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Australia's Hottest Summer Beats Previous Record by 'Large Margin' (brisbanetimes.com.au)
As Australia welcomes the first day of autumn with a sigh of relief, the summer statistics have arrived from the Bureau of Meteorology confirming suspicions that the country just sweated through it's hottest-ever summer. From a report: The national mean temperature for summer smashed the 1961-1990 average by a whopping 2.14C, almost a full degree above the previous hottest summer on record (2012-2013), which was 1.28 degrees above the old average. The mean maximum temperature also beat the 2012-2013 mean maximum by a similar margin (2.61 degrees above average compared to 1.64 degrees above). "It was exceptionally warm across most of the country," the weather bureau's summary states, with NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory all recording their hottest-ever summer as severe and lengthy heatwaves spread across much of the country in December and January.
Translation: Help me bury my head in the sand!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have a tried and true Australian strategy for counteracting this. Put a tax on the temperature.
New Zealand just had it's third hottest January on record.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No links, no mention of where temperature recordings were made.
If full links were provided to all the data, would you believe them ?
If no, why ask for links ?
If yes, then why are you doubting the conclusion ?
Whenever you ear a report of a hot or cold spell, I recommend visiting University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer site to look at the temperature anomaly maps. This gives you a far better picture of what's going on globally than local reports do.
For example in this winter's bitter cold spell in North America, you would have seen extremely high temperatures in places like Svalbard Norway. This shows that the cold temperatures in the US midwest weren't the *globe* being colder, they were in fact the consequence of the incursion warm air from the temperate latitudes into the Arctic. Since temperatures mix very slowly on a global scale, the cold Arctic air was displaced southward into central North America. When those cold temperatures "disappeared" a few days later, to be replaced with record warm temperatures, they actually just moved to a different place (e.g. the North Atlantic).
Of course this is still weather, but it's weather compared to a long term climate *baseline* -- 1979-2000. If you make a habit of visiting this data site you'll get used to seeing the globe mostly *orange*, meaning hot compared to the baseline. Eight of the past ten years are among the ten hottest years in the instrumental record. Nine of the last ten were among the hottest when they happened. To see an extensively *blue* (cool) map, you'll have to wait for the next major La Nina event, although in all probability that will still be hotter than baseline most of the time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For chrissake, global warming is about mean temperatures. And when an entire continent sees temperature shifts, no that's not fucking weather.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Record snow falls in the mid west are a result of global warming.
Or how do you think the snow got there? Hu? It is winter!!! But the ocean is still warm, hence it creates clouds, hence they snow down.
Can't really be so hard to grasp simple principles.
100 years ago, the ocean would have been colder: hence less snow.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You were fine up to clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back into space, so more clouds = global cooling. So you see, it's not as simple a line of reasoning as you think it is.
This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Stick with the emphasis on mean temperatures rising. That's pretty well established. Don't try to pass off cold weather events as evidence supporting global warming, because anyone with an iota of common sense will call out your BS. The way I figure it, global warming increases the average energy state of the global weather system, resulting in greater temperature extremes (hotter and colder). But it's impossible to say if any specific hot or cold temperature event is a result of global warming, or just natural weather fluctuations. The mean temperature OTOH is a combination of millions of temperature measurements. That statistically averages out the fluctuations, giving you a reliable measure of what the system is doing over time.
There are links right there in the article to the State of the Climate 2018 report from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The report addresses most of your issues, and has plenty of embedded references that you seem to have missed because they weren't all bundled up in the end-matter.
But you probably didn't have time to look into that without sacrificing first post.
Clouds reflect sunlight back into space [slashdot.org]
That depends on several factors. Clouds also trap IR trying to escape from the Earth during night time. Type of cloud, altitude, and place all matter for the exact balance between the two.
This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Well the problem is that climate change evidence appears in the form of both rising global means and increasing global variance of temperature. The problem with this from a PR perspective is that variance (or standard deviation) is a complex statistical concept. How you do communicate that to the public? You can't so they simply point at extreme weather events as evidence (they are). And since that includes both warm and cold events and there are stupid people on both sides, you get dumb absolutist arguments. You sounds scientifically literate pointing out falsifiablity but your simplistic reduction to a binary situation allows you to both be completely wrong and sound scientifically accurate at the same time. You are wrong because we can measure variance and it is increasing which gives us even more evidence that climate change is happening. But you are right that the public wouldn't understand that more subtle point and would be unable to see the fallacy in the binary reduction you used. Either you understand PR well, or you are the victim of PR...
PS The term variance is abused in other fields like data science to mean even more vague but complex things (like error rate or uncertainty).
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Because New Zealand has records going back hundreds of years, eh?
I'm not sure what your point is. Historical meteorological records for New Zealand go back almost 150 years.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yet in the article they claim Australia's heat is evidence of global warming.
Indeed. Weather is not climate. Weather doesn't affect an entire continent at once for a combined duration of several months at a time.
Especially now that here in the Midwest we are seeing record setting snowfalls and record setting low temperatures.
Now speaking of weather you just managed to compare an entire summer dataset to the polar vortex which was a weather event, one with a very short duration and on the whole the US has had quite a mild winter. *golfclap*.
Now in the meantime if you care to look at historical data you'll see upwards trends in both countries. If you care to go to the detail you'll find the hottest daytime temperature record wasn't actually set during the hottest continental summer either. But I get it, weather and climate are difficult to separate.
If anyone insists that this is indicative of global warming then every record low temperature must be counted as evidence against it.
That is not how trend lines work. Come back when America actually has had the coldest year on record and the previous record was the year before it, and the record before that was also in the past 4 years.
Because New Zealand has records going back hundreds of years, eh?
Do you even know what "on record" means, Anonymous Coward?
... that the first day of Autumn offered no relief. It was 38degC in the Victorian Central Highlands where I live and looks like being not much cooler than that today.
A YouTuber I follow is at the Avalon Airshow, just south of Melbourne. Not only is it pushing 40, it's windy, that hair-dryer hot wind that makes 40-ish temperatures even worse. In the meantime we've just had the coldest February ever here in Vancouver.
...laura