How Melbourne’s Climate Has Changed: A reply to Dr David Jones (Part 2)
Posted by jennifer, October 16th, 2008 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
IT is generally believed that there has been a decline in rainfall across Australia and that as a consequence cities like Melbourne must suffer severe water restrictions. Indeed if you live in Melbourne you must get prior written approval to fill a swimming pool, there are strict rules explaining how and when you can water your garden, and it is illegal to wash to your car with a garden hose.
In Melbourne reducing water demand and ensuring the efficient use of water is now government policy and the public is continually reminded of this imperative.
Melbourne’s broadsheet, The Age, recently published an opinion piece entitled ‘Our hot, dry future’ by David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology. The piece reinforced the popular belief that there has been a long term decline in rainfall as a consequence of climate change. Dr Jones wrote:
“We also know that over the past 11 years Melbourne’s rainfall has been about 20% below the long-term average, and that south-east Australia as a whole has now missed out on more than a year’s worth of its normal rainfall over the duration of the event. The run-off into Melbourne’s dams has been 40% below average over this drought period compared with the longer term, while regional areas have fared even worse. And the drought hasn’t ended.”
Total rainfall for the major water-harvesting catchments feeding Melbourne is archived on a weekly basis at the Melbourne water website as well as total dam storage levels back to September and August 1998, respectively. My assistant at the Institute of Public Affairs, Nichole Hoskin, asked the Water Commission if we could have this information in an excel format for ease of manipulation, but a Mark Kartasumitra, explained we would have to make-do with what was at the website. So Nichole extracted the individual weekly values for rainfall and water storage from their archives and entered these values into a spread sheet and then plotted a chart for rainfall, shown below, and also a chart for water storage.
There has been a steady decline in the amount of water in Melbourne’s dams since 1998, but the chart of total catchment rainfall shows no such decline. Indeed rainfall over the last decade appears to have been fairly steady.
When Dr Jones writes that rainfall has been 20% below the long-term average I wonder what time frame he uses by way of comparison? When Dr Jones writes that runoff has been 40% below average it is interesting to again ponder time frames and also what changes in land management in the catchment may have contributed to the reduction. Indeed the available data suggests that dam levels have fallen significantly even though there has been reasonable rain.
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Part 1 of ‘How Melbourne’s Climate Has Changed: A reply to Dr David Jones’ was published on October 14th, 2008, and can be read here.
Well Neville if you’re so incredibly bigoted that you’re unable to read and get the import of it all – well that’s your problem mate. We’re not talking 50 years time – we’re talking now. So if you have no interest into well researched issues which pit observations against theory and models which attempt to reproduce and tease apart the factors – well wallow in blissful ignorance and bias.
I’m not going to spoon feed you Neville – if you’re unmotivated to learn – stay uneducated. We’ve only discussed all this a dozen times already.
Neville – Just think how really big and interlinked the conspiracy must be that supports the evil climate science empire – an insidious organisation of scientists worldwide all writing complex detailed papers which cruise through peer review. A massive conspiracy on a world scale – thousands of scientists – never ever witnessed before. Wow ! How did they do it?
Luke I can see you really believe in AGW , then it must be so easy then to disprove the Aqua satellite data and find the hot spot the’ve been searching for over many years.
That’s your number one problem then you must prove that we can make a difference by reducing our 1% of GHG’s by 60% or whatever which is impossible as anyone with a grain of commonsense well understands.
The cause of the drought is the decrease in global humidity after the Mt pinatubo eruption. It appears to be driven by stratospheric effects that drive the rainfall rate. The greenhouse effect has actually decreased due to the 12% decrease in humidity since the 1960s. The driver of climate is cloud cover, which decreased by about 2% in the last 30 years, creating an increase of 4-6w/m2, This is confirmed by the OLR (outgoing longwave radiation) having a positive colleration with temp, which should be negative if CO2 forcing was the cause.
Of course CO2 cannot cause warming because it is saturated (26m if atmosphere absorbs 50% of the energy in the CO2 bandwidth). any chem student would know you cant absorb more than 100% of the energy in the CO2 band, Climate scientist think you can. Please explain how CO2 can create energy, in violation of the first law of thermodynamics.
when are the AGW folk going to pull their heads out of the sand and look at the clouds and humidity.
Alas Dear Neville – the hot spot has been nuked. http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/10/14/two-denialist-talking-points-quashed/
Meanwhile the desperate would rather do anything than get themselves informed. La la la lah la lah – they’re not listening.
Gee I always wondered why the climate modelling community was ignoring clouds and humidity. Probably explains why so much research effort is going on in those areas doesn’t it. Get real !
OK Luke, that paper when the hype has been decoded means: “We couldn’t find a hotspot but by assuming large error bars on the observations we managed to just make the observed data error bars overlap the large error bars on the models we used”.
Didn’t Gavin Schmidt already do that?
Eyrie
They “assumed” error bars for the observations, rather than calculate them?
Lysenko lives again.
Oh no! Luke’s list reads a bit like Emily’s List:
Just look at some of the names… John Church, Penny Whetton, David (the jack in the box) Karoly and Gavin Schmidt.
And Luke claims to be promoting serious climate science. Bet they all peer review each others work too. members
The topic is an excellent example of misdirection.
The claim is.
Oops, forgot to close my quotes.
The response is a graph of the rainfall for the past eleven years, with no reference to the long term average.
Sid the cherry-pluckin’ cherry plucker speaks. But today the tactic has changed.
Indeed they don’t all review each other’s work. Strangely you’ve missed many of the important names further highlighting you’re what a hick you really are. Anyway it’s not like you’ll be reading them. You wouldn’t know where to start.
Anyway another great example of sceptics at work.
Nothing to say – why not make shit up? Nexy even has a lesson in it.
http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2008/03/lesson-2.html
LOL
Monckton to McCain – good read.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html
Did they pull that out of McCains waste paper bin? What are the odds McCain actually read that? About 1/100000.
This is the inflow for Melbourn’s dams, not the rainfall, but it’s interesting.
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/images/annual_lrg.gif
Luke you are effectively dismissing the evidence from your BIBLE ( latest AR4 report from Ipcc) I take it?
Afterall they claim the hotspot must be there 10 klms above the tropics as proof of AGW, so if they’ve got this wrong ( your BIBLE don’t forget ) then why should we trust the rest of their modeling at all?
If you doubt that literally hundreds of radiosonde measurements cannot actually find and record the hotspot but it can be calculated by some bizarre theory you must be off in cloud cuckoo land.
No such thing as a BIBLE in science. They admit themelves they are not %100 certain of their claims, try to find that in a BIBLE.
However, the Tropical Troposphere Hotspot is alive and kicking.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121433727/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Still no response to the basic failure of the article to address the specific claim,
Instead what we have is a graph with no reference to the long term average rainfall.
SJT; from your inflow link 1967 was a very interesting year. For me it was all about bushfires in SE Australia. I got quite a run around the MMBW water system after that
Note; there is not much below that rather bad year.
Read the rebuttal paper Neville – of course not …. sigh …
SJT:”Early versions of satellite and radiosonde datasets suggested that the tropical surface had warmed more than the troposphere, while climate models consistently showed tropospheric amplification of surface warming in response to human-caused increases in well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs). We revisit such comparisons here using new observational estimates of surface and tropospheric temperature changes.”
So they “adjusted” the observations then?
These people are getting desperate.
So, I’m thinking that Luke must be hired by Jennifer to provide devil’s advocate posts. Why would he bother with this bigoted, uneducated, biased-toward-industry group of idiots when there are a wealth of sites out there which would embrace his views, and help maintain his sanity. I’m worried about that sanity thing.
Do you have a problem with Radiosonde and Satellite data needing adjustments? Sounds like part of the normal data gathering process to me. No data gathering process is perfect, some are just less problematic than others.
Well Eyrie – write the rebuttal paper. But why bother – it’s easier just to do a Nexus6 Variant #2 “make shit up”.
Driving round town this morning; when I remarked what a beautiful cloudless sky we had after considering scattered showers were forecast earlier, she soon to leave the day job said “no, there is a cloud right up there” but before I had locked on “oh wait a minute, it’s a vapour trail” and sure, there it was but just a remnant. It’s more spring rain promised for the ACT we can’t expect to benefit anybody this summer and it’s been the same for ages.
One could expect as a direct result of AGW, that we would see more evaporation at sea, more precipitation generally and a secure water future. However, even the vapour trails disappear quickly in this drier than normal morning air. Perhaps someone else can explain where the water went.
Alas the great white hope of Santer et al and the rediscovered temp increase in the tropics has been beaten to the canvas; lucia and McIntyre did a tag team on him; to be expected when his associates include windshear Sherwood and error bar Schmidt.
Gavin: a possibility is that it’s not warm enough to cause evaporation and hence no rain. Maybe AGW is a crock of s*j%#t!
Hmmm…..
Jennifer: “IT is generally believed that there has been a decline in rainfall across Australia and that as a consequence cities like Melbourne must suffer severe water restrictions”
Slightly off topic was the ABC 4 Corners program tonight – “Buying Back the Rver”
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/20081020_water/interviews.htm
imo after watching the whole thing on TV we could run to at least several hundred fresh comments in a new thread on “where the water went”
People – pleased find the time (you’ll need it) to read what I believe is a seminal ‘paper’ addressed to John McCain that is quite brilliant in it’s demolition of the AGW scam:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html
thx bickers, an excellent letter, i hope he sent it to obama as well since it looks increasingly likely that it is he who will be dealing with the “problem”.
Interesting. Still no response to the basic fact that the graph does not address the claim at all. There is no long term average shown on it.
At the end of the day, one of David’s origional statements “This has been our hottest, longest, driest drought, with the lowest run of in southern Victoria’s history”…. cannot be substantiated. Not even by the BoM’s own records, (even with all their “adjusting”).
Now note that David is claiming four records in one here….viz. hottest; longest, driest and lowest run off. Quite a big claim. And is the “on record” period of these claims the same for each? And just how long are these “on record” periods?
But things get worse! Up to now David is only talking about statistics, but then moves quickly into ideology.
“This drought is now far beyond our historical experience….Climate Change (akka “Global Warming”) caused by humans is now acting to make drought more severe and increasingly likley…”
These claims cannot be substantiated by David and his fellow AGW believers.
David then wanders off further into the arctic region with further unsubstantiated claims of unprecented disappearence of sea ice….Then back home again to flippently dismiss the excellent snow cover experienced in our alpine regions this season.
And today the snow is back,…in late October! Flurries down to 700 M in our area. And Sydney having it’s coldest October day in 60 years. Not to mention it’s coldest August since 1947.
And with world temperatures cooling in the past 10 years, the AGW believers have to spin the prayer wheels faster and recite the AGW Mantra louder in an effort to dispel a niggling doubt that it could in fact be just a myth.
Isn’t it interesting the way “Dropkicks for forests” and their published cronies can assume away the essential attributes of sound forest management to prop up their case.
They lament the conversion of high water yield senescent forests to low yielding regrowth forests but in doing so they must falsely assume that no other mitigating action is either possible or economically viable to carry out.
Millions of hectares of regrowth forest have been taken out of a Forestry regime of regular partial harvesting (that restores water yield) and are placed in a Parks regime where no actions are taken that would restore water yield. And they have the unmitigated gall to blame the consequences of their own lack of action on the original action that was being remedied on a regular basis.
In the same way, they have targeted new plantations for their impact on catchment water yields but have refused to accept that the expansion of native forest (like most of the box ironbark), and the post firestick thickenning of native forest, does exactly the same thing.
Indeed, these morons and their incompetent Myer Foundation funders, continue with this breathtakingly stupid assumption that all native forest is senescent old growth when more than 95% of the Box Ironbark country is closely spaced young poles that are in such serious competition with each other that their water yield is minimal.
Ditto for all the Ash Forests post 1939. The presence of a coup[le of old stags is all they need to pretend that this forest is old growth that needs ‘protection’ from all human disturbance.
But foremost of the intellectual failings of these “articulate bimbos” is their incapacity to make proportionate responses. They have more than 3 million hectares of post fire, post harvest and post firestick thickened forest under their own managerial control that is significantly impairing catchment yields. But rather than take a single step to correct the known adverse conditions on their own tenure, they campaign against remedial actions on about 10,000ha of state forest each year.
I was going to say that this is all entirely within their own heads but that is not true. Their cerebral cortexts have nothing to do with it. This is being driven by some yet to be discovered, hyperactive organ that is located somewhere between their genitals and their sphincter.
Interesting. Still no response to the basic fact that the graph does not address the claim at all. There is no long term average shown on it.
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