Posts tagged…Temperature
Academy of alarm
Thu, Aug 19 2010
What does the Australian Academy of science think their role should be? To inform or to frighten? To elucidate public policy issues from a scientific viewpoint? Or to indulge themselves in scaremongering so unsupported by facts that it borders on irresponsible?
Their latest climate-alarm pamphlet contains appalling rubbish, including claims that the world will warm by up to 7° C in the next…
Read more…Century trends in Victorian temperatures
Mon, Aug 17 2009
There are a dozen or so rural Victorian weather stations, of the 255 listed as reporting maximum temperature data to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, that have records stretching back to years before 1900. I have found them by skimming through the listings on this page at the BOM website. It has a helpful graphic that dynamically displays the record length.
I thought it might be interesting…
Temperatures for June in Victoria
Tue, Jul 14 2009
June 2009 was not as warm as June 2008, but still 0.8° C above the average for 1961-1990, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. There have been ten hotter Junes since 1950.
Temperatures for May in Victoria
Sun, Jun 14 2009
Temperatures in May 2009 were 0.52° C above the historical average.
U.S. and Global Temperatures: a correction
Fri, May 22 2009
Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and a principal author of the Real Climate weblog, has emailed me to point out an error (mine) in my review of Ian Plimer's Heaven + Earth.
I said that I had learned from Ian Plimer that NASA had reversed it's claim that the ten years following 1995 were the hottest ten years of the century when Steven McIntyre showed that the record belonged to 1934.…
How bad is polar ice loss?
Sat, Apr 11 2009
News reports everywhere are picking up the theme of 'alarm' over the extent of ice cover at the poles.
"‘What we’re seeing is very dramatic,’ said Andrew Fleming, remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey. ‘It’s very worrying.’ Scientists believed the effects were linked to the ‘very strong warming’ at the poles, he said. The Antarctic peninsula has warmed by more than 3ºC in the…
A climate rebuttal
Wed, Apr 01 2009
A strong message with good science behind it.
58 years of Victorian temperatures
Mon, Mar 23 2009
A small experiment with the Bureau of Met's record of mean temperature anomalies for Victoria using Hadley Wickham's 'ggplot' library for R. There are 696 observations of monthly means between 1950 and 2008. The Bureau provides 'anomalies' from the monthly 1961-1990 means. How are these anomalies distributed? Are they skewed toward the upper 'tail' of the distribution, pointing to an alarming…
Australia not at ‘most risk’ of warming
Wed, Mar 18 2009
The Financial Times carries a story on the politics of the Australian emissions trading scheme legislation that makes the usual genuflections to alarmism but manages also to be dead wrong in the second paragraph. It quotes John Connor, head of the Climate Institute, which describes itself as "an independent research group in Sydney" (merely fashionable thinkers however):
"‘We are the developed…
Feb 09 Temperature in Victoria
Thu, Mar 12 2009
About 1 degree above the average 1960-1991 February temperature, but only the fourth hottest February this decade (despite the cruel record temperatures of 'Black Saturday'). Well below the records in the mid-1950s, the mid-1960s and the early 1980s.
Little evidence fires due to warming
Tue, Feb 10 2009
The Financial Times reports that Mr Kevin Hennessy, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and a contributing author on the IPCC's reports, claims "Continued increases in greenhouse gases will lead to further warming and drier conditions in southern Australia, so the [fire] risks are likely to slightly worsen"
If Mr Hennessy is relying on the same assessments as he made in the 'Drought…
The last time it reached 115°
Sat, Feb 07 2009
Update: High winds, record temperatures and fire have created a horrible reprise of the 1939 disaster: possibly 40…