Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for March 2014

Finding Figures Quoted in Media in IPCC Report Released Today

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WORKING Group II, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published their contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report earlier today. The summary document begins by explaining that human interference with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for humans and natural systems. The report goes on to assess the impacts, how we can adapt and why we are vulnerable.

Within an hour of the reports release the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had an article quoting CSIRO’s Dr Mark Howden…

“The world’s leading climate science organisation – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has released its fifth report and warns the world is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate.

The CSIRO’s Dr Mark Howden, who was lead author on the chapter addressing food production and food security, says the report predicts a rainfall reduction of 20 to 40 per cent in parts of southern Australia in coming decades, while rainfall will be more variable in the north.”

I need to file my The Land column this evening and I would like to put the 20 to 40 percent reduction in some context relative to the rest of the report. But I can’t find these figures in the report.

It’s a long report with many components. Can someone help me…

http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/report/final-drafts/

In particular where does it say rainfall will reduce by 20 to 40 percent in southern Australia?

Fiddling Temperatures for Bourke: Part 1, Hot Days

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IF you know Bourke, you know Australia, wrote the famous Australian poet Henry Lawson. There is something quintessentially Australian about the place, the harshness of the western landscape, a tenacious spirit, the notion of ‘a fair go’.

So what would you say if another Australian icon, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, was fiddling the temperature record for Bourke? I’d call it un-Australian.

But lets not jump to any conclusions!

Lets just ask a few questions in the hope that the Bureau will answer them.

The postmaster started recording temperature at Bourke on 25th April 1871. That was a year after the post office and telegraph departments were amalgamated and meteorologist, astronomy and electrical engineer Charles Todd was appointed Postmaster General and Superintendent of Telegraphs. He was a smart man and a good organiser. Just a year earlier he had overseen the successful completion of the overland telegraph line from Darwin to Adelaide connecting Australia to Europe via Indonesia. By 1877 every Australian state had tapped into this network.

While there is a meticulously recorded daily temperature record for Bourke from 1871, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology rejects this record until 1st January 1910. So when David Jones from the Bureau reports each January on the annual average temperature for Australia, only the data for Bourke from 1st January 1910 is included.

It is claimed that temperatures weren’t reliably recorded until after the installation of Stevenson Screens and that this didn’t occur at most weather recording stations in Australia until 1910. A Stevenson screen was installed at Bourke in August 1908.

But is the absence of a Stevenson screen really a good enough reason to ignore 40 years of data carefully collected by successive postmasters at Bourke?

It is likely the thermometers at Bourke were kept in a lattice round house or a Glaisher stand or some other type of enclosure. According to the scientific literature, these installations could result in the recording of temperatures up to 1 degree Celsius warmer during summer. So why not just subtract up to 1 degree from all summer temperatures for Bourke prior to August 1908?

Furthermore, the Bureau is not consistent on this issue. While claiming that temperatures not recorded in a Stevenson screen are unreliable and not able to be incorporated into the official Australian temperature record, they then discard and change records for Bourke after the installation of a Stevenson Screen.

The record high temperature of 51.7 degree C recorded on 3rd January 1909, after the installation of the Stevenson Screen, has been expunged from the official record on the basis it must be an observational or clerical error. That is the reasoning given in a 1997 study by Blair Trewin, who now works for the Bureau. He came to this determination after comparing temperatures at Bourke with temperatures as far away as Thargomindah (454km) and Coonamble (364km), all the while ignoring temperatures at nearby Brewarrina (97km), which also set records on that day.

But this isn’t the only temperature record that has been changed or removed since the installation of a Stevenson screen at Bourke. Through a process of what the Bureau refers to as data “homogenisation” almost all of Australia’s temperature records have been changed in the development of the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperatures (ACORN-SAT). Dr Blair Trewin is actually the climate scientists who oversees the ongoing development of this official data set.

It has resulted in changes to many of the original temperature records for Bourke. For example, a recording of 47.5 degree C on 28th January 1913 has been changed to 46.6 degree C, a recording of 48.3 degree C on the 10th January 1939 has been changed to 47.9 degree C and the list of changes goes on and on.

Why? Why tamper with the original recordings after a Stevenson screen was put in place?

Many ordinary Australians have become increasingly concerned with this fiddling by the Bureau. Ken Stewart, a retired school principal, has undertaken a detailed assessment of the new official temperature data, ACORN-SAT, and shown that the many adjustments can change the entire temperature trend for particular locations.

Let’s consider what the Bureau has done just to the hot day data for Bourke by way of some temperature charts. Each dots in the following four charts/figures represents a day where the mean maximum temperatures exceeded, or is claimed, to have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius at the Bourke Post Office. Click on the figures/charts to get a larger and better view.

Hot days Bourke

In Figure 1, I have included all the days where temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius from when the Bourke post office started recording temperatures, until the Bureau closed down this temperature recording station in 1996. The spread of dots suggests there were more extremely hot days in the late 1800s and early 1990s.

The Bureau has expunged the extremely hot day recorded in 1877 and again in 1909, claiming the values are too extreme for Bourke. So all the hot days without these values are shown in Figure 2. Then the Bureau, in developing its official ACORN-SAT database, discards all the data before 1910 and then makes more changes to all the data that’s left. We don’t know the exact methodology used in this homogenisation process. The final result is shown in Figure 3.

If the Bureau just adjusted the data before the installation of the Stevenson screen, by subtracting 1 degree Celsius from all the hot days before August 1908, the hot day temperature record for Bourke would look like Figure 4.

Instead it truncates the data, and then makes adjustments until there is no evidence of a cooling trend. Surely the residents of Bourke, if not every Australian citizen, deserve an explanation.

Read more on this topic…
Part 2, Adjusting maximum temperatures both down and up, and then changing them altogether
Part 3, Shortening an already shortened record

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Anyone with early photographs of Bourke could have a photograph of the enclosure in the yard at the post office before the installation of the Stevenson screen in 1908. It would be valuable information, knowing just what this was.

It would be also very valuable to compare records from Bourke with temperature records from nearby locations, for example sheep stations, particularly for the late 1870s and early 1900s.

If you have any historical temperature records for the Bourke region, or photographs of enclosures at the post office email me at jennifermarohasy at gmail.com or telephone 041 887 32 22.

Additional Notes, References and Links:

Ken Stewart, ACORN-Sat: A Preliminary Assessment, May 2012. http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/acorn-sat-a-preliminary-assessment/

Blair Trewin, Another look at Australia’s record high temperature, Australian Meteorological Magazine, volume 46, pages 251-256. 1997. Trewin compares temperatures for Bourke with temperatures for Walgett, Thargomindah, and Coonamble, which are 231, 454 and 364kms from Bourke respectively by road. Trewin ignores temperatures at Brewarrina, which is just 97 km away.

The Northern Miner, Tuesday 5th January 1909 included the following news: “SYDNEY JANUARY 4. The severity of the heat wave is shown by the official returns of the temperatures for the 48 hours ended at 9am this morning. In some instances the records are the highest for thirty years. They include Bourke 125 degrees in the shade. Brewarina 123, Pilliga 123…” Reference in the same article is later made to Walgett recording a temperature of 112. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/80316601?zoomLevel=6 [125 degree Fahrenheit is 51.7 degree Celsius. 123 is 50.6. 112 is 44.4.] This newspaper clipping was found by Lance Pidgeon.

Call for Independent Audit of Bureau of Meteorology by Dennis Jensen in Australian Parliament

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LATE yesterday Dennis Jensen, the Member for Tangney, spoke in the Australian Parliament about how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology plays “fast and loose” with critical temperature data.

At the end of this important speech, Dr Jensen calls for an audit of the Bureau and in particular the methodology it uses for compiling temperature data.

Dr Jensen emphasises the problem with the Bureau claiming unreliable temperature data for Australia prior to 1910, while supporting and contributing to a United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global temperature data base from 1850 including for Australia.

There is a more detailed justification for an audit of the Bureau detailed in a letter to Minister Greg Hunt…

Q4. Given potential and actual conflicts of interest, could the Australian Bureau of Statistics, (ABS) rather than the Bureau of Meteorology, be tasked with the job of leading the high quality and objective interpretation of the historical temperature record for Australia?

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to treat data selectively and favor information that confirms their beliefs. Such bias can quickly spread through an organization unless there are procedures in place to guard against groupthink. Groupthink – Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1983) by Irving L Janis is the seminal text in the area and outlines how irrespective of the personality characteristics and other predispositions of the members of a policy-making group, the groupthink syndrome is likely to emerge given particular conditions; including that the decision-makers constitute a cohesive group, lack norms requiring methodical procedures and are under stress from external threats. This can lead to illusions of invulnerability and belief in the inherent morality of the group leading to self-censorship, illusions of unanimity and an incomplete consideration of alternative solutions to the issue at hand. All of these characteristics can be applied to the Bureau, which is particularly convinced of the inherent moral good in both its cause and approach to the issue of global warming.

The extent of the problem of groupthink within the Bureau, and the international climate science community more generally, became particularly evident in 2009 when the Climategate emails were released. These emails raised many disturbing questions about the way climate science is conducted; about researchers’ preparedness to block access to climate data and downplay flaws in their research; and about the siege mentality and scientific tribalism within the community. These emails show that managers at the Bureau including David Jones and Neil Plummer, rely on other climate scientists, particularly those at the heart of Climategate, for statistical advice and share the general contempt of the mainstream climate science community for rigorous scientific analysis.

For example, in an email dated 7th September 2007 Dr Jones wrote to Phil Jones from the Climate Research Unit that, “Truth be know,[sic] climate change here is now running so rampant that we don’t need meteorological data to see it.” In an email dated 5th January 2005, David Parker from the UK Met Office wrote to Mr Plummer resisting a suggestion that the period used to calculate temperature anomalies be corrected on the basis that “the impression of global warming will be muted.”

In 2006 Edward Wegman, professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the US National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association, was asked by the US House of Representatives to assess the statistical validity of the work of Michael Mann which contributed to many of the claims by the IPCC that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium. In his final report, Professor Wegman made damning assessments pertaining to the statistical competence of leading climate scientists.[4]

In particular, and drawing an analogy with pharmaceutical research, Professor Wegman recommended:

Recommendation 3. With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, review and consultation with statisticians is expected. Indeed, it is standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health and also when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.

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The full text of the letter can be read here… https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/questions-for-the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology/

Extending the Official Temperature Record Back in Time (Part 1: Bourke)

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I HAVE repeatedly argued that it is important for Australians to have a better understanding of natural historical temperature variability. I have also stressed that this can not be achieved by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology reporting on a contrived national annual average temperature each year, particularly given that this mean is based on an adjusted and homogenised official record that only begins in 1910.

In a recent letter to Minister Hunt I suggested that the official temperature record for individual localities, where possible, should be extended back in time. I reiterated that the current start date of 1910 for all official records is arbitrary and excludes valuable temperature recordings including those made through the Federation Drought (1896 to 1902).

In recent correspondence concerning my letter to Mr Hunt (but not addressed to me, so I can’t share it at this moment) the Bureau has insisted that temperature records prior to 1910 were reported on more informally and in a range of standard and non-standard ways and are therefore unreliable. Furthermore, it is claimed in supporting materials, that there is no evidence to suggest that the late 1890s and early 1900s were exceptionally hot. A paper by Linden Ashcroft, David Karoly and Joelle Gergis (Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal, Vol 62) is cited in support of this claim.

The Ashcroft et al. paper is not a study of the historical temperature record per se, but rather uses a two-step homogenization process to correct pre-1910 data for select locations in south-eastern Australia.

BREAKING NEWS… Dr Dennis Jensen MP states in the Australian Parliament that the Bureau of Meteorology plays fast and loose with the data and calls for an AUDIT. Watch on YouTube http://youtu.be/WQDjX9uVYMo ****

I am interest in getting a better understanding of the methodology used by Ashcroft et al. and also the reliability of the historical temperature data.

Given the statistical approach they employed, I wonder, for example, if they may have inadvertently and incorrectly adjusted down very hot days during the period of the Federation Drought?

Bourke in central western New South Wales is one of the localities used by Ashcroft et al.

Ian George, a past contributor at this blog with a particular interest in temperature data, has previously brought to my attention adjustments made to data for Bourke in January 1939 with the raw temperatures being reduced by up to 0.9 degrees Celsius in the homogenised official data set. Was a similar methodology applied to the earlier data series by Ashcroft et al.?

Regarding the reliability of the historical data: when was a Stevenson Screen first installed at Bourke? How was the temperature recorded before installation of the Stevenson’s Screen?

The following plot of the annual average maximum temperatures for Bourke theoretically based on the raw unadjusted data was downloaded directly from the Bureau’s website. Does someone know where I can find a plot of the adjusted official annual data for Bourke from 1910 and/or has someone a template that is useful for generating annual values from ACORN daily temperature data – or do I just need to get on and do this myself?

Does someone know how to apply the Ashcroft et al. two-step method to the pre-1910 Bourke data and what might this data series look like?

Update (11pm): A Stevenson Screen was installed at Bourke in August 1908.  An exceptionally high temperature recorded after this date, on 3 January 1909, has nevertheless been expunged from the ‘raw’ temperature record for Bourke by officers at the Bureau.  Even with these unofficial temperature adjustments, it’s evident that temperatures in Bourke have not been increasing since August 1908, rather it would appear, that consistent with the raw temperature data for much of Australia, temperatures have been steady or falling.   The only way the Bureau can get an increasing trend is through data adjustments which should not be necessary anyway post the installation of a Stevenson Screen.

 

Bourke Annual Mean Max Temp

Click on the image/chart to see the entire data series and for a larger view.

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Some Useful Links

Linden Ashcroft et al. 2012 paper in Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal http://www.bom.gov.au/amoj/docs/2012/ashcroft.pdf

Some of my recent correspondence concerning temperature records and the Bureau https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/correspondence/

Comment made in previous thread by Ian George about Bourke data adjustments https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IanGeorge_AnomalyComment.pdf

Part 2 of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being released in four parts with Working Group II due to officially release their contribution on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” in Yokohama, Japan, on Monday 31 March.

Comments on the IPCC report, and pre-release publicity, are welcome in the following thread.

For an alternative perspective on climate change the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) will be posting their second report in the next week or so. In the meantime their March 2014 Archive of Scientific Literature Reviews can be accessed here http://www.nipccreport.org/issues/2014/mar.html

Mega-Drought for Murray Darling, Predicted by Kevin Long

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I began my most recent newsletter to those subscribed at ‘MythandtheMurray.org’ with reference to the Michael Crichton quote: ‘If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

I continued by providing a link to a recent blog post where I explain how British Explorer Matthew Flinders missed the Murray River’s mouth when he was mapping the southern Australian coastline in 1802, probably because the Murray’s mouth had closed over.

In response I received an email from Kevin Long explaining that the last mega-drought in the Murray-Darling spanned the period 1790 to 1820.

Kevin Long, a long-range weather forecaster based in Bendigo, Victoria, went on to explain that he believes we are at the beginning of another mega-drought in the Basin because of the solar minimum and phase of the current lunar cycle.

While it is fashionable for many climate scientists, and also social and political commentators, to scoff at the idea that the moon could influence climate, it is not disputed by those with an understanding of conventional physics that the moon’s gravitational field along with the day/night cycle of the spinning earth creates atmospheric tides that modulate high-altitude winds that have a major influence on weather.

The complete email from Kevin Long follows.

While providing a summary of the current extra-terrestrial situation as it affects rainfall in the Murray-Darling, Kevin Long continued with my leaf-tree analogy. In particular suggesting that he is a leaf attached to the big tree of knowledge.

I agree that there exists a vast amount of information concerning astronomy and historical climate patterns. Kevin Long has an intimate knowledge of these patterns as they affect rainfall in the Murray Darling Basin.

Prior to the establishment of the current Australia Bureau of Meteorology in 1909, Australian meteorologist had a keen knowledge of astronomy and considered solar, lunar and planetary cycles in their weather forecasting. I’m told that there was some interest in what was termed ‘solar terrestrial physics’ at the Bureau until the early 1950s. Now this tree of knowledge is ignored.
I’m told modern meteorologists are instead trained in how to interpret the output from general circulation models (GCMs).

It could be that as meteorologists have moved away from a deep knowledge of astronomy, and the influence of the sun, moon and planets on climate cycles, their skill at medium and long-range rainfall forecasting has greatly deteriorated.

Email from Kevin Long…

Hi Jennifer

The historical records you included about Matthew Finders indicate the Murray mouth was closed in 1802. This all fits with the weather cycle as I understand it to be at the time.

That was the middle of the last mega-drought, brought on by the Dalton minimum cycle 1790 to 1820 (three very low and long sun spot cycles only averaging about 35 sun spot number).

The solar minimum cycle repeats every two hundred years or thereabouts.

Just a little more evidence that indicates this leaf is still attached to the big tree of knowledge.

The Murray Darling Basin is subject to long periods of well below average rainfall, this occurs when the northeast lunar air tide cycle is not peaking during the monsoon season.
It takes 9 years for the northeast lunar air tide cycle to progress backwards through the summer months, after which the dryer transition phase takes the next 9 to 10 years to progress back through the summer months, it is during this time that a long drought is most likely to develop. (This year the peak of the northeast air tide is occurring in late November so we are at the start of that long dry period.)

The southern air tide phase that follows during the next 9 year (2025 to 2034) has only a small influence on the top half of the MDB’s rainfall, so if you don’t have above average solar activity the northern half of Australia is likely to remain in a low rainfall sequence for most of the next 28 years of the 37.2-year air tide cycle. It is only when a strong La Nina cycle happens to form, that a few cyclones are likely to be forced inland providing some temporary relief during this long dry period.

Global sea ice is now above the average of the last 35 years and the Antarctic ice is presently about 20% above average for this time of the year. This indicates a dry winter/spring.

The SOI has plunged from +14 to –13 in just over a month. Even the Bureau of Meteorology is now warning of El Nino in the second half of the year. This little leaf blowing in the wind saw it coming months ago.

Cold seas are already dominating the east coast of Australia, and a big slug of cold sea is moving across under Australia, this is very likely to kill the autumn/winter rainfall that the weakening southern air tide is trying to produce. (The air tides get a little weaker every year until 2020 which is the driest part of this 18.6 year lunar declination cycle, otherwise known as the flood and drought cycle.)

Once June has passed there is very little chance of any river filling rains until the next La Nina gets organized, which is not due until 2017. That one is normally the weakest one in the 18.6-year cycle.

If the climate cycle runs true to form you will be able to walk across the Murray mouth, later this decade without getting your feet wet once again. And you will be able to see large 200 year-old dead tree stumps in many of Australia’s deepest dry holes.

Regards Kevin Long
http://www.thelongview.com.au

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map moon sun

The map shows the position of the sun and the moon relative to the earth at about the time I made this blog post. The day and night world map can be accessed by clicking here… http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html