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Science Forum Index » Environment Forum » This Week - Laverton Aero and East Sale, Victoria, Australia
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| Author |
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| David Naugler |
 Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 11:13 am |
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Guest
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From:
http://www.vision.net.au/~daly/stationx.htm
Station(s) of the Week
(13 December 2003)
Each week, the temperature history of a weather station(s) somewhere
in the world will be presented. Most will be from rural sites or small
towns, not the big cities to reduce the impact of errors from urban
heat islands. Here is `Global Mean Temperature' for the 20th
century, based on an averaging of mostly city-based surface stations.
Note the post-1970s warming, a warming not evident in the satellite
record of global temperature (as shown on the main page).
See if the `Station of the Week' has a record like the global one
claimed here. Both this global average and the `station of the week'
originate from the same data source, the Goddard Institute for Space
Studies
All stations previously shown here are also available at the Stations
Page
This Week - Laverton Aero and East Sale, Victoria, Australia
Earlier this week, the Australian Greenhouse Office (A.G.O. - a
government agency which openly promotes global warming) released a
report timed to coincide with the second week of the COP-9 climate
conference in Milan. It might as well have been written by GreenPeace
as it contained nothing but a litany of gloom and doom about
Australia's future climate prospects. More droughts, more floods,
more bushfires, more of everything nasty and nothing good.
They state on Page 1 - "It (the AGO report) is largely based on, and
consistent with, the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change published in 2001". That means they buy into
all the absurdities of that IPCC report such as the infamous `Hockey
Stick', and that the AGO has nothing new to tell us but to recycle the
same message from 2001. But they put an Australian spin on it for
local consumption. For Australia they claim that - "Based on the SRES
scenarios used by the IPCC, and regional changes in climate simulated
by nine climate models, average temperatures in Australia are
projected to increase by 0.4 to 2.0°C by 2030, and 1.0 to 6.0°C by
2070, relative to 1990."
To support their claims, they state - "Australian average temperatures
have risen by 0.7°C over the last century, and the warming trend
appears to have emerged from the background of natural climate
variability in the second half of the 20th century." This of course
is a testable claim as it only requires an examination of rural
station records to see if it is supportable or not (Urban records are
patently unsuitable due to heat island effects creating artificial
temperature trends in big cities like Melbourne and even smaller ones
like Canberra). The warming predicted for Australia matches almost
exactly the global warming predicted by the IPCC, and even the
reference to 1990 just happens to also match the 1990 reference year
cited in the almost-defunct Kyoto Protocol.
Presented this week are two stations in Victoria, Australia, the most
southerly state on the Australian mainland and cited by the AGO as
being the most greenhouse-sensitive region for future climate change.
The stations are Laverton Aero (37.9S 144.7E, about 15 miles southwest
of Melbourne) and East Sale (38.1S 147.1E, about 112 miles east of
Melbourne).
See:
http://www.vision.net.au/~daly/stationx.htm
for graph.
There are clearly two or three separate trends indicated in the above
records, so that citing a single trend is both misleading and
statistically suspect. There is clearly nothing significant going on
at either station, a slight warming up to 1981, followed by a slight
cooling. In particular, the period after 1990 when the AGO report
warns of rapidly rising temperatures, we see a slight cooling at both
stations. At this rate their predicted warming of `0.4 to 2.0°C by
2030 relative to 1990' is way off track.
`Extreme Events'
On extreme events like droughts, floods and bushfires, they are
nothing new, contrary to what the AGO and the IPCC would have the
public believe. The worst drought since European settlement in
Australia occurred around 100 years ago, the so-called Federation
Drought, which was more extreme and longer-lasting than either of the
two recent droughts of 1982-83 and 2002-03 (both induced by El Niño).
That was long before `global warming'.
As for bushfires, there is also nothing unprecedented about recent
fires, dramatic though they were. Memories can easily forget the
massive fires of `Ash Wednesday' in 1983 when 72 people were killed in
Melbourne and Adelaide, or the Hobart Tasmania fires of 1967 when 62
people were killed. The greatest fire of all, `Black Friday' 13th of
January 1939, saw a firestorm sweep across Victoria. Millions of
hectares were burned and 71 people killed.
On Black Friday itself, the Melbourne temperature reached 45.6°C which
remains the highest temperature ever recorded in Melbourne. By
comparison, Melbourne scored 44.1°C on one day in the summer of
2002-03 which is the hottest temperature since Black Friday.
Melbourne is a much bigger city now and so breaking a record would be
both expected and probably inevitable due to the heat island effect,
but 13th January 1939 remains the record. There were also very
serious fires in 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914, 1919, 1926 and 1932. So,
there is nothing new about bushfires in Australia, either in number or
intensity. It is unprincipled scaremongering by the AGO to claim
otherwise.
If many of their claims about the past and present are seen to be
unsupportable and false, their predictions about future trends,
virtually copied in toto from the IPCC, are even more suspect, and
based on computer models.
Using the above graphs for Laverton and East Sale as a guide, it means
that in the next 27 years, both graphs will need to reach the ceiling
of the graph (16°C) to fulfil the upper AGO prediction of a 2°C
warming by 2030. Before it does so, they have to regain the
temperature lost between 1990 and the present.
Laverton and East Sale are 120 miles apart but have similar trends, so
they represent a regional picture of temperature in Victoria. To
check out to what extent other Australian stations show overall
warming, or warming since 1990, the following stations are also
available on this website -
More Australian Stations ....
(see: http://www.vision.net.au/~daly/stationx.htm for links)
Laverton, Victoria, Australia. An airfield 15 miles southwest of
Melbourne. Annual & seasonal data to 2003.
Adelaide, South Australia. An urban station which unusually for a city
shows a cooling. Data to 1999
Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. The Alice is in the
centre of Australia. Data to 2000
Brisbane, Queensland. Unusually for a city, this station shows a
cooling. Data to 2001
Canberra & Wagga Airports, Australia. Two records on one graph, one
very urban, one very rural. Data to 1999
Charleville & Longreach, Queensland, Australia. Both inland stations.
Data to 2001
Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Lies on the coast about halfway
between Sydney and Brisbane. Map. Data to 2000
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Data to 1999
Geraldton & Giles, Western Australia. Map. Data to 1999
Kalgoorlie, Esperance, and Albany, Western Australia. Map. Data to
2002.
Launceston & Hobart Airports, Tasmania, Australia. Map. Data to 2002
Mount Isa (QLD) and Tennant Creek (NT), northern Australia. See the
chart itself then see how CRU misrepresents
this region as warming rapidly when the reality is quite
different. Data to 2002
Mildura and Adelaide Airports, Australia. Comparison of trends. Data
to 2001
Northern Australia - Darwin (post 1941), Halls Creek and Gove Airport,
the last two are rural. Data to 2000
Western Australia stations. Kalgoorlie, Albany, Esperance, Giles &
Geraldton. Map. Data to 2000 |
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