The media has recently been reporting apparently unprecedented heat in Central Australia in the context of human-caused climate change. But is the current heat wave, with extended periods of days above 40^oC at Alice Springs really unprecedented? To answer this question it is necessary to examine the data.

There are two sites at Alice Springs for which readily accessible temperature data are available. The first is the Alice Springs Post Office commencing in 1878 and ceasing in 1953; the other is the Alice Springs airport commencing in 1941 and currently the official observing site for Alice Springs. The sites are about 10 km apart; the difference in January monthly mean maximum temperatures between the sites during the period of common observations (1943-53) was 0.2^oC with the airport being the warmer of the two.

For the airport site the January monthly mean maximum temperature for all years of record (1942-2012) is 36.2^oC. The monthly mean January maximum temperature for all years (1879-1953) at the Post Office is 0.3^oC cooler at 35.9^oC. The impression is that, when combined, we have a relatively homogeneous maximum temperature record for Alice Springs that spans 134 years.

The airport site is the basis for conclusions being drawn that warming has occurred during the second half of the 20th century. The 95th percentile for the monthly mean maximum temperature data is 39.0^oC; five years exceeded this value making the hottest Januarys 1994, 1999, 2004, 2006 and 2008, all in recent decades. The warmest year (2006 with a monthly mean of 40.0^oC) started with 12 consecutive days above 40^oC and with a subsequent 4 days above 40^oC. To date, 2013 is up with these previously hot months having experienced the first 14 days with temperatures reaching 40^oC or above. On these data alone one might conclude central Australia has been getting hotter.

The Post Office data, however, show a quite different picture. The 95th percentile value is 39.3^oC, or 0.3^oC warmer than for the airport. The hottest years from the Post Office record were 1879, 1881, 1887 and 1881, all in the late 19th century. The hottest year in the Post Office record was 1887 and had 11 days above 40^oC, a brief respite then another 10 days above 40^oC. Taken in isolation the Post Office record would suggest a very warm late 19th century with a cooling trend since.

When we plot the monthly mean data for both sites an extended pattern of cooling followed by warming emerges. Temperatures are now only recovering to the values of the late 19th century.

It is unfortunate that the Australian government has not considered it sufficiently important to digitise and make publicly accessible all of the meteorological records from earlier years. The Bureau of Meteorology website has a range of important statistics about changing climate but most are generated from data subsequent to 1910 and based on a digitised selection of those recorded. As a consequence, statements based on the post-1910 data that suggest an ongoing warming trend are incomplete and likely misleading.

There is fragmentary accessible data (such as the above for Alice Springs) and much anecdotal evidence to suggest that during the late 19th century over central Australia, western New South Wales and South West Queensland the temperatures were as warm as or warmer than for recent decades. Without ready access to the existing earlier meteorological data a faulty picture of a warming Australian climate is portrayed in official statements. However, based on the Alice Springs data, a coming period of cooling cannot be discounted.

William Kininmonth
Kew, Vic 3101
Australia

• At most, global average sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 2-3 inches per century. It is probably not rising at all.
• Sea level is measured both by tide gauges and, since 1992, by satellite altimetry. One of the keepers of the satellite record told Professor Mörner that the record had been interfered with to show sea level rising, because the raw data from the satellites showed no increase in global sea level at all.
• The raw data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON sea-level satellites, which operated from 1993-2000, shows a slight uptrend in sea level. However, after exclusion of the distorting effects of the Great El Niño Southern Oscillation of 1997/1998, a naturally-occurring event, the sea-level trend is zero.
• The GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites are able to measure ocean mass, from which sea-level change can be directly calculated. The GRACE data show that sea level fell slightly from 2002-2007.
• These two distinct satellite systems, using very different measurement methods, produced raw data reaching identical conclusions: sea level is barely rising, if at all.
• Sea level is not rising at all in the Maldives, the Laccadives, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, French Guyana, Venice, Cuxhaven, Korsør, Saint Paul Island, Qatar, etc.
• In the Maldives, a group of Australian environmental scientists uprooted a 50-year-old tree by the shoreline, aiming to conceal the fact that its location indicated that sea level had not been rising. This is a further indication of political tampering with scientific evidence about sea level.
• Modelling is not a suitable method of determining global sea-level changes, since a proper evaluation depends upon detailed research in multiple locations with widely-differing characteristics. The true facts are to be found in nature itself.
• Since sea level is not rising, the chief ground of concern at the potential effects of anthropogenic “global warming” – that millions of shore-dwellers the world over may be displaced as the oceans expand – is baseless.
• We are facing a very grave, unethical “sea-level-gate”.

by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner

Read More here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/sea_level_not_rising.pdf [PDF, 3.7MB]

Minister Combet’s announcement that they are going to compensate working families for the cost of carbon tax should confirm one thing; a carbon tax is going to cost working families.

The fundamental issue here is that a carbon tax is not going to change the temperature of the globe or change the climate in any shape or form. It is merely a gesture. A gesture that means that those who are already finding it extremely difficult to get by are going to have that difficulty exacerbated by a pointless tax with a deceitful inference that it will the change global climatic conditions.

What is the point of taking money off people, spinning it around a bureaucracy and giving people back a bit of their own money and expecting be thanked for it? Why don’t you just let people keep their own money and go away?

In the meantime you put up the price of the fundamental mechanism of commerce, power, so what is now our competitive advantage? Obviously we don’t want lower wages so ultimately there will be fewer jobs.

Is Australia going to be reduced to a country that digs up red rocks and black rocks, iron and coal and sends them over to where they don’t have a carbon tax so they can produce the things we used to produce?

Doesn’t the government get it? The people don’t want this tax and surely the have some right in being respected on this decision.

Even on the CFMEU website, the majority of the workers don’t want a carbon tax. I’m sure that this is not a National Party stronghold, so my advice to the Labor party is, listen to your own people otherwise it will end up in tears, like the NSW election.

Senator Barnaby Joyce
LNP Senator for Queensland, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate
13^th April 2011

Climate Change, to say the least
makes us humans change some habits,
though the sun still chooses east
there is panic ‘mongst the rabbits.

Nerdy, idiosyncratic
motivation quite unknown,
quark and man made heavy static
new emperors to claim the throne.

Polar bears, so many starving
neither seals or tasty fish,
end up serving pups and carving
offspring as survival dish.

Icebergs melting raising oceans
though the physics are unclear,
grizzlies passing smaller motions
in the forests, so I hear.

Say the experts, it is gazzes
preference for C-O-Two,
emanating out of azzes
and the lowly Subaru.

Burning fossils is the trouble,
though we ought to, don’t you think?
And the atmospheric bubble
makes the solar system blink.

First it’s cooling then it’s warming,
records kept and falsified,
killer bees covertly swarming
turtles drowning in the tide.

Please dear reader, use some logic,
and recall your chemistry,
images so anagogic
for the biased mind to see.

They will plunge civilisation
into poverty and death
those who will commit their nation
to renounce their carbon breath.

All this is quite schizophrenic,
voices heard and faulty reason,
yet to say anthropogenic
is denial of the seasons.

Sun empowers living matter
sun has rhythm and design,
Gore the impotent mad hatter
claims his profit paradigm.

All in all, so many changes,
gone the cold Siberian East,
Santa carefully arranges
straw hats for his wildebeest.

©2009 Herbert Nehrlich

The Somali pirates have nothing on the bunch who turned up in Copenhagen, seeking to plunder the world and divvy up the loot under the guise of ‘saving the planet’. I heard even Mugabe was there, after reducing his nation from rich Rhodesia to poor Zimbabwe, looking for a handout under the latest fable, ‘the Carbon Debt’ supposedly owed to the poor countries by the rich countries.

There is only one carbon debt, and that is the debt every inhabitant of this planet owes to carbon dioxide. Without adequate amounts of this in the atmosphere, plant life suffocates, and we could not grow enough crops to feed the population. To quote Freeman Dyson ‘The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all of the carbon dioxide within a metre of the ground in about five minutes’.

Surely it’s time to confront the immorality of scaring children witless with images of ‘threatened bears’ (polar and koala) and ‘dying’ reefs and then exploiting their fears with cheap political stunts.

Please, no more scares and no more talkfests, whether in Mexico in 2010, or Cairns in 2011 (neither city has reported snow yet). The money would be better spent on improved and reliable water, power and transport systems. Education about how this country became prosperous would also be a good investment into a prosperous future otherwise we can descend from A to Z (Australia to Zimbabwe) faster than in a Mad Max movie.

John McRobert
Indooroopilly
Qld Australia

Michael Kiely

Government Climate Change policies will depopulate the bush and corporatise agriculture.
The city investor gets a tax break to buy up family farms from struggling farmers and plant
forests as carbon sinks. The family farmer is told they will be slugged with a ‘tax’ for their
emissions from stock (methane), fertilisers (nitrous oxide) and fuels (carbon dioxide), and at
the same time, denied the right to trade the carbon they can capture in their soils.

Read the full document [PDF, 11 KB]

Battery Storage-An Infinitesimal Part of Electrical Power

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in Energy Central.

Large-scale storage of electricity is the latest proposed solution to boost the deployment of renewables. Renewable energy advocates, businesses, and state governments plan to use batteries to store electricity to solve the problem of intermittent wind and solar output. But large-scale storage is only an insignificant part of the electrical power industry and doomed to remain so for decades to come.

By Duggan Flanakin

Should Americans follow China in a massive commitment to supposedly eco-friendly battery-electric buses (BEBs)? California has mandated a “carbon-free” bus system by 2040 and will buy only battery or fuel cell-powered buses after 2029. Other states and cities are following suit.

Vehicle decisions are typically based on cost and performance. Cost includes selling price plus maintenance, while performance now includes perceived environmental impacts – which for some is the only issue that matters. But that perception ignores some huge ecological (and human rights) issues. (more…)

The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused the Federal and some state governments of imposing Stealth Taxes on electricity consumers by forcing power retailers to buy expensive power from inefficient and costly renewable energy sources. Read the full press release here. [PDF, 30 KB]

The Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, Mr Viv Forbes, today called for a grass roots revolt by the real workers of Australia against the green militia and their socialite supporters who are leading the country into job cuts, power blackouts and poverty.

Mr Forbes claimed that only three brave and outspoken politicians understand the real threats facing Australia, both from natural climate change (probably cold and dry) and from the stupid policies supposed to stop global warming (it has stopped).

Martin Ferguson is in touch with real people who keep the wheels turning in the mines, factories and transport fleet. He knows that none of these industries could operate without using carbon fuels which all produce harmless carbon dioxide gas. He knows we need efficient reliable power stations, not wind and solar playthings.

Barnaby Joyce represents the farmers, foresters and fishermen who produce the food, fibre and building materials we all need. He also knows that none of these essential items can be produced without producing more harmless CO2 gas.

Steve Fielding stands up for all the Australian families hoping for jobs for themselves and their kids. He knows that every job in Australia depends on our basic industries making the minerals, food, fibres and processed goods the world buys from us.

Public opinion polls show that ordinary Australians are increasingly swinging behind these leaders while Mr Rudd trips the Climate Change Stage, and Malcolm Turnbull agonises over how to make a more comfortable green noose for Australia. The only people who support such nonsense are the huge Climate Change Industry and those trying to buy green votes in the leafy suburbs.

All real work produces carbon dioxide.

The only way we can quickly reduce production of CO2 is by reducing jobs or reducing our consumption of food, fibre and minerals – the Ration-n-Tax Scheme thus offers unemployment and poverty in real industry in return for more taxes to create make-believe green jobs.

Mr Turnbull thinks nine amendments will make the RAT scheme acceptable. Only three amendments are required: “Reject, reject, reject”.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition