March 21, 2023 By jennifer
That’s all the news, another climate change report from the IPCC – United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Of course, it tells us that the end is near unless we do something to prevent the temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, none of the contributors have any possibility There is no proven ability to accurately forecast weather several days in advance, nor is much known about the quality of the temperature data fed into simulations that suggest the Earth is on fire. However, they claim to be able to forecast temperatures many years in advance and repeat 1.5 C as a tipping point.
The fact is that the annual maximum temperature across Australia has mostly fallen, and is more than 1.5 C, at least between 1910 and 1960, then increased, and more than 1.5 C, since 1960.
There are very few locations across Australia where temperatures were recorded at one location and using standard equipment (including a Stevenson display with a mercury thermometer) long before 1908. Darwin in the Territory. North and Richmond in Queensland are special locations because they have long histories and relatively reliable temperature records. Making a single adjustment to the temperature record in Darwin to accommodate for post office-to-airport travel (after the post office was bombed during World War II), it is clear from the graph that both temperature series show cooling and then warming over the last century and more than 1.5 C over a period of less than a decade.
This is the case all over the Earth: that temperature tends to cycle on the decimal scale and is more than 1.5 C.
Back in 2014, John Abbot went through the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s database of New South Wales temperature heterogeneity. He selected continuous temperature series from before 1900 to 1960 and after 1960 to 2013.
He chose 1960 as the split point, because the maximum annual temperature from Australia tends to drop around 1960 and then warm up after that year, and because if we divide it around 1960 it’s easy find more stations. (Coonabarabaran, Miller Street in Hay, Moruya Heads are about the only three. I can’t remember why he didn’t include Sydney Observatory Hill.)
It is clear from this table that over sixty years to 1960 cooling is more than 1.5 C … indicated by a negative sign. At Deniliquin, the cooling temperature is more than 4.5 degrees Celsius per century.
Since 1960, warming in most locations has exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius per century in 2013. On average, the maximum temperature cooling rate has been minus 1.95 to 1.95. 1960 and the average warming rate of 2.48 after 1960. These are peak values, and they give some idea of the absurdity of worrying about an average temperature rise of 1.5 C. since pre-Industrial times.
That thing journalist at ABCand scientists at IPCC, continuing to talk about 1.5 C shows they know nothing about our climate history.
Only the adjusted temperatures, and also the minimum temperatures from cities due to the associated urban heat island effect, show continued warming.
The extent of the remodeling was detailed in a presentation I gave to the Sydney Institute in 2014, which included a table of locations in NSW compiled by John Abbot. The notes from that presentation are still relevant, you can Download and read them here.
Meanwhile, since around 2012, the reliability of heterogeneous temperature data from Australia became even more questionable as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology switched to a different probe design that could record reliably up to 0.4 C warmer in the same weather than a mercury thermometer. My recent eight-part series, Hyping Daily maximum temperaturedetails the problem of non-equivalence between automatic weather station probes and old-fashioned mercury thermometers.
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The image featured at the top of this blog post is a scatterplot of the difference between daily maximum temperatures from a probe in Mildura versus a mercury thermometer in the same Stevenson display over the period from July 2012 to January 2015. All available parallel data were plotted, minus a few exceptions. This is the range of parallel data available for second generation probes for the whole of mainland Australia, unless our Administrative Appeals Hearing is successful. Fingers crossed.
Mediation has not ended; I have nothing to report other than what I wrote in part 4 of Hyping Daily maximum temperature.
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