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.
*****************
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.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What is it about Labor that doesn’t want to know about building dams?
They would rather spend taxpayers capital than chance their own political capital putting in de-sal plants and subsidising house tanks.
Look at Kevin and the Wolfdene dam.
Dams in developing areas are a win/win/win. Cheapest water, good eco-habitat and catchments that can be farmed to a fair extent.
These same catchments otherwise often become a “sea of roofs” and it’s a lose/lose /lose.
Even if the walls are only raised the advantage can be huge, often trebling capacity.
This “it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more” mentality is plain stupid but it seems to dominate the Labor political psyche.
Maybe Dr. Jones could tell us why.
Bob Carr said NSW wouldn’t need the Welcome Reef Dam and transfered the land to those environmental vandals NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Then from Dubai he said NSW will have a water crisis and announced the Desalination Plant
No facts, no figures, no analysis. No wonder it didn’t get published in The Age, and no wonder we will never see anything published scientifically.
Well spanglers that would depend if David is a Labor voter – but given you’re a mind reader you must know the answer. I mean maybe he could be voting for Graeme Bird’s LDP party – do you know?
Anyway mate the voters don’t like them. Go to Traveston and tell them you’d love the dam. Maybe some of Mottsa’s pugilistic property rights mates there might like to give you a dental exam.
But anyway – haven’t we been through this before. Rainfall ain’t runoff.
Hydrological drought can be different to agricultural drought.
Antecedent conditions here are for drier catchments that take some time to wet up. So Nicole needs to get back to research – how about a longer time period to get that very short time period in perspective. And let’s see what a the engineers’ runoff models produce.
David might be totally right. The pattern of runoff from that pattern of rainfall might be exactly what you’d expect.
Which maybe is what you should do before getting the guns out.
Hydrological what?
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/06/27/1182623991774.html
A dam or two around here might help Melbourne’s water problems.
I think David’s playing with the same clockwork models as this lot.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/16/2392508.htm
In #1 we had some discussion re snow cover this season.
An interview this week on ABC radio had a guy presumably from the hydro in NSW chatting about their success in recent cloud seeding around the Alps. It seems about 10% in fact extra snow can be attributed to their efforts this year.
Note too they reckon it will take another 10 years to catch up on normal water storage at this rate.
David,
Does the rainfall graph look about right?
When you see roos grazing, sleeping, copulating, socialising in near 50 degrees C [40 is a walk in the park and I’m talking shade temps] you wonder where these experts get their information.
“David might be totally right. The pattern of runoff from that pattern of rainfall might be exactly what you’d expect.”
What I’d expect is that the patterns of R and R are right where there ain’t any dams.
The Director General of the department running the catchments is guilty of gross negligence in allowing the vegetation in the catchment to thicken to a point where it now substantially reduces runoff. This act of omission has substantially diminished the economic value of the entire water infrastructure from Dam to water meter.
He is not, and has never been paid to act negligently and so, is guilty of misconduct. But all of his fellow conspirators are keen to hide their misconduct behind the myth of climate change.
W’al I’ll be, I do believe Ian Castles has spooked the boy. Never, I say, never have Ah seen such hot air spruiked. Warms my heart, in a global sense.
“allowing the vegetation in the catchment to thicken” – yawn – and the proof being?
David. Is there more data for the Melbourne catchment, that shows rainfall before 1998?
The proof is simple, Boy wonder. The catchment is covered in forest. The forest is alive and growing. There has been no thinning operations in that forest, the clowns think thinning would reduce water quality. And it logically follows that if all the trees are getting bigger then there is more competition amongst them for soil moisture, hence less runoff.
“Is there more data for the Melbourne catchment”
Let’s offer a clue or two, during the 1970’s we had a lot of contact with the MMBW water quality group based at the Mitcham depot. The whole greater Melbourne distribution network and storages were being rapidly upgraded to cope with demonstrated supply shortages during the 1960’s fire seasons. With the introduction of flouridation we were also busy deploying a range of new instrumentation. A fellow contractor was working directly on stream flow telemetry as part of the planning for the Thompson River project.
Old MMBW catchment records if they have survived from about the mid 70’s should show an expansion in data sets to match the present day records however they may be different to those from the official weather stations of the time. Some of that country on the MMBW catchment fringe was considered virtually undeveloped and remote. Let’s say it would be wise to consider several early developments to support our our conclusions regarding rainfall trends.
My choice would include rainfall and stream flow records from the Yan Yean, Silvan and Upper Yarra Reseviors as there is not much to be gained from studing the western side of the city. IMO this lot picks up all the important rainfall segments and the longest records outside the weather station network.
Warwick Hughes noted that Perth water catchments were also subject to increased vegetative growth reducing runoff into the dams.
Jen et al.,
David did not say there had been a decline _since_ 1998. He said that the past 11 years were 20% below the long time mean.
Hence looking for a trend since 1998 makes no sense whatsoever, and frankly, makes this post look foolish.
Jen that graph merely shows that rainfall over the last decade has been extremely low over Melbourne’s catchments. The last decade is far-and-away the driest and hottest on record in central Victoria.
This thread is denying observational fact.
For stream flow data is avaliable here
http://www.ourwater.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/366/The-Next-Stage-of-the-Governments-Water-Plan-2007.pdf
All the high-quality rainfall and temperature data is avaliable here – http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/datasets/datasets.shtml
All the high-quality gridded data is avaliable here – http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/rain/index.jsp
I look forward to Bill’s scientific paper.
David,
The above graph was put together by adding up the weekly values provided at the Melbourne Water website for catchments identified as “rainfall for the major harvesting catchments.” And as I said, information at that site is only provided for the last 10 years.
Which are the equivalent sites at the links you have provided (i.e. which are the sites that represent rainfall in the major harvesting catchments) and how should the values be combined to get an idea of historical rainfall for the Melbourne catchment?
The warm phase PDO from 1977 to 1998 was dominated by el ninos, so what has this got to do with AGW?
Unless of course these fools believe that a 5,000 year trend of declining rainfall in southern Australia really was caused by humans.
There is some rainfall data on the Melbourne Water website. Annual rainfall from 1977-2005 at the Thomson dam (Melbourne’s main catchment) is at
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water/
water_supply_catchments/thomson_reservoir.asp
It shows that rainfall in this decade is greater than it was prior to 1985. 2006 and 2007 are absent but I recall that 2007 figures were above average, around 1100mm. Even so, inflows in 2007 were low, probably due to increasing vegetation (the real greenhouse effect?), exacerbated by ‘environmental’ releases of water downstream, a government policy.
In spite of above-average rainfall in 2007 and tight water restrictions in Melbourne, water storages did not increase. This is not a rainfall failure, this is a water policy failure.
Sorry about the big space in my previous comment. I swear I didn’t put it there.
It’s common to get high rainfall but low runoff and one way to check the cause is by hourly readings.
Daily readings do not tell the story.
Hardly convincing Mottsa. I thought you’d at least have toddled out an argument about regrowth after bushfires, perhaps back to 1939, how good the forest industry would be at thinning, what crap-heads greenies and urbanites are, offer to deck a few people, but would have been all quiet on any plantations (mustn’t upset industry at any cost eh?).
But perhaps as David suggests the pattern of rainfall and combination of years explains it all.
We all know the drill by now
(1) talk up the timber industry benefits – harvesting, thinning, fire etc – get up the greens
(2) dismiss any possible AGW effect or interaction – cherrypick if necessary
(3) never quote any science that might attribute an anthropogenic influence
It’s a great ping pong game.
“The warm phase PDO from 1977 to 1998 was dominated by el ninos, so what has this got to do with AGW?”
(1) Indeed – you might ask why the Walker circulation has changed
(2) Why haven’t the neutral years delivered the rain
(3) PDO might interact with El Nino and La Nina but does it cause them ? Reckon not.
(4) Could we have a look at recent work by CSIRO and BoM on southern Australian rainfall – nah – let’s not.
Let’s just play around with 25% of the story.
I get it now luke, it’s all about guess work and fundamentalist religion then?
For you Neville most likely.
Ian
“The proof is simple, Boy wonder. The catchment is covered in forest. The forest is alive and growing. There has been no thinning operations in that forest, the clowns think thinning would reduce water quality. And it logically follows that if all the trees are getting bigger then there is more competition amongst them for soil moisture, hence less runoff.”
Ian you are right all you have to do is remove the word “the clowns”
Both you and Luke are right. Rainfall isn’t a good enough indicator, you need to do a water balance, which would include (amongst other things) evaporation and transpiration. However thining the forest could make other problems, for example increased silt in your dam. Note that you don’t have to thin that much to increase surface runoff, it’s mostly a case of removing undergrowth near the dam, heck you could do it with controlled burns.
Dams are typically a poor way to store water, the best thing to do would be to pump the water from the dam into an aquifer and remove the evaporation altogether – not sure if you have any nearby in Melbourne though…
sorry,
Ian you are right all you have to do is remove the words “ clowns think”
Braddles
“exacerbated by ‘environmental’ releases of water downstream, a government policy.”
Have you looked at the way people do EWRs? That is, calculate Enivironmental Water Requirements. This will answer why it’s not ‘exacerbating’ the problem.
Some contributors may wish to Google “streamflow records MMBW” and scan for themselves the wealth of information I mentioned earlier. I reckon too our resident forest buffs would be particularly interested in this recent report that depends somewhat on the work we were part of as outlined above.
http://www.doctors.forests.org.au/2006_Report.pdf
Some of the more serious science on the forest – water yields issue:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/61003632/abstract
http://www.ewatercrc.com.au/documents/Afforestation%20in%20catchments.pdf
It’s the usual dirty trick of the AGW crowd: only show the anecdotal data that suits its religion.
– Decline of reservoirs’ levels ? Then show it.
– NO decline in catchment rainfall, then DON’T show it and make the data impossible to get.
When there is a good climate scare, be sure there is a hidden skeletton in the climate closet. Climate “science” is so predictable.
It’s the usual septic sceptic trick of the denialist crowd to tell half the story or simply make shit up is even better. Pavlovian denialist drivel is so pathetic.
If you think rainfall data is impossible to get well you must have spent a whole 30 seconds looking.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs14.pdf Try figures 1 and 3 – onya bike tossa.
Luke, Like David, you have not provided a relevant url. Can we get a link to all the rainfall data for the Melbourne catchment please.
NT, the increase in siltation after thinning is very short lived and is of minimal significance compared to the drop in total water volume if thinning does not take place.
Lets face it. Most city water mafia are now openly discussing the recycling of human excrement so why do they still have this fobia about a bit of silt.
It is downright bizare for these people to still maintain this absolute water quality fetish in the face of major shortages in supply.
If they really wanted to improve Melbourne’s water supply they would locate a shopping centre with extensive outside car parks right in the middle of the dam catchment. This would produce at least a six fold increase in yield and still produce water that is easier and cheaper to bring up to potable standard than human sewerage.
Jennifer,
I doubt the anonymice could find a url detailing Melbourne’s rainfall data.
I tihnk we forget that Climate Change alarmism is a state project, not a scientific one, and the increased paranoia over supplying raw data, suggests that we have cottoned onto the game.
If Obama gets up in November, then I suspect climate alarmism will be ratched up further globally.
It isn’t science folks, its the misuse of science and most of you voted them in.
Don’t complain when the seeds you have sown don’t produce the things you expected.
Gavin and Luke, gross cherry picking. Doctorts for forests are a political group with a clearly defined agenda to halt all harvesting of native forests, the timescale that they are talking about e.g. 150 years for water yields to return to normal after a harvest of less than 1% of the catchment compares very poorly with empirical data from MMBW where it took 50 years for water yields to return to normal after the 1939 wildfires deforested most of the Melbourne water supply catchments.
And Luke, Zhang and Vertessy’s papers deal with experimental catchments where hypothetical management bears no resemblance to reality. It has been a constant criticism of that work for nearly 10 years now. Again it is a case of virtual science (modelling) versus reality. The real data provides vastly different insights to the outcomes proposed by Vertessy and Zhang.
Computer modelling seems to be a modern affliction affecting science. Remote monitoring of earthquakes is a case in point. Design an instrument to be sensitive to low frequency modulations, connect its output to a radio frequency transmitter, and voila – remote data collection.
But the frequent reporting of other phenomena associated with earthquakes, including strange lights, smells, and other physical phenomena are not collected because in these times, we cannot afford to have people collecting data in situ.
The problem with this method of data collection is that the only data one collects is predertimed by the instrumentation.
Science is about collecting the same data in situ but having a human being doing it.
Novel phenomena are noticed by humans, but not by inanimate measuring gadgets.
But its amazing what interpretations are possible from the data collected inanimately, and the theories therefrom deduced.
Jen – what don’t you understand about a basic decile analysis? Would you like to do your own spatial decile analysis?
Put up the data then Pandanus and stop flossing. Let’s see the yield curves.
It’s funny how worst on record rainfall stats don’t seem to mean anything.
Jen – commend you acquire the raw data from BoM’s SILO system and work it up yourself given you don’t trust BoM’s analysis I have provided.
It would seem that David posting above is in fact Dr David Jones; and could it be that Luke is some sort of a public servant in the BoM? He certainly seems to be pandering to his master like some poodle fakir in mendicant vassalage, or lowly serf paying homage to his liege lord.
David and the true believers at the BoM, can do anything with records. The good old “adjusting” is as good a measure as any to produce the result you want. And with the millions of climate dollars being thrown at them by the Feds, just imagine the team of climate actuaries they employ to get the figures right.
The blase way that David tried to dismiss the excellent snow cover in the Australian Alps in an earlier post was really quite pathetic.
That a senior public servant should take an activist role in promoting an ideology based on poor and unsubstantiated science is really quite poor.
And could it be that you might be just a well known activist talking through your hat for political purposes? Perhaps a cherry harverster ? We know by now Sid that you eschew any trend lines and pluck any passing DATUM – usually sample size of one – to suit your normally acidic point.
So lets see – when CSIRO don’t engage they’re being secretive – when BoM engages they’re being activists. So damned if you do – damned if you don’t. You ought to be grateful that David gives you the time of day. Obviously the only thing that would satisfy you Sid to is to be totally unscientific and agree with whatever dribble you’d like promoted as truth?
BTW Sid – whatever happened to that rainfall analysis you were going to provide. Disappeared like the morning mist?
If you want information about Melbourne’s water look at the Our Water our Future Website or Melbourne Water’s website.
Excellent resources which have been available freely for years. I have already linked a PDF which shows rainfall across the catchments and runoff into the catchments. These both set records by large margins.
All the Bureau’s HQ station data is freely available at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/datasets/datasets.shtml .
I look forward to seeing a scientific analysis which shows my article to be wrong.
Even if rainfall in the last 10 or 20 years is dramatically under the average it still doesn’t prove AGW.
We know that this area has had reducing rainfall for at least 5,000 years, but extreme conditions can prevail either side of the ledger and in one persons lifetime.
What about the cool phase PDO from 1945 to 1977 when massive floods occurred on the Murray over many years, if this technology existed in the 50,s and 70,s we could all be blogging about the human influence causing that flooding as well.
Until you find that hot spot over the tropics or disprove the findings of Spencer in the REAL ATMOSPHERE i.e. NO POSITIVE FEEDBACK to INCREASED CO2 your arguments are ridiculous folly and a complete waste of time.
Yes Neville – very little evidence except for this list which you’ll never bother to read.
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Arblaster, J. M., and G. A. Meehl, 2006: Contributions of external forcings to southern annular mode trends. J. Climate, 19, 2896–2905.
Cai W., D. Bi, J. Church, T. Cowan, M. Dix, L. Rotstayn (2006), Pan-oceanic response to increasing anthropogenic aerosols: Impacts on the Southern Hemisphere oceanic circulation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L21707, doi:10.1029/2006GL027513.
Cai, G. Shi, T. Cowan, D. Bi, and J. Ribbe, 2005: The response of the southern annular mode, the East Australian Current, and the southern midlatitude ocean circulation to global warming. Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23706, doi:10.1029/ 2005GL024701.
Cai, P. H. Whetton, and D. J. Karoly, 2003: The response of the Antarctic Oscillation to increasing and stabilized atmospheric CO2. J. Climate, 16, 1525–1538.
Cai, W. (2006), Antarctic ozone depletion causes an intensification of the Southern Ocean super-gyre circulation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L03712, doi:10.1029/2005GL024911.
Cai, W., and T. Cowan (2006), SAM and regional rainfall in IPCC AR4 models: Can anthropogenic forcing account for southwest Western Australian winter rainfall reduction?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L24708, doi:10.1029/2006GL028037.
Cai, W., and T. Cowan (2008), Dynamics of late autumn rainfall reduction over southeastern Australia, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L09708, doi:10.1029/2008GL033727.
Cai, W., and T. Cowan (2008), Evidence of impacts from rising temperature on inflows to the Murray-Darling Basin, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L07701, doi:10.1029/2008GL033390.
Cai, W., and T. Cowan, 2007: Trends in Southern Hemisphere Circulation in IPCC AR4 Models over 1950–99: Ozone Depletion versus Greenhouse Forcing. J. Climate, 20, 681–693.
Cai, W., T. Cowan, M. Dix, L. Rotstayn, J. Ribbe, G. Shi, and S. Wijffels (2007), Anthropogenic aerosol forcing and the structure of temperature trends in the southern Indian Ocean, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L14611, doi:10.1029/2007GL030380.
Domingues C., Church, J., White, N., Gleckler, P., Wijffels, S., Barker, P. & Dunn, J. (2008) Improved estimates of upper-ocean warming and multi-decadal sea-level rise. Nature 453, 1090-1093 | doi:10.1038/nature07080
Fyfe, J. C., and O. A. Saenko (2006), Simulated changes in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere winds and currents, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06701, doi:10.1029/2005GL025332.
Fyfe, J. C., and O. A. Saenko, 2005: Human-induced change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. J. Climate, 18, 3068–3073
Gillett, N. P., and D. W. J. Thompson, 2003: Simulation of recent Southern Hemisphere climate change. Science, 302, 273–275.
Hendon, H.H., Thompson, D.W.J. and Wheeler, M.C. 2007. Australian Rainfall and Surface Temperature Variations Associated with the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode. Journal of Climate, 20(11): 2452-2467. DOI: 10.1175/JCLI4134.1
Lough, J. M. (2007), Tropical river flow and rainfall reconstructions from coral luminescence: Great Barrier Reef, Australia, Paleoceanography, 22, PA2218, doi:10.1029/2006PA001377.
Lough, J. M. (2008), Shifting climate zones for Australia’s tropical marine ecosystems, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L14708, doi:10.1029/2008GL034634.
Murphy, B.F. and Timbal, B. 2008. A review of recent climate variability and climate change in southeastern Australia. International Journal of Climatology, 28(7): 859-879
Pearce, A., and Feng, M. (2007). Observations of warming on the Western Australian continental shelf. Marine and Freshwater Research 58, 914–920.doi:10.1071/MF07082
Power, S. B., and I. N. Smith (2007), Weakening of the Walker Circulation and apparent dominance of El Niño both reach record levels, but has ENSO really changed?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L18702, doi:10.1029/2007GL030854.
Rakich, C. S., N. J. Holbrook, and B. Timbal (2008), A pressure gradient metric capturing planetary-scale influences on eastern Australian rainfall, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08713, doi:10.1029/2007GL032970.
Rotstayn, L. D., et al. (2007), Have Australian rainfall and cloudiness increased due to the remote effects of Asian anthropogenic aerosols?, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D09202, doi:10.1029/2006JD007712.
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It will be the day when any sceptic does a fulsome review of the literature and makes a decent publication of it.
Luke
You still haven’t looked at a dictionary definition of fulsome…
David; I must admit to being frustrated in my search for old MMBW streamflow records, charts data whatever given there should be water measurements going back say 150 years in some places.
I recall too the MMBW was a world leader in research for water works and standards.
the best info I could find was here
http://www.anra.gov.au/topics/water/availability/vic/basin-yarra-river.html#meas
Answer the question Luke, what’s any of that got to do with proving AGW in the real atmosphere, absolutely zilch.
You make as much sense as endlessly quoting computer models telling us what the climate will be in 50 years.
The most important part of your argument (if you believe AGW) is a total nonsense as well. Simple arithmetic tells you ( providing you have good sense) that UNLESS you can get China, India and Brazil on board it’s a complete waste of time anyhow and the’ve effectively told the world to go and get stuffed.
Belief is an amazing thing, what are you like on flying saucers, bigfoot, the lochness monster, the shroud of turin I wonder.
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.