13 September 2013

An unusually warm spring

| johnboy
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The Bureau of Meterology has issued a Special Climate Statement on the warm weather we’ve been having:

Canberra had its earliest spring day of 25 ?C or above on 2 September, beating the previous record by 11 days (13 September 2008), and a number of other locations set or equalled records for the earliest day above 35 °C or other significant thresholds (Table 1). A total of 20 maximum and 12 minimum early season temperature records have been broken or equalled for the Australian Climate Observation Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature

Make of that what you will.

Although I did enjoy Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt’s tweet yesterday afternoon to renowned climate sceptic and self described “only scientist in Parliament” Dennis Jensen:

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Woody Mann-Caruso11:06 pm 14 Sep 13

I have completely and carelessly misread Robertson’s comment. I retract my own, and apologise for it unreservedly.

Woody Mann-Caruso said :

It’s just weather, and weather displays variation. And it’s local, not global.

And all of the world’s climate scientists are collectively wrong, and have been since the 60s. Also, gravity is just a theory. It could be God’s invisible angels pulling us downward to stop us getting into Heaven, and you can’t prove it isn’t.

Your first name isn’t ‘Pat’ by any chance, is it?

Robertson’s point is that there is a difference between weather and climate. The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time. Similalry, you can’t make global predictions based on localised changes.

milkman said :

IrishPete said :

wildturkeycanoe said :

Perhaps the alarming swing toward the Liberal party at the election means a there will be an eventual slide into Liberalism until the world stalls into a lethargic desire to not get up in the morning.

1% is an alarming swing? With respect, it doesn’t take much to alarm you. The swing was AGAINST Labor and the Greens. The ultimate beneficiaries of these votes were not the Liberals and Nationals, but people like Patter and Kalmer.

IP

Voters were punishing Labor for their piss poor performance. The Libs didn’t suddenly become massively desirable.

Massively desirable? I naturally get an instant soft-on every time Mr Abbott appears on my TV. Most women I know experience the female equivalent. “Desirable” and ‘Liberal” are two words that just don’t go together.

Woody Mann-Caruso7:22 pm 14 Sep 13

It’s just weather, and weather displays variation. And it’s local, not global.

And all of the world’s climate scientists are collectively wrong, and have been since the 60s. Also, gravity is just a theory. It could be God’s invisible angels pulling us downward to stop us getting into Heaven, and you can’t prove it isn’t.

Your first name isn’t ‘Pat’ by any chance, is it?

That is a wonderful photograph.

(And that’s not an attempt to minimise the threat of climate change. I just like the photo.)

IrishPete said :

wildturkeycanoe said :

Perhaps the alarming swing toward the Liberal party at the election means a there will be an eventual slide into Liberalism until the world stalls into a lethargic desire to not get up in the morning.

1% is an alarming swing? With respect, it doesn’t take much to alarm you. The swing was AGAINST Labor and the Greens. The ultimate beneficiaries of these votes were not the Liberals and Nationals, but people like Patter and Kalmer.

IP

Voters were punishing Labor for their piss poor performance. The Libs didn’t suddenly become massively desirable.

A “Special Climate Statement” about how we’re all gonna fry?

Someone should tell them who won the election. Somewhere on the long list of Things To Do is cleaning out the BOM of alarmist propagandists and refocusing them on the job of recording and forecasting the weather.

wildturkeycanoe1:34 pm 14 Sep 13

IrishPete said :

wildturkeycanoe said :

Perhaps the alarming swing toward the Liberal party at the election means a there will be an eventual slide into Liberalism until the world stalls into a lethargic desire to not get up in the morning.

1% is an alarming swing? With respect, it doesn’t take much to alarm you. The swing was AGAINST Labor and the Greens. The ultimate beneficiaries of these votes were not the Liberals and Nationals, but people like Patter and Kalmer.

IP

Sorry, my sarcasm got lost somewhere in the second half of my longneck. I was drawing a parallel between global warming and politics, deducing that by the same logic used in the global warming debate, we can take the results of this election to mean we will see the Liberal party continue to grow stronger till the destruction of the earth results. Greenies take the last few hundred/thousand years worth of temperature records and make claims that we are causing our own demise, whilst the previous hundreds of thousands of years show this to be a normal peak in our planet’s cycle.
Twas a far fetched attempt, but like I said, it was the beer talking.

The cat did it said :

Dr Jensen has a PhD in Ceramics from Monash Uni. Such expertise is commendable, but a long way from climate science.

His facebook page (thanks for the link davo101) is a collection of unrelated material that seems to be drawn from the Lavoisier Group (Ian Plimer’s crowd), and trots out the standard denialist arguments that have been knocked over time and time again by mainstream climate science.

Jensen apparently has ambition to be appointed as Coalition Science Minister, but I doubt Mr Abbott is such a risk-taker.

Err, if Abbott is not a risk taker, why is he taking risks with our planet?

IP

wildturkeycanoe said :

Perhaps the alarming swing toward the Liberal party at the election means a there will be an eventual slide into Liberalism until the world stalls into a lethargic desire to not get up in the morning.

1% is an alarming swing? With respect, it doesn’t take much to alarm you. The swing was AGAINST Labor and the Greens. The ultimate beneficiaries of these votes were not the Liberals and Nationals, but people like Patter and Kalmer.

IP

The cat did it7:27 pm 13 Sep 13

Dr Jensen has a PhD in Ceramics from Monash Uni. Such expertise is commendable, but a long way from climate science.

His facebook page (thanks for the link davo101) is a collection of unrelated material that seems to be drawn from the Lavoisier Group (Ian Plimer’s crowd), and trots out the standard denialist arguments that have been knocked over time and time again by mainstream climate science.

Jensen apparently has ambition to be appointed as Coalition Science Minister, but I doubt Mr Abbott is such a risk-taker.

wildturkeycanoe7:03 pm 13 Sep 13

Perhaps the alarming swing toward the Liberal party at the election means a there will be an eventual slide into Liberalism until the world stalls into a lethargic desire to not get up in the morning.

IrishPete said :

“only scientist in parliament” like “the only gay in the village”? Most of the time that Little Britain character was wrong too, you could say he was in denial.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/a-degree-more-love-needed-from-pollies/story-e6frgcjx-1226571102398 The Australian seems to make a distinction between engineers and scientists, but it doesn’t say which they consider this Jensen peanut to be.

IP

I read somewhere his PhD in physics involved ceramics somehow.

“only scientist in parliament” like “the only gay in the village”? Most of the time that Little Britain character was wrong too, you could say he was in denial.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/a-degree-more-love-needed-from-pollies/story-e6frgcjx-1226571102398 The Australian seems to make a distinction between engineers and scientists, but it doesn’t say which they consider this Jensen peanut to be.

IP

I did enjoy Dr Jensen’s fact vs fiction as that’s because it is indeed a randomly selected sample of facts and fictions in search of a story. My favourite is this one as it shows the all fast-feedbacks sensitivity of the Earth is 0.75 K/W/m^2 and has been so for at least the last 800 000 years.

Robertson said :

The Bureau of Meteorology gives some excellent visual representations of some of the current trends in climate for Australia:
Rainfall is a good one:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=rain&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970

There’s an interesting graph on a wall in the National Museum, near the diprotodon skeleton. It’s not easy to see, there’s a lot of other clutter in front of it, but it is a record of sediment from Lake Eyre for the past 250,000 years. Lake Eyre drains about a quarter of the continent, so it is a reasonable measure of the “wetness” or “dryness” of Australia.

It shows that the past 17,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, were as “wet” as it ever gets in Australia and there have been other periods like this at irregular intervals in the past. It also shows that it can get a hell of a lot drier for long periods.

It’s just weather, and weather displays variation. And it’s local, not global.

Having said that – we are still not in an El Nino phase, yet we are experiencing the effects of unusually plentiful heat in the system. The last La Nina phase was the warmest La Nina ever, and it was also a warmer La Nina that every El Nino prior to 1998.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Jan-OctGlobalLandOceanTemperatureAnomalies1950to2012.jpg

The Bureau of Meteorology gives some excellent visual representations of some of the current trends in climate for Australia:
Rainfall is a good one:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=rain&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970

Sea surface temperature:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=sst&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970

Cool nights is always a good one – showing the effects of greenhouse gases:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=extremes-time-series&tQ%5Bgraph%5D=TN10&tQ%5Bave_yr%5D=0

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