If Climate Change was a real threat, the Bureau of Meteorology might even look at their own historic records.

When Jennifer Marohasy and Chris Gillham did just that, they found that as bad as the current situation is, it’s happened before:

The wettest day in Lismore was in February 1954. The wettest year for Lismore was 1893. There was no increase in the intensity or frequency of extreme wet days at Lismore, or the towns around it.

Now if the BOM looks at this with a supercomputer, they might find an effect from CO2. But if the BOM just used a calendar, like I did, they might find the latest floods started the week after Hunga Tonga volcanic dust rolled across Australia. Maybe that matters?

No one needed a supercomputer to read a rain gauge in 1885, and we have excellent long data. Imagine how handy that might be if the BoM wanted to understand, say, Australian flood cycles? There are 137 years of rainfall records in Lismore from 1885 to now, but the BOM said we set a new record for Lismore based on Lismore airport where records started as long ago as… 2002.

 

The Bureau […]