Australia’s climate alarmists are having a terrible month. Green/Left worrywarts such as the Australian Academy of Science are struggling to cope with the Great Barrier Reef enjoying the largest area of coral cover ever recorded.
That’s after the Academy’s doom-crying since 2012, which is as far back as I’ve bothered to track its Reef fulminations.[1] [bold, links added]
And there’s another shock for lovers of windmills and made-in-China solar panels. According to the UAH temperature satellites that have been crisscrossing the continent for 40 years, Australia shows no warming for precisely the past decade.
Suppose you’re teaching ten-year-olds, and you don’t care about your career in the education system. You could announce, “Hey, kids, there’s not been a jot of warming here since Mummy brought you home from the maternity wing.”
The statement, “No Australian warming for the ten years to end-July” risks giving apoplexy to alarmists. And globally, UAH satellite readings to end-of-June show no warming for seven years and 10 months.
The ground-based HadCRUT series likewise shows no warming for 86 months. For Australian climes, whether the pause continues depends on whether we get another El Nino (warming) or La Nina (cooling).
In neither case have CO2 emissions been shown to have much or anything to do with it.
Our local alarmists’ shtick has been that our continental “heating emergency” has spurred bushfires, floods, droughts, and cyclones.
The CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and Tim Flannery’s Climate Council might as well put out a joint press release: “Sorry, damn, we got that all wrong.”
They won’t, of course. What they’ll do is argue that land-based temperature measuring is superior to UAH satellite read-outs, ten years is too short to matter, and any fool can cobble up suitable trendlines on a wiggly graph.
Hence one needs to get into technicalities, which are actually quite interesting.
- The ten-year halt to local warming is not a ‘cherry-pick’. It is calculated by a method taking all months into account. Indeed it’s the method recommended by the godfather of global temperature measuring, Prof Phil Jones of the early HadCRUT global temperature series, also of 2009 Climategate email fame.[2]
- Ten years’ halt is not “too short to matter”. It upsets all those claims that the alleged climate crisis is “even worse than expected.” If it was ten years’ warming, bet your life that the alarmists would be making a song and dance about it. No climate models forecast such a halt, nor did they predict the previous global halt that lasted 18 years and eight months to November 2015.
These long halts suggest why the climate models have predicted twice as much warming as has actually occurred. As the 2013 IPCC report glumly reported, 111 out of 114 of its climate-model runs overshot the actual warming.[3] But they’re still the basis for trillions of investment in renewables and “net zero” wild-goose spending.
- Why are satellite readings better than the Bureau of Meteorology’s ACORN-SAT Series 2.2 land-based measurements?[4] Largely because ACORN derives from just 112 Stevenson screens (temperature-measuring boxes), representing our 7.7m square kilometer continent. There are big gaps in coverage of the important weather-generating Northern Territory. Many of the 112 screens are biased upwards by the urban heat island effect, i.e. the growth of concrete, tarmac, buildings, and population around boxes originally sited amid light breezes on green paddocks.
ACORN’s bad reputation among skeptics also stems from the bureau’s serial revisions and black-box “homogenization” of raw data, virtually all generating steeper warming trends.
In contrast, the UAH satellites continually sweep our entire land mass.[5] The UAH data revisions are purely technical and transparent, such as adjusting for the decay of orbits.
In more detail, the satellites are launched by NASA and managed by NOAA — the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which includes official weather forecasting.
Drs Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) monitor about 15 instruments on the satellites.
They measure the microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the lower troposphere, which means the air from near sea level to about 14 kilometers up. (Land-based measurements are taken just 1.2 meters from the surface).
The satellites’ emission readings are proportional to temperature and the UAH team does the data conversion and adjustments.
Are the UAH-adjusted measurements reliable? Yes, because they provide data consistent with independent data from radiosonde measurements on weather balloons.
Thousands of these balloons are launched every day. The UAH data are also fully independent of land-based data and validated by major US institutions like USCRN, CERES, and ERBS.[6][7]
On the global scale, satellite coverage is, of course, vastly superior to the three main terrestrial global temperature measuring systems HadCRUT, NASA-GISS, and NOAA, which lack coverage of significant areas of the Earth’s surface.
Gaps include the poles, large ocean areas, and much of Siberia and the African continent’s 30 million square kilometers.
This has given license to climate scientists to just “make up” a lot of the data, including record-breaking heat where there happen to be no weather stations.[8]
The Climategate emails also show Phil Jones’s top team conspiring to alter their HadCRUT data to offset inconveniently cool results.[9]
The HadCRUT data, which underpins the entire global climate scare and trillion-dollar net-zero investments, was never independently audited until 2018 when Melbourne researcher Dr. John McLean ran an audit for his successful Ph.D. thesis.
He found messes and anomalies that would not be officially tolerated even in minor company accounts.[10]
The BoM is not Robinson Crusoe in regard to its degraded weatherbox sitings.
The U.S. government has the densest and longest sets of temperature records, but research released last month by Anthony Watts shows that 96 percent of the 1,000-plus US NOAA stations sampled (of more than 10,000) violate NOAA’s own siting guidelines and are biasing warming rates upwards.
The problem is actually worse than in 2009 when a similar survey – endorsed by government US watchdogs Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Government Accounting Office (GAO) – found 89 percent were corrupted by the heat-island and other siting defects.
The warming trend was twice the rate of the trend using only compliant-sited stations.[11] Watts explains,
“By contrast, NOAA operates a state-of-the-art surface temperature network called the U.S. Climate Reference Network. It is free of localized heat biases by design, but the data it produces is never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.”
As for Australian temperatures, our Bureau of Meteorology shows barely a flicker of interest in the inconvenient UAH coverage of Australia. BoM’s warming temperature trend is showing a widening inconsistency with UAH satellite read-outs.
It’s a pity that then-PM Malcolm Turnbull and Environment Minister Greg Hunt scotched the plan by ex-PM Tony Abbott in 2014 to get a proper independent audit done of the BoM ACORN series.[12]
(When Abbott won the Opposition leadership from Turnbull in 2009 by one vote, Hunt voted against him. To get Hunt onside, Abbott then offered him the climate portfolio, and lawyer Hunt agreed — but only on conditions including “That the science of climate change was never challenged”).[13]
In the event, Hunt recruited his own panel which reported in 2017 that ACORN was “well maintained and represents an important source of information on the climate trends affecting Australia.”[14]
Australia nonetheless owes a continuing debt to amateur and more critical auditors of the BoM such as Townsville ex-headmaster Ken Stewart, Perth journalist Chris Gillham, and Port Macquarie retired scientist Dr. Bill Johnston
Townsville’s Ken Stewart has run a study finding a fairly close match in trends in the BoM series and the UAH satellite trends but considers recent BoM warming assertions are due to faults in the BoM maximum daily temperature series.
In another study by Stewart, assisted by Perth’s Gilliam, Stewart notes that BoM previously ran a Mark 1 Acorn-Sat series which was highly praised internationally in 2011 as “an important long-term national asset”.[15]
The BoM barely a year later mysteriously withdrew it and replaced it with an adjusted Mark 2 version, based on the same raw data.
The adjustments — normally used for good technical reasons — increased our warming trend from 0.09degC warming per decade to 0.13degC per decade to 2022.
This came about from lowering adjusted temperatures before 1971 and raising them after, Stewart’s audit shows.
This “increased warming” of up to 0.4degC per century is entirely from dubious adjustments, not changes in measured data.
The BoM/CSIRO systems of temperature adjustments were OK’d by a panel of four supposed “world-leading experts” from countries where the adjustments are also contentious – especially New Zealand with its notorious adjustment bias toward warming.
No wonder the BoM is now at loggerheads with the satellites.
Read rest at Quadrant Online
For those who don’t know, there’s a network of private weather stations scattered around Australia on Weathercloud. We have one here at our place and the data that machine provides can’t be tampered with by me or anyone else.
No warming for the Land Down Under too bad Gore and DiCaprio now please go back to making fake Documenteries like you did before
Imagine if the founding fathers, when creating the American constitution, had foreseen the morass we’re in today. Would they have included accurate statistical record keeping? It certainly should have been an amendment. I say this because we’re in a political war that threatens sovereignty. The Club of Rome, the United Nations / IPCC, the WEF are an unelected power hungry minority. The climate change crew are in for themselves and would rather work in the shadows, underground, unelected and unaccountable. Maurice Strong said as much when asked why he didn’t run for office.
Correct.
c3headlines.com & click on Quotes: alarmist liars & plotters condemned out of their own mouths.
JD.
No warming for 10 years!! Must not have “adjusted” those temperatures properly.
Clearly all the work the “Greens” have done is why the temperatures haven’t increased, right!? Or maybe it’s that CO2 isn’t the temperature control knob after all.