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter
1510 Refreshments
Session three – Wind measurements (RMetS Chair)
1540 Aeolus: a 21st-century spaceborne anemometer Dr Roland Meynart
European Space Agency
1605 From the surface of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere – meteorological observing, how hard can it be? Stuart Goldstraw Met Office, Exeter
1640 Panel – all speakers
1700 Wrap up and meeting close Master, WCSIM
ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
The first thermometers in England and the Central England Temperature series. In 1661, Robert Southwell (1635-1702, later PRS) was on his Grand Tour in Europe. His diary shows he was in Florence on 3 April 1661, and it was almost certainly there, at the Medici court, that he saw one of the examples of exquisite glassblowing we now know as Little Florentine Thermometers. He brought back one or two of these delicate instruments to England, and later that year or in early 1662 showed them to Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke at a Royal Society meeting in London.
Hooke, as Curator and chief experimentalist to the Royal Society, was instantly fascinated, had copies made and began England’s first temperature measurements: Boyle and Hooke together worked on the
thermal properties of gases, publishing Boyle’s Law PV=k in 1662.”
Tonyb
Tony, what were the refreshments? It sometimes requires more robust teases to acquire a crowd.
“Are” the refreshment, just to clarify.
jungle trunks
“A joint meeting between the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers, the Royal Meteorological Society and the Scientific Instrument Society will be held on Saturday 13 June 2020 at Glaziers Hall in London. The meeting will cover the history and development of meteorological instruments, from the 17th to the 21st centuries, covering thermometers, barometers and wind measurements, and their applications.
The meeting programme is given overleaf, and the booking form below. Full programme details, session abstracts and speaker biographies are available on the RMetS events page for this meeting. The RMetS delegate fee for this one-day meeting is £34 per head. The delegate fee includes morning and afternoon refreshments and a buffet lunch.”
Isn’t it great that these sorts of organisations still exist?
To answer your question Tea AND biscuits (not just Tea) A BUFFET lunch (Not just a sandwich) and afternoon refreshments, which at the very least will surely be a classic High tea with cucumber sandwiches, cakes a Victoria Sponge and a cream tea. Sounds good.
I could ,make a lbock booking as the full programme does sound very interesting. I belong to the History section of the Royal Mets Society.
tonyb
Sounds wonderful; a full buffet may gather a few flyovers!
I actually love that kind of stuff, well not just buffets, but the evolutionary history of measuring instruments; If I wasn’t booked June 13, it could be a cake and eat it too kind of thing.
tonyb,
Thank you for the kind invitation, which I have to decline with thanks.
A while ago I would have been capable to say “yes”. Now, long stiff legs rule out air travel and I have no longer have hosts with fireglass racing yachts.
As for your mention of “Bearing in mind your interest with old instruments,” I am really not that interested in Robert. He has failed to shake off his indoctrination or infatuation with green anti-science, as you can see by the calibre of his answers to my simple science here.
Enjoy your coming summer. We are approaching a cold Autumn, with February temperatures in Victoria like these, the figures being deg C colder than the long term Feb average for these sites, often back to the 1950s.
Melbourne airport -1.8
Essendon -0.9
Laverton -1.6
Moorabbin -1.8
Bendigo -0.7
Albury -0.3
Lakes Entrance -1.5
East Sale -1.4
Geoff S
Hi Tony,
I have a much greater interest in modern instrumentation. But I continue to be impressed by the diligence and sophistication with which people adapted simple technology to answer profound scientific puzzles. Thousands of years of celestial mechanics, 1000 years of Nile River data, 400 years of sunspot numbers, hundreds of years of temperature and rainfall data.
These days there are satellites measuring a plethora of variables, 1000’s of drones in the oceans, moored arrays of automatic samplers, pluviographs, resistance temperature sensors, neutron soil moisture probes… feeding into near real time data networks and emerging Earth system models.
https://www.climateurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/picture-1-esm.png
I’m trained and experienced in engineering hydrology and in biogeochemical cycling. Lots of hydrodynamic modelling, lots of data collection and management. The BoM ACORN-SAT temp series is diligently compiled and as good as it is going to get. It is still a just a part of the much broader picture that is the fruit of actual scientific enquiry. Contrast this with pernickety quibbles that seem profoundly unscientific.
Brother, I too believe in Ice Ages.
Lucky we haven’t seen any of those in recent decades.
Robert:
“Whatever way you look at it – the world has warmed in recent decades”.
I agree with that.
What I disagree with is the cause of warming.
The warming is caused by the orbital forcing.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
Of course. The planet is spinning faster. 🤨
“The planet is spinning faster. ”
Faster, or is it slower? It was my understanding that a day on Earth was 22 hours, roughly 400 million years ago. What source can be relied upon as the most trustworthy? The Earths rotation is said to have gradually slowed since post bombardment period, a consequence of a number of factors (including frictional drag from the moon), since 4 billion years ago. Relative to said conclusions, I can’t extrapolate anything from this relative to climate; I’m simply reiterating what’s been described by some in science who study distant geologic/orbital phenomena. You don’t concur?
I was being sarcastic about Christos’ spin equals warmth.
RIE,
Your graph with red lines is the same data in different format that I used above Feb 27 at 8.19 hrs. I used the data to show that the adjustments cooled the past, despite others like Most claiming that does not happen
You use the same data to show that all is well.
One, or both, of us is showing cognitive dissonance and I’m not so sure about you?
I see it as me using science and you using advertising. Geoff S
There are red and blue lines. Adjusted and unadjusted quite obviously. I see it as professionals being diligent and documenting extensively versus an amatuer with an axe to grind and an inability to acknowledge consilient evidence.
Robert I. Ellison
“Whatever way you look at it – the world has warmed in recent decades.“
True but .
Sort of thing Nick Stokes would say.
I think the guys are merely arguing that the warming trend has been adjusted to be much more alarming.
Give them a break.
Sure, some of them are trying by extension to say there is no global warming, all concocted and manufactured.
If we believe that extra CO2 in the atmosphere equates with a warmer atmosphere then if all else is equal it has to be warmer.
And we do believe that.
Sensible people.
Natural variability means proof of the evidence of the warming is moot however.
Being diligent and documenting is no answer to the problems of adjustment being used and veracity of the system being used to determine local and world temperature variations.
BOM is guilty of maladjustment.
Repeated serial offenders.
You work with the data you have and extrapolate.
But all extrapolation comes with 3 caveats at least.
1. This is adjusted not real data.
2. Explain that none of it is now actual site data amalgamation but represents a grid of hypothetical temperatures, not a real, past world temperature anomaly record.
3. The thermometers were shaken at least once daily.
I think you are right.
Thank you angech !!!
Angech
Phil jones on examining the CET for 1700 to 1740 admitted that temperature variability was far greater than he had realised. During that period we went from a rapidly warming trend out of the LIA to the winter of 1740-one of the harshest in our long history.
Phil jones -together with his mentor Hubert Lamb- wrote many books on the climate and examined many records. There is simply no question that our climate experiences a vast range of natural variability. It is mentioned in record after record.
Our local Abbey records how during the 1300’s the climate cooled so substantially that open cloisters previously used by the monks for study had to be roofed over due to cold and rain and windows were also made smaller.
tonyb
Tonyb
Thank you for that comment on Phil Jones and the great natural variability possible. Jim Hunt and I were discussing one of the others apart from temp but it has stalled for the moment.
JCH should be happy with the February temp.
Tickled to death, but not as bullish on the final GMST of 2020 as some.
Nick Stokes is another blogger I don’t read. I’d suggest reading some Earth system science instead. But hand waving about BOM adjustments doesn’t rise to any reasonable scientific standard.
The result that truly speaks for itself is the comparison of BoM’s official compilation of mean yearly Australian temperatures against vetted small-town data there. Such a study made several years ago showed that, along with BEST’s index for Oz, B0M compiled without any serious discrimination
against UHI. The discrepancies of BoM’s official anomaly values start out negative in the early decades of the 20th century and turn persistently positive in recent decades. This artificial warming trend is 0.67 C/century higher, which explains ~73% of the variance of the discrepancies.
Robert,
When I said “The warming is caused by the orbital forcing” I meant the orbital forcing from Reversed Milankovitch cycle point of view.
Robert,
I never said any planet’s spinning faster causes Earth’s Global warming.
But… the faster spinning planets are warmer everything else equals.
Even you cannot deny it anymore.
Of course Earth is on average warmer than Moon because Earth rotates 29,531 times faster, and because Earth is covered with water.
Now, please take notice of the following, you will enjoy it:
Mars and Moon satellite measured mean temperatures comparison: 210 K and 220 K
If Mars and Moon had the same exactly albedo, their satellites’ measured temperatures would have been exactly the same.
Mars and Moon have two major differences which equalize each other:
Moon is at R = 1 AU distance from the sun and the solar flux on the top is So = 1.362 W/m² ( it is called the Solar constant).
Mars is at 1,524 AU distance from the sun and the solar flux on the top is
2,32 times weaker than that on the Moon.
Mars rotates 28,783 times faster than Moon does.
So Mars is irradiated 2,32 times weaker, but Mars rotates 28,783 times faster.
And… for the same albedo, Mars and Moon have the same satellite measured mean temperatures.
The rotation difference’s fourth root is
(28,783)¹∕ ⁴ = 2,3162
And the irradiating /rotating comparison
2,32 /(28,783)¹∕ ⁴ = 2,32 /2,3162 = 1,001625
It is only 0,1625% difference
When rounded the difference is 0,16 %
It is obvious now, the Mars’ 28,783 times faster rotation equalizes the Moon’s 2,32 times higher solar irradiation.
Thus we are coming here again to the same conclusion:
The Faster a Planet Rotates, the Higher is the Planet’s Average Temperature.
Robert, why we slipped again to already explained theme of “The Faster a Planet Rotates, the Higher is the Planet’s Average Temperature”?
Of course it is important, but it is already explained how the planets warm in the real world, and how they do not in the world of models.
The theme we are discussing now is the incapability of thermometers in the standardized Stevenson Screens to monitor the climate warming temperatures variability.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
You keep returning to it. And thermometers – as I said – and I won’t say it again – measure the sensible heat of kinetic molecular energy. Meteorologists do it in a repeatable and comparable way.
There are easy ways to check how troublesome it is to use the daily Tmax and Tmin temperatures to attempt simulations of past weather and climate.
The Australian BOM provides half-hourly temperature readings for some of its weather stations. One can average these 48 observations each day, then compare that average to the conventional Tmean, which is a half of Tmax+Tmin. One can cross-check from the BOM Climate Data Online, where Tmax and Tmin are recorded, for conversion to Tmean via another route.
I did this exercise for 28 & 29 Feb and 1 March 2020, for northern location Darwin, central Alice Springs, southern Melbourne. Here is a table of the results.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/averages.jpg
The question arises as to which of these estimates is best selected to represent a daily T average. These are all taken from the same apparatus, AFAIK, but one gets quite different outcomes by variations to methods. The errors involved are a significant size when Australia’s official claimed estimate of 0.9 deg C over the Century from 1910.
For interest, here is a temperature profile for those 3 days at Melbourne. Notice how the “total heat” is rather different on these days, though the Tmax and Tmin are pressed to represent this “area under the curve”.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/profile.jpg
Thank you Geoff Sherrington.
Congratulation, it is brilliant, it is exactly what was needed to be done.
Thank you again.
Thank you again, Geoff Sherrington. That is a very interesting look at how temperature records can mislead no matter how carefully, and accurately, they are delivered.
As an example, for the higher NH latitudes, the maxima and minima are affected by the length of daylight hours as much as anything else. Only at the equinoxes will the simple mean of max plus min divided by two be reasonably representative. At all other times surely the lengths of day and night have a role in determining true temperature averages at any given latitude.
.
We simply return to the reason why we started to keep weather records at all. They were not started because someone believed one day we would become agitated by feelings that we were agents of our own destruction unless those feelings simply boiled down to being unable to predict predictable coming weather events and thus be less good food producers.
Typo, replace 39.3 with 29.3 in the right column of the table above.
Apologiesm Geoff S
And yet we can clearly see that Tmax is higher on some days than others.
Why the obsession with Tmax, RIE especially in historic records? Is it to fit an agenda of some kind?
Historic records were taken using min-max thermometers. By the way, modern electronic thermometers typically record higher Tmax than min-max thermometers because they record short-duration spikes.
Instrument changes are a primary cause of inhomogeneous data. But there is a more fundamental problem with surface temp related to soil moisture.
“H = CpT + L q
where Cp is the specific heat of air at constant pressure,T is the air temperature, L is the latent heat of vaporization, and q is the specific humidity [Haltiner and Williams, 1980] .The quantity, H, is called moist static energy and can be expressed in units of Joules kg^-1.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2004EO210004
I have noted the helpful advice from tonyb regarding the UK Met Office archive material. I repeat my earlier assertion that quantities of material were removed from the online access archives during the transition to their new site design. I have also attempted to communicate the problem with them at the time of the access being removed but with no success.
It seems I am not alone. On a recent visit to Watts Up With That? I see (in an article about BOM’s ACORN transitions) that others have had / are having similar issues with the UK’s Met Office.
This is what is so frustrating about the situation that has arisen because climate science has seemingly become entrenched in open warfare instead of a balanced scientific approach to solving the problems we believe we may have..
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It is the “magic” of the planet’s spin.
When it is understood, it becomes science.
The closest to the sun planet Mercury has
15,47 times stronger solar irradiation intensity than the planet Mars has.
However on the Mercury’s dark side
Tmin.mercury = 100 K,
when on the Mars’ dark side
Tmin.mars = 130 K.
These are observations, these are the by satellites planets’ temperatures measurements.
And they cannot be explained otherwise but by the planet Mars’
59,5 times faster than planet Mercury’s spin.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
The planet Earth’s and the planet Mars’ faster rotation is that what creates the necessary interaction for the incident on the planets surface solar energy much more efficient absorption.
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
I can remember the days when a rotisserie was an essential kitchen feature for good roast joints or chickens and speculation among chefs that the faster movers were the better cooking options.
Perhaps climate science really does need to pay more attention to the solar contribution to our planet and to explore and to expand upon the Milankovitch cycles.
Thank you, UK-Weather Lass-In Earnest !!!
http://www.cristos-vournas.com
In the middle of the last century Harold Hurst was working on nearly a 1000 years of Nile River data. Andrey Kolmogorov was working on turbulence. Independently they discovered Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics. The propensity for the Earth system to shift between and persist in regimes. So while temperature increased at a modest rate with multiple changes in trajectory – cloud feedback is involved – in the instrumental record – what we can depend on for the future in a dynamically sensitive system is regime change.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/cowtan-trend.png
as Dorothea Mackellar’s 1908 poem ‘My Country’ says: Australia is a sunburnt country of droughts and flooding rains https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm
“The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!
The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze …
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Now we are getting widespread heavy rain across the eastern half of the continent.
http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDYPME03/2020030412/PME24_aus.png
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/watl/rainfall/pme.jsp?ref=ftr
Indian Ocean Dipole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Dipole
The cause would seem to be the recent massive size low intensity cyclone between Qld and NT has left a swathe of water in the air which due to the vagaries of climate has decided to drift down over the continent.
We had a similar , much bigger event in 1991?? Which led to 11 inches of rain in 8 hours in the Goulburn Valley Victoria with widespread flooding.
That was due to a large Western Australia cyclone the drifted massive amounts of atmospheric water (rain) across central Australia eastwards
Yep, that’s Australia.
I am far from an amateur. I have studied and modelled Australian rainfall for 40 years. The most fundamental behaviour is flood and drought dominated regimes discovered in geomorphological transitions between high energy braided streams to low energy meandering forms in eastern Australia following the Great Pacific Climate Shift in 1976/77. Let me Google that for you.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=great+pacific+climate+shift+of+1976%2F1977
The latest Pacific Ocean climate shift in 1998/2001 is linked to increased flow in the north (Di Lorenzo et al, 2008) and the south (Roemmich et al, 2007, Qiu, Bo et al 2006)Pacific Ocean gyres. Roemmich et al (2007) suggest that mid-latitude gyres in all of the oceans are influenced by decadal variability in the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM respectively) as wind driven currents in baroclinic oceans (Sverdrup, 1947).
The polar modes drive gyres in both the south and north Pacific. Spinning up the South Pacific Gyre causes enhanced upwelling in the region of the Humboldt Current feeding into stronger trade winds causing the western warm pool and increased warm water flow into the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian throughflow. Thus the coupled modes of Australian rainfall variability.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/south_pacific_gyre-1-1.png
The temporal patterns of north and south Pacific Ocean states suggest a common stochastic trigger. And the Hurst-Kolmogorov regime dynamic shows a complex dynamical system response
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/lam-2013-geopotential-at-polaes.png
But there are other feedbacks that modulate polar surface pressure. Atmospheric temperature, ozone destruction, Asian brown haze… Einstein trumps William of Occam.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
A recent report by the Australian CSIRO found no link between the recent bushfires and climate change.
“A recent report by the Australian CSIRO found no link between the recent bushfires and climate change.”
Do you have a reference, Peter?
‘Senator Canavan had to wait nearly a minute in Senate estimates on Wednesday afternoon when he asked CSIRO officials if they still backed the lack of a link between fires and climate change, when they failed to include the same evidence in a more recent explainer document.
‘After several long seconds of silence, the CSIRO said it still backed the previous findings.
‘The Nationals senator told Sky News on Thursday that scientists and officials are feeling pressured to follow the “orthodoxy” on climate action.’
The Australian
It’s not possible to attribute weather to climate change – although fires are more frequent in drier and hotter conditions.
https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/Environment/Extreme-Events/Bushfire/preparing-for-climate-change/2019-20-bushfires-explainer
Judith, Rutherglen is in Victoria, close to the New South Wales border.
PS: Thank you for all you do.
Thanks a lot Judith
The post and most of the comments are any old hodge podge of quibbles by amateurs and cherry pickers. Intended to demonstrate what? That the world isn’t warming? Or if it is that it is all solar cycles? Or more eccentrically still – the planetary rotisserie theory?
Oceans and atmosphere have obviously warmed in recent decades. No credible scientist denies it – even Judith Curry who in hosting post after amateurish skeptic post might be seen as endorsing such rubbish.
http://images.remss.com/figures/climate/RSS_Model_TS_compare_globev4.png
All of it in SW according to the satellite record – and most the result of low level marine stratocumulus feedback over the eastern Pacific Ocean.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/loeb-post-hiatus.png
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62
Which varies over decades to millennia.
e.g. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2014GL062447
In ways that are missing in state of the art models.
e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6
But revealed in 20CR reanalysis for punks who want to cluelessly wave away any sophisticated analysis with simplistic memes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VbgzCahx8o
All of it opens a can of Hurst-Kolmogorov worms for skeptics who are less about planetary dynamics than internecine cultural warfare.
.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Natural sources of it made the planet warm enough for life as we know it to evolve.
What happened to common sense? Whole rivers have been dammed with added evaporation from artificial lakes and water used for irrigation and other uses where it evaporates. There are more than 57,000 large dams worldwide.
Water tables are declining worldwide due to pumped irrigation. Irrigated cropland is now more than four times the area of France.
Irrigation has been slowly increasing for centuries with a sudden increase in the rate of increase around 1950. Measured average global water vapor has been increasing 1.47% per decade which accounts for all the global warming attributable to humanity. https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com
I forgot the irrigation theory of global warming.
There is some 25 mm of water in the atmosphere.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/water-vapor-and-cloud-1-e1570482763721.png
What changes that is atmospheric temperature – by abou 7% per degree C. Consistent with measurements.
http://images.remss.com/figures/climate/vapor_global60.png
If there is some large change in water stores – it shows up in ocean mass.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/ocean_mass.png
Rob E.
You, and many others, erroneously say “What changes that is atmospheric temperature – by abou 7% per degree C. Consistent with measurements.” It is a fundamental misconception that WV always depends on air temperature. That only occurs at saturation, i.e. 100% relative humidity. The rest of the time, the % change in WV varies with the % change in vapor pressure which depends only on the liquid water temperature. (Click my name and see Section 4.)
It’s the WV in the air that causes the warming and it has been increasing 1.47% per decade on average since it has been accurately measured worldwide (Jan 1988). Other changes in water stores are not relevant except if low altitude clouds increase there would be some cooling.
Common sense says that WV has been increasing faster than possible from just planet warming.
Warmer air holds more water at any relative humidity. According to the RSS graph it increased at 1.14%/decade. It is a feedback.
Common sense is not that common and not much use in a system as complex and dynamic as Earth’s climate.
Rob E,
If you had said warmer air CAN hold more water it would be true. But to say “Warmer air holds more water” is not true, is misleading and you should know better.
The vapor anomaly chart you show for the period thru 2012 probably uses yearly average and a slightly higher reference TPW level. That same data source graphed using monthly data through Oct 2019 and a reference TPW level of 28.9 mm is shown as Figure 5 at https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com . That produces the 1.47% per decade. I have continued monitoring the NASA/RSS site with the slope through Jan 2020 increasing to 1.49%.
To not realize that all that WV added by human activity would increase the WV above natural sources is at best egregiously stubborn. I even compare the measured increase with that calculated from the HadCRUT4 temperatures in Figure 7 at the link.
Talking about ‘ocean mass’ in this context is not relevant.
Eventually the WV will stop increasing and when it does, the average global temperature will stop increasing but the CO2 will continue to increase because of developing nations burning more coal to generate electricity. Meanwhile, the rising WV will mitigate if not downright prevent the disastrous cooling portended by the quiet sun.
It’s all good if we (US, UK & EU) can avoid committing prosperity suicide with this misguided war on burning fossil fuels.
As I wrote above, close study of the historic raw Australian temperature better allows a national warming of 0.4 degrees C for the century from 1910 than the 0.9 C promoted by The Establishment.
I have given a few examples why the early record, at least before about 1980 is probably fit for some of its purposes but is not really fit for the purpose of making policy decisions based on the disputable higher warming figure whose magnitude is largely due to biased adjustments some of which lack objective reason.
Nobody here has come within a bull’s roar of refuting any of my conclusions, because they are so simple and logically derived from original observations that they cannot be refuted.
Again, I thank Alan Longhurst for his essay which raises much material that compliments mine and that of my friends.
It is way past time for straight science about climate research. Drop you erroneous preconceptions, use the Scientific Method, drop emotion and consensus thinking, respect proper error analysis and its consequences and help put hard science back into education.
I was in Australia during this bush fire, you will easily find a cloudy and smoky sky. The smoke smell was everywhere. It was verified disastrous. We have to think about global warming otherwise it will be a serious issue for the environment and disturbs ecology.
To get the clean Air, I have to installed an Air purifier at my home.
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