It’s Proof, Proof I tell you! Australia is getting hotter and the future is… back in 1922

Panic! “The proof Australia is getting hotter”

The headlines are as inane as ever — stating the obvious, proving only that the modern media is mostly bread and circuses. Pretty much everyone agrees the world is slowly trending warmer, but it’s rolled out in the media as if someone somewhere is denying it, and as if mere proof of warming is “proof” it will keep warming. Watch the causal chain explode into climate astrology:

“THERE is no point in denying it: Australia is getting hotter, and it’s not going to stop. And we have the figures to prove it. “

If this proves anything about the future climate its that journalists are getting more gullible. They have figures too?!

Caroline Zielinski, of The Telegraph, dutifully repeats the PR line, that “2014 was the hottest ever on Earth”. She must have missed the press release that also said that NASA were only 38% sure of that. That makes them 62% sure they were wrong – just another global warming factoid, eh?

Zielinski tells us that Boulia had 25 days of 40-plus temperatures – “the longest heatwave ever”. So Ken Stewart promptly checked the BOM records and found it was not. There were 31 days above 40C in 1973.

Zielinski tells us Western Australia had “several days of near-50-degree heat this summer.” Oh Yessity, Yes indeed. At Marble Bar a full century of global warming means it was almost as hot in 2015 as it was in 1905 and 1922. Back to the future we go.

To investigate the story, Zeilinski confirmed the big-government WMO press release by phoning the big-government BOM, as if either of these groups would contradict each other. Dr Karl Braganza at the BOM backed up the WMO, apparently not pointing out the awkward fact of the 62% wrong NASA press release, and not mentioning the data on Boulia either. Instead he went out on a limb with a brave theory that there was no climate change in Australia until 1950.

“Australia has warmed up most notably since the mid-20s century,” says Dr Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology.

“Prior to that, temperatures were reasonably flat — we didn’t have much of a trend.

“There was no clear trend prior to World War II — it’s from 1950 onwards that we’ve had a significant warming trend across Australia.”

There is a decided lack of convincing good temperature proxies for Australia, but proxies from pretty much everywhere else in the world show that the warming trend started two to three hundred years ago, long before man-made CO2 rose. That trend hasn’t changed much. In the last 16 years, the more CO2 we pumped out, the less difference it made.

Yes, it’s warming (a bit). The world has been warming for 300 years. So?

Everywhere we look there are signs the warming started around 1700 – 1800AD. In the Northern Hemisphere, 120 proxies show things started warming 200-300 years ago. Some 6,000 boreholes drilled on all continents (including Australia), show the same thing. Sea levels have been also rising for around 200 years. The water flowing past Indonesia started warming around 300 years ago. (The Makassar and Lombok Straits are the main throughflow from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.)

But maybe Australia didn’t warm or cool? The seas just rose and fell, the oceans changed, and the other continents got warmer and cooler.

Read more on the Indonesian sediments study .

Boreholes can only show the general trends, but the trends are pretty clear. What caused the medieval warm period? The models don’t know. What caused that cool dip around 1700AD? The models don’t know. What caused the recent warming — the models don’t know. They got the last 16 years wrong, and everything else. They’re broken.

Sea levels have been rising for 200 years, though they were generally falling for the 7,000 years before that.

Yes, we skeptics agree, Australia has warmed a little bit since the middle of last century – we aren’t convinced it warmed by as much as the B0M adjusted homogenized datasets claim. Listen to Jennifer Marohasy talk about homogenisation on 2GB.

And remember, this ladies and gentlemen is the evil Murdoch press. The media outlet with secret instructions from Rupert to shamelessly promote deniers. They are pilloried for allowing skeptics a voice, yet prove they can do mindless propaganda with the best of them when they choose to.

Hint to Caroline Zielinski — I’m happy to help you make news.com stories more accurate. The CSIRO State of the Climate Report left out a lot of things. All you have to do is ask.

REFERENCES

Yair Rosenthal1,*, Braddock K. Linsley2, Delia W. Oppo3 (2013) Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years, Science 1 November,Vol. 342 no. 6158 pp. 617-621 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837 [Sciencemag.org ]

Christiansen, B. and Ljungqvist F. C. (2012). The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability. Climate of the Past, 8(2):765–786, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] [NASA copy] [Discussion on CA noted a lack of complete archives and code]

Ljungqvist, F. C., Krusic, P. J., Brattström, G., and Sundqvist, H. S (2012).: Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries, Clim. Past, 8, 227-249, doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] or try this [PDF] [CO2science discussion]

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