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 … Who knew? With intrepid dedication the Australian BoM has uncovered our hottest ever day, buried under erroneous calculations, hidden from view in High Quality expert data sets that were World Class til they weren’t. Strangely the BOM hasn’t issued a press release, even though their supercomputer-marketing team put out a Hottest Ever January media release within hours of January ending. It appears the BOM hasn’t even issued a press release to tell the world they’ve finished the third complete reanalysis of Australian temperature history. Luckily for the BOM, which may have run out of bytes or letters of the alphabet, volunteers like Chris Gillham of the unofficial BoM audit team noticed that the BoM ACORN dataset has become ACORN2. So we’d like to tell the world. Once again, the genius at the BOM is able to retrospectively compensate for all the flawed sites and thermometers that kept reading too high. Incredibly, no one noticed for a hundred years. As we launch ACORN2 let’s remember how proud the BOM were of ACORN1. This is from them back in 2017: Bureau of Meteorology statement on temperature observations01/08/2017 The Bureau of Meteorology holds the integrity of our weather observations and climate data to the highest possible standards. The Bureau rejects allegations aired in some media outlets that it has sought to tamper with temperature data. So the highest possible standards just got higher. Luckily they have arrived in time to find extra warming trends before the next Australian election. An example of the haywire homogenisation that’s rewritten Australia’s temperature history is that Carnarvon can now claim to have had Australia’s hottest ever day, with ACORN 2 listing the town at 51.0C on 23 January, 1953. The bureau names Oodnadatta Airport at 50.7C on 2 January 1960 as Australia’s hottest ever day. In the ACORN 1 dataset, 23 January 1953 at Carnarvon was 48.5C, and in RAW it was 47.7C. ACORN 1 lists Albany at 51.2C on 8 February 1933 but ACORN 2 cools this day to 49.5C (RAW 44.8C). So the original Carnarvon record just got 3.3C hotter. The Albany record which got 7 degrees warmer in the last round has dropped back 2.7C. Lordy, look at the size of those centigrade wrestling matches! The original ACORN may have been a bit rushed as it arrived just in the nick of time to save the BOM HQ dataset from being audited by the Australian National Audit Office. (Something Cory Bernardi requested with our help). The old HQ stood for High Quality. So much for that. Cooling the past once again?Thermometers in 1910 -1940 were reading far too high despite them being in Stevenson Screens at some of our best sites:
 …. What bad luck. All this time the raw data was conspiring to hide Australia’s true cooler history. It was even more true of Minima:  …. It’s a big news day when a town is even forecast to maybe possibly beat the old Oodnadatta record, so I expect (not) that the media will go crazy about this new discovery, or they would if the hottest ever day was not 60 years ago. There’s a lot more we will say about ACORN2. Questions we are all waiting to find out — does it still have nearly a thousand days where the minima are higher than the maxima? Are they still creating monthly square wave patterns in the data as temperatures whip-saw up and down with adjustments going a degree either way on each side of New Years Eve? Just how much has this cooled the past and warmed the trend and where are these changes most apparent? Will the BOM call these adjustments “neutral” like the last time. How do they compensate for the Urban Heat Island effect, for the introduction of electronic super sensitive thermometers and all the site moves? The Australian people pay a million dollars a day for this inept and biased operation.So far the only thing new about this version is that the BoM don’t seem so keen to tell the world about yet another revision of history. For the record, when this new version was “launched” a year ago, I went through the full history of scandals and revisions in one post (just in case you want to be reminded how many times the BoM has shifted the goal posts). Thanks to all the dedicated BOM Audit team who don’t get paid, thanks to Jen Marohasy, Senator Cory Bernardi, Graham Lloyd and The Australian. All of whom have played an important role in keeping the pressure on. __________________________________________ THE BOM LIST grows — Scandal after scandal
Australians are the Renewable crash Test DummiesAs I said for free and two months before the ANU, with a 50% annual growth in renewables, Australia is ramping up unreliable power faster than anywhere. Now comes a paper: Australia: the renewable energy superstar showing that, per capita, Australia is installing unreliable generators in a blitzkrieg pace, more than twice as fast as Germany is, and 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China. No other dummies are even in the race. The largest coal exporter in the world is working harder than anyone to destroy its largest export earner — which would be noble if only there was more to it than being a magical spell to ward off storms. This is a legendary paper and very helpful. Save the link, copy the reference, send it to your MP, your friends, your newspaper! Why not head to the launch at ANU at 5:30pm, 14th Feb? Never again can anyone get away with national flagellation for “not doing enough”. Henceforth Green and Labor M.P.’s will stop calling us a national joke, a pariah, and a disgrace. (Though, actually, all those things are true, for the opposite reason. China is laughing at us, and we are a disgrace to our children for blowing up national assets, squandering resources and teaching them witchcraft.)  Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables Australia is installing renewables so fast it’s even faster than the second top country which is also, Australia. Apparently the net cost of adding renewables is zero according to the experts at the ANU. In a consistent world this one document would also immediately end all subsidies. No more RET, SRES, LRET, low interest loans, tax breaks, forced market rules or golden interconnectors. Except, of course, they’re totally wrong on the cost. Australians have the most expensive electricity in the world for a reason. Somehow Chinese hackers or a renewables marketing team must have snuck into the ANU to write most of the report. Of the six summary conclusions, the first two are obvious and the last four are fantasy. They are only “straight-forward” or “sustainable” if you have $10 trillion dollars to spare and you can’t think of anything better to do with it. The full gloss PR story: Australia: the renewable energy superstarSummary:
The net cost is zero?The net cost is only zero if you ignore the glorious subsidies, the extra transmission lines, the rising FCAS bill, the blackouts, the emergency demand management, the damage from surging voltages, the wasted capital expenditure, the squads of flying diesels, synchronous condensors, and the burden that unreliable energy dumps on the whole grid. In the US windpower makes gas power $30/MWh more expensive. Blakers et al might think this is a part of the gas bill but obviously it’s a hidden renewable cost. We can argue the toss with cherry-plucked analysis of wholesale price bidding games, but the end result is a retail price and on that, history is devastating. Coal gave us 30 years of falling prices, and renewables wiped all those gains out. Renewable energy saves on fuel, but wastes infrastructure, land, labor and resources. How can that be cheap? Like an infection, unreliable power damages the efficiency and economics of every other generator. And even though solar energy is semi-reliable, it still wrecks havoc on the grid: see the Duck curve, the 1000MW generator that goes AWOL and the warnings. For most of the year solar energy is the extra energy that arrives when we know we don’t need it. Plus the rise of subsidized unreliables pushes out the unsubsidized sector leaving the market ripe for bid squeezes that cost nearly a billion dollars a day. One of the world’s fastest sustainable rates of emissions reduction?What’s sustainable? Not the price, our industries, or our 50Hz supply. Not our lifestyle. We can have sustainable rates of carbon reduction but we can’t have a sustainable civilization at the same time. The world can readily follow the Australian path? Sure if they happen to be a first-world nation with vast empty space that’s 15 degrees from the equator, in the roaring 40s, and with $100 billion to throw away. Sure.
h/t Marc Morano, ClimateDepot REFERENCESBlakers, A., Stocks, M., and Lu, B. (2019) Australia: the renewable energy superstar, APO Analysis and Policy Observatory, ANU, [PDF] February 12th, 2019 | Tags: ANU, Electricity Cost, Electricity Grids, JoNova's Favourites, RET (Renewable Energy Target) | Category: Academia, Cost, Global Warming, Renewable |  Print This Post | | Welcome to the DroneAge, where people act like robots and share dumb ideas at light speed!Episode #601: Climate change makes you lonely and fat.Feeling friendless, floppy and like a loser? It’s not your fault. Blame a coal plant. Blame Exxon. Blame anyone but yourself. It’s your bad luck to be born into the most bountiful, benevolent era in human history. Damn! Lonely, unfit and hooked on air-conditioning – is this the summer of the future?Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald, uses new unorthodox indicators of “climate change”. Wait for it… test cricket attendance? It’s a smorgasbord of nonsense: In Perth, cricket fans avoided an historic Test fixture amid predictions of 38-degree days. Sun melted a coastal highway filled with holidaymakers in northern NSW. Victoria’s coal generators shut down. Tasmania burned. And rotting fish corpses lining the Darling River at Menindee forced anglers to seriously rethink their plans. Are we kidding? Thirty-eight degrees is just a summer’s day in Perth. It’s something that happens 19 years out of 20. As for coal generators shutting down: we’ve spent 20 years trying to drive them out of business to stop climate change, and now, if they don’t work, that proves climate change is real? The reasoning is so circular it could give people whiplash. Let’s not forget coal plants run at 550 degrees plus (unless they run at 1000C). They don’t shut down when it gets two degrees hotter outside, they are some of the last generators running. They outlast even the nuclear plants. (Not that we have any of those). And Lordy, a modern university professor was trapped in his airconditioned car in Adelaide and discovered sunlight goes “through glass”: It was not what the Griffith University professor had planned. But as a monster heatwave baked a crust onto southern Australia, “it was not possible to be outside at all”, he says. “I couldn’t do anything, I was basically just in the car all the time. Even then I got fried because the sunshine was so hot, it went through the glass,” Stantic recalls. Sure. Hot sunshine goes through glass. Cold sunshine, of course, bounces right off. The nonsense never ends. So he cut his holiday short. Once, long ago, my parents drove 4,000km right across Australia in January, including 700km of dirt road over the Nullabor in an un-air-conditioned EJ Holden. They couldn’t put the windows down or the car would fill up with dust. At times the car was over 50C inside. Somehow they survived, and even had fun. In the 1800’s people did it on horseback (if they were lucky). If they weren’t lucky, they walked from Perth to Kalgoorlie with wheelbarrows. No fans, no fridges, no phones. What a bunch of fat unfit sissies we are. As for dead fish — plenty of those in 1932.Dead fish, dead birds, and even a dead baby. The mercury hit 120F in Collarenebri. (That’s 50C, again, just another one among our long list of 50C temps). You know it must be climate change when things are almost as hot and deadly 87 years later.  Mass fish and bird deaths in 1932 prove climate change was something that happened all the time. A world too hot for humans, my footAt Observatory Hill in Sydney, it hasn’t even reached 40 degrees once this summer, despite building brick walls and giant freeways next to the thermometer to help it stay warm. They’ve switched to electronic one-second-record thermometers too which you’d think could electronically pluck a 40C out of gusts of car exhaust coming off the freeway. But it was hot hundreds of kilometers away: The record-smashing temperatures of recent weeks have made it very clear: climate change has arrived. Depictions of a world almost too hot for humans are no longer an abstraction. Summer has changed, and so must we. Hasham writes like a Hollywood marketing groupie. Where are the hard questions? The counter-points? Any semblance of critique? Today people “on low incomes” we’re told, are lying on the floor because they can’t afford air conditioning. “They would literally lie on the floor in the coolest part of the house and not move for hours,” [Dr Louise] Crabtree says. They are trapped in their homes “because they don’t have transport options that are affordable and cool.” It’s like a Soviet Gulag I tell you! We’ve spent 30 years telling people to live in high density apartments and catch buses so they can stop heat waves. But now they are imprisoned at home in heatwaves that keep coming, and what they really need is a car, cheap petrol and a garage at home to park it. “We heard from people who, on a hot day, can’t get out of the house because they don’t have transport options that are affordable and cool.” Blast-furnace ambient temperatures also turn people off physical exercise. “If it’s just too hot and a walk to the bus stop is too far and the bus stop has no shade, people will stop walking. It’s very much impacting how much people are walking or bicycling,” Crabtree says. Is the real problem the heat waves that Australia has always had, or is it that people can’t afford fuel and energy since the government decided we should try to change the weather instead? h/t David B in Cooyal February 11th, 2019 | Tags: Australian temperatures, Evidence, JoNova's Favourites, Logic & Reason | Category: Biology, FakeNews, Fauna, Global Warming, Logic & Reason, Media-matters | Print This Post | | … Sometimes we have laws, and sometimes it’s the wrong time for themA judgement today in a minor NSW court banned a coal mine in the hope of making storms and floods nicer for our great grandchildren. Curiously, it was not the much hated thermal coal mine, it was a coking coal mine – the stuff we use in making steel. It takes 600 kilograms of coal to make one ton of steel and Australian coking coal is considered some of the world’s best. It follows that either the world uses a bit less steel, or it buys the coal from somewhere else. Does the judge have something against steel? Let’s melt down wind turbines and solar panels instead. Most likely the world will buy the coal from somewhere else. It will likely be less pure and more polluting with few environmental controls or worker’s rights, but hey-de-ho, Judge Preston is not there to worry about environmental global concerns. It’s not like he’s a judge in the NSW Land and Environment Court. Oh… Effectively, an Australian court decided to increase global pollution by blocking a clean coal mine*. As usual, there is no scientific or legal consistency; No principle apart from impressing people at dinner parties? The court decision may put $100b of coal projects at risk:Coal is our number one export earner: [Perry Williams, The Australian] An unprecedented court ruling that links Australia’s coalmines to global climate change may place a $100 billion pipeline of fossil fuel developments in peril. But who needs money? (Or steel…) Bear in mind the decision may be appealed. (More money for lawyers). Tick, tock, time to be legal?Strangely the judge concludes that moving 0.03% of global coal production from Australia this year to China next year will make the world a better place for the NSW taxpayers who fund his salary. The developer of the mine, Gloucester Resources — controlled by German mining billionaire Hans Mende — aimed to produce 2.5 million tonnes a year of coal from the open-cut mine 3km south of Gloucester. Total global coal production is 7 billion tons or more. India has built 52 new coal mines in the last five years. Keep reading → February 9th, 2019 | Tags: Coal, NSW (New South Wales) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Warwick Hughes (h/t Dave Brewer) points out that on Dec 20th the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted that the Townsville region had only a 1 in 3 chance of exceeding the average rainfall in January.  Australian Bureau of Meteorology, prediction, Jan 2019 rainfall. … How that turned out one month later:  Australian Bureau of Meteorology, January rainfall, 2019. Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean:  …. Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. The issue is not that the BoM gets it wrong — it’s that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts? Ten days out they were still hopelessly wrongAs Warwick Hughes notes they also predicted on Jan 17th that February in Townsville would only have a 45% chance of exceeding the average rainfall. The downpour started on Jan 27th. Today, after one whole week in February, the area has already had over four times the normal rainfall for the whole month, but the BoM didn’t see that rain coming ten days in advance. The fancy-pants detailed graphics are entirely misleading — like advertising that sells an ability the experts simply don’t have. We don’t want genius from our BoM, we just want honesty. Keep reading → February 7th, 2019 | Tags: Australian rainfall, BOM | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Another triumph of modelingIn 2014, Townsville City Council launched a detailed flood mapping service. The maps will allow people to search individual properties to find out the risk of it being inundated during a one-in-100-year flood event. Five years later and they’re publishing inundation maps. Sadly, new suburbs were built with the wrong expectations. Townsville flood maps reviewed as more homes go underJared Owens and Charlie Peel The Australian Townsville City Council’s spokeswoman said last night the model, which was based on expert modelling of different scenarios, was overwhelmed by an “unprecedented” monsoonal trough … Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said Townsville’s flood maps relied on “exhaustive modelling of every possible scenario”, looking at variables such as rainfall and artificial structures. “We’re not God. We don’t have supreme knowledge. We only have the best science, the best knowledge we can have,” he said. “We now know with the (dam) gates fully open … what will flood and what won’t, so there will be a new set of flood maps produced out of this event.” If we had better climate models, perhaps we might have been able to empty the dam before the downpour instead of during it. (Though I’ve yet to see any data on dam levels yet, so perhaps not. Wait and see.). The Local Government Guru must be flummoxed. He (Hallam) even protests they used the “Monte Carlo” risk analysis “as recommended in 2012 by experts.” What could possibly go wrong? How about basing a $1.5Trillion dollar global industry, agriculture, energy generation and national wealth on models one hundred times more complex which also use a “Monte Carlo” analysis.” Another ugly lesson:Beware, people who followed the expert advice have no legal recourse to get compensation if they’ve just “discovered” it was built on a floodplain instead. In the global warming parallel universe there won’t be compensation: no climate modeler could even afford to pay back 0.1% of the damage created by those expert predictions. Here’s a house constructed without expert models A Queenslander house. Image NJM2010 Inhabitants from the slide-rule-era built a kind of house on stilts that suited both droughts and flooding rains. It was so common, it was known as a “Queenslander”. After the Brisbane floods the ABC even featured an article lamenting the lost art of the old architecture: “Have we forgotten to build for the wet“? For those from foreign lands, Brisbane is also in Queensland, but is 1,300km south of Townsville, outside the tropics, yet still prone to droughts and floods too. Best wishes to those suffering at the hands of monsoons and or models.
——————————————— UPDATE: The Ross River Dam was 65% full before the downpour. This is not the same situation as the Wivenhoe Dam disaster near Brisbane. h/t Jonesy (I note Townsville is currently under Level 2 water restrictions. 🙂 Don’t use your sprinklers on the wrong day!) Martin Clark: The State Govt forces councils to plan for the UN IPCC RCP 8.5 (worst case “global warming” scenario). This has been an exceptional event, but it is NOT unprecedented. There is a swale at the rear of my property. I have a marker placed at the level where the 1998 flood reached. The flood water has gone way past this marker four times in the last 6 days. The flood mapping may be partly based on expert engineering analysis, but the provisions are augmented by the lunatic projections of the UN IPCC’s RCP 8.5. This is called up in the State Planning Policy, so it MUST be incorporated in local planning provisions. This has resulted in some ridiculous requirements. I objected to RCP 8.5 being included in the SPP. Much to my surprise, it was removed, but was then put back in by the current regime. It is a distraction that can’t happen, but diverts attention from events that can happen. The ’98 flood was the result of a spent cyclone sitting over the city for about 24 hours. This has been a monsoon trough that has stayed almost stationary for 6 days. “Australian Rainfall and Runoff” does not adequately cover events that don’t move. Up until quite recently, “monsoonal” weather was regarded as something that only applied to India and SE Asia. As far as we know, monsoon troughs don’t go round for a second go like cyclones sometimes do. We hope. The only solution is to design for this type of phenomenon and where cost-effective, refit existing development to be recoverable. The money we waste on ruinable energy needs to be spent on real problems. “100 year” events? More like “100 week” events. February 7th, 2019 | Tags: Floods, Queensland (QLD) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … After epic flooding in Townsville, witchdoctors are blaming climate change. Queensland’s recent extreme weather – bushfires, heatwaves, coral bleaching, drought, Cyclone Penny, Townsville’s floods – showed Queensland is clearly experiencing climate change, Professor Ian Lowe said. Thus spake the Druid of Runes waving a bunch of multifactor complex processes that have been happening forever, can’t be predicted and only have scary trends if you draw short graphs with no error bars. Verily we see doom, doth payth my grant, or whatever it is that keeps Prof Ian Lowe going. He is allegedly in the Queensland Climate Advisory Council (QCAC) — an organization so successful its only existence on the internet appears to be a sidebar on page 15 of a government PDF. But whoever they are, they’re experts, trust us, that the media doesn’t need to ask for an alternate opinion. Wouldn’t you know it though, floods seem to happen quite a lot in TownsvilleThis is not to say that the current floods are not serious but just that Townsville is a floody kind of place. It’d be climate change if things stopped flooding in Townsville. In the last ten days Townsville has had 600mm of rain (2 ft). Mt Stuart about 800mm. That’s a lot of rain, but it’s been done before. In 1998 Townsville airport recorded half a meter of rain in 24 hours. It sounds recent but back then CO2 levels were 360ppm. Other parts of the city reached up to 1.3m of rain during the week. But Far North Queensland (FNQ) has a history of insane bouts of rain. Few places on Earth do rain like FNQ. The legendary Bellenden Ker Top is 250km north — the wettest place in Australia. Once in 1979, it got nearly 4 meters of rain in just eight days. Fully 1.5 metres of water fell out of the sky in one day. So who has a rain gauge five feet tall? One year it recorded 12m of rain. The whole area should be surrounded by pool safety fences to comply with council bylaws. In 1946, The upper Ross River got 200mm of rain in just 2 hours. Call that a rain bomb? They would now, but back then CO2 was only 310ppm, and people just called it a downpour. This was Townsville in 1946 when CO2 was 310ppm. |
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