Jennifer Marohasy

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Hottest Summer in Australia was 1938/1939

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THIS last summer has been hot in Australia. But was it the hottest ever? Summer 80 years ago was arguably as hot, if not hotter. Back then more ferocious bushfires burnt larger areas.

Yet Australia’s Environment Minister, Melissa Price, recently claimed this summer’s bushfires as a consequence of climate change. I grew up with stories from my late father of terrible bushfires – infernos – back in 1939. The Black Friday bushfires destroyed four times the area of farmland and forest as the devastating February 2009 fires – and twenty times as much as burnt this last summer. Ash from that bushfire fell as far away as New Zealand.

My father described hot and hungry years in rural Victoria back then – just as John Steinbeck described farm life in the mid-west of the US in the 1930s in his famous ‘Grapes of Wrath’. There was hardship, and there were dust storms in the US and also in south-eastern Australia.

In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since.

Mean maximum summer temperatures as measured at Rutherglen in rural Victoria for the period when mercury thermometers were used.

Yet Minister Price denies this history – my late father’s history. She is relying on temperature data that has been extensive remodelled. This remodelling is justified by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the basis that temperatures are now measured using a non-standard method (spot readings) from non-standard equipment (custom built probes in automatic weather stations). Apparently, we need to know how hot it was back then, relative to the equipment used now.

On 13 January 1939 my father was living not far from Rutherglen, near Australia’s longest river, the Murray River. He described a hot wind blowing from the north west.

The Rutherglen agricultural research station has one of the longest, continuous, temperature records for anywhere in rural Victoria. Minimum and maximum temperatures were first recorded at Rutherglen using standard and calibrated equipment back in November 1912. Considering the first 85 years of summer temperatures – unadjusted/not homogenized – the very hottest summer on record at Rutherglen is the summer of 1938/1939.
While this last summer of 2018/2019 was hotter according to Minister Price, such a claim would not pass scrutiny if assessed for the Guinness Book of records – because of all the changes to the way temperatures are now measured at Rutherglen relative to that summer back in 1938/1939.

At Rutherglen, the first big change happened on 29 January 1998. That is when the mercury and alcohol thermometers were replaced with an electronic probe – custom built to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s own standard, with the specifications still yet to be made public.

According to Bureau policy, when such a major equipment change occurs there should be at least three years (preferably five) of overlapping/parallel temperature recordings, except the mercury and alcohol thermometers (used to measure maximum and minimum temperatures, respectively) were removed on exactly the same day the custom-built probe was placed into the Stevenson screen at Rutherglen, in direct contravention of this policy.

In 2011, the Bureau made further changes in that it stopped averaging one-second readings from the probe at Rutherglen over one minute. The maximum temperature as recorded each day at Rutherglen is now the highest one-second spot reading from the custom-built probe. That is correct – spot reading.

So, to reiterate, we now have a non-standard method of measuring (spot readings) from non-standard equipment (custom-built probes) making it impossible to establish the equivalence of recent temperatures from Rutherglen – or any of the Bureau’s other 695 probes in automatic weather stations spread across the landmass of Australia – with historical data.

Then there is the remodelling – with the most recent remodelling creating Version 2 of ACORN-SAT. This has resulted in an overall 23 per cent increase in the rate of warming between Versions 1 and 2 for the 112 weather stations that comprise ACORN-SAT. This is the database used by the Bureau and the CSIRO to monitor climate change across Australia.

At Rutherglen, a modest rate of warming in the raw maximum temperatures of 0.7 degrees Celsius per Century has been changed to 1.3 degrees Celsius in ACORN-SAT Version 2. Changes to the minimum temperature trend are more dramatic: a slight cooling trend of 0.3 degrees Celsius has been changed to warming of 1.9 degrees in ACORN-SAT Version 2 for Rutherglen.

Annual mean minimum temperatures at Rutherglen (1913-2017). Raw temperatures (green) show a mild cooling trend, which is changed into warming in Version 1 of the remodeled ACORN-SAT. The warming is exaggerated in Version 2 of ACORN-SAT.

This remodelling – known as homogenisation – involves the detection of discontinuities and then adjustments which generally result in past temperatures being cooled relative to the present. By cooling the past, present temperatures appear hotter. For example, considering maximum temperatures at Rutherglen, the largest single drop-down (adjustment) to daily temperatures occurs from 1 January 1938 back in time. The Bureau classifies the hot summer of 1938/1939 as a ‘discontinuity’ that is ‘statistical’ in ‘cause’ and then cools all the days before 31 December 1938 by 0.6 degrees Celsius back to 1912 – the beginning of the record.*

This is an embarrassment to the scientific method, and an insult to the 71 lives lost on 13 January 1939.

To repeat, the Bureau does not deny making these changes. Rather it claims such changes to Rutherglen’s temperature history are necessary to show what the temperature would be back then, using today’s equipment. But there was no actual change in the equipment between Versions 1 and 2 of ACORN-SAT for Rutherglen. So, this reason makes no sense.

The remodelling of Rutherglen, and the other 111 stations that comprise ACORN-SAT is extensive and misleading. It was correctly described as ‘fraud’ by commentator Rowan Dean on Sky Television on Sunday 10th March.

So why did, for example, the Bureau drop the minimum daily temperatures by a further 2.6 degrees Celsius on the day of the Black Friday bushfire? To be clear, the minimum temperature on the day of the Black Friday bushfire at Rutherglen was measured as 28.3 degrees Celsius. This value is changed to 27.8 degrees Celsius in ACORN-SAT Version 1, a reduction of 0.5 degrees Celsius. In Version 2, the temperature is reduced further, now archived as just 25.7 degrees Celsius for 13 January 1939 – a reduction of 2.6 degrees from the original temperature as actually recorded on that day.

There is a real history of rural Victoria: 71 men and women did perished in that bushfire back on 13 January 1939. According to my late father, it was extraordinarily hot and the wind was blowing from the north west.

The Bureau has never put a media release out letting the Australian public know that there is a Version 2 of ACORN-SAT, with even cooler historical temperatures for Rutherglen and most of the rest of Australia than in Version 1 that was only published in 2012.

Just a few years ago, the minister then responsible for the Bureau, Greg Hunt, was claiming that ACORN-SAT Version 1 was the world’s best practice and the correct temperature history of Australia. Now, we have ACORN-SAT Version 2, and temperatures overall have been warmed a further 23 percent relative to Version 1.

The remodelling by the Bureau is industrial-scale: this is necessary to generate a consistent global warming trend that does not exist in the raw unhomogenized data from rural and regional Australia.

There are consequences for future generations in this remodelling. It affects how we understand the relationship between climate and bushfires. Also, by continually reducing past temperatures, there is potential for new record hot days, record hot summers and hottest years for even cooler weather. Recommend wellbutrin buy .

This is nonsense – consistent with how the Bureau now measures and remodels our temperature history.

A different version of this article was first published at The Spectator: https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/03/the-hottest-summer-on-record-except-for-the-ones-that-weve-changed/

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*I’m quoting from the ‘Adjustment Summary’ for ACORN-SAT Version 1 published in September 2014.

University Professor Sacked for Telling-the-Truth

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BACK in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor.

Peter Ridd as a first year undergraduate science student at James Cook University back in 1978 – forty years ago.

Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one university for forty years.

Since Peter was fired on 2 May 2018, the university has attempted to remove all trace of this association: scrubbing him completely from their website.

But facts don’t cease to exist because they are removed from a website. The university has never challenged the veracity of Peter’s legitimate claims about the quality of much of the reef science: science on which billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research is being squandered. These issues are not going away.

Just yesterday (Friday 18 May), Peter lodged papers in the Federal Court. He is going to fight for his job back!

If you care about the truth, science and academic freedom, please donate to help bring this important case to court.

It doesn’t matter how little or how much you donate. Just make sure you are a part of this important effort by donating to Peter’s GoFundMe campaign.

Peter deliberately choose to frame the book chapter about the replication crisis that is sweeping through science.

In this chapter – The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Coral and Problems with Policy Science – Peter details the major problems with quality assurance when it comes to claims of the imminent demise of the reef.

Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.

Ex-professor Peter Ridd has also published extensively in the scientific literature on the Great Barrier Reef, including issues with the methodology used to measure calcification rates. In the book he explains:

Like trees, which produce rings as they grow, corals set down a clearly identifiable layer of calcium carbonate skeleton each year, as they grow. The thicknesses and density of the layers can be used to infer calcification rates and are, effectively, a measure of the growth rate. Dr Glenn De’ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science used cores from more than 300 corals, some of which were hundreds of years old, to measure the changes in calcification during the last few hundred years. They claimed there was a precipitous decline in calcification since 1990, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The LHS chart suggests a problem with coral growth rates – but the real problem is with the methodology. When corals of equivalent age are sampled, there has been no decline in growth rates at the Great Barrier Reef – as shown in the RHS chart.

However, I have two issues with their analysis. I published my concerns, and an alternative analysis, in the journal Marine Geology (Ridd et al. 2013). First, there were instrumental errors with the measurements of the coral layers. This was especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality. This forced an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s – falsely implying a recent calcification drop. Second, an ‘age effect’ was not acknowledged. When these two errors are accounted for, the drop in calcification rates disappear, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The problem with the ‘age effect’, mentioned above, arose because in the study De’ath and colleagues included data from corals sampled during two distinct periods and with a different focus; I will refer to these as two campaigns. The first campaign occurred mostly in the 1980s and focused on very large coral specimens, sometimes many metres across. The second campaign occurred in the early 2000s due to the increased interest in the effects of CO2. However, presumably due to cost cutting measures, instead of focusing on the original huge coral colonies, the second campaign measured smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter.

In summary, the first campaign focused on large old corals, while, in contrast, the second campaign focused on small young corals. The two datasets were then spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated – in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth…

Dr Juan D’Olivo Cordero from the University of Western Australia collected an entirely different dataset of coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef to determine calcification rates. This study determined that there has been a 10% increase in calcification rates since the 1940s for offshore and mid-shelf reefs, which is the location of about 99% of all the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. However, these researchers also measured a 5% decline in calcification rates of inshore corals – the approximately 1% of corals that live very close to the coast. Overall, there was an increase for most of the Great Barrier Reef, and a decrease for a small fraction of the Great Barrier Reef.

While it would seem reasonable to conclude that the results of the study by D’Olivo et al. would be reported as good news for the Great Barrier Reef, their article in the journal Coral Reefs concluded:

Our new findings nevertheless continue to raise concerns, with the inner-shelf reefs continuing to show long-term declines in calcification consistent with increased disturbance from land-based effects. In contrast, the more ‘pristine’ mid- and outer-shelf reefs appear to be undergoing a transition from increasing to decreasing rates of calcification, possibly reflecting the effects of CO2-driven climate change.

Imaginatively, this shift from ‘increasing’ to ‘decreasing’ seems to be based on an insignificant fall in the calcification rate in some of the mid-shelf reefs in the last two years of the 65-year dataset.

Why did the authors concentrate on this when their data shows that the reef is growing about 10% faster than it did in the 1940s?

James Cook university could have used the chapter as an opportunity to start a much-needed discussion about policy, funding and the critical importance of the scientific method. Instead, Peter was first censored by the University – and now he has been fired.

When I first blogged on this back in February, Peter needed to raise A$95,000 to fight the censure.

This was achieved through an extraordinary effort, backed by Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, John Roskam and so many others.

To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly. In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.

New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February. The core issue continues to be Peter’s right to keep talking – including so that he can defend himself.

In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter’s employment agreement. The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him. Peter disputes this.

Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice – to defend himself! All of the documentation is now being made public – all of this information, and more can be found at Peter’s new website.

Together, let’s fight this!

Go fund ex-professor Ridd at:

https://au.gofundme.com/peter-ridd-legal-action-fund.

The Institute of Public Affairs published Climate Change, The Facts 2017, and continues to support Peter’s right to speak the truth. For media and comment contact Evan Mulholland on 0405 140 780, or at emulholland@ipa.org.au.

Buy the book if you haven’t already: this is another way of showing your support.

Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy speaking at the Sydney Institute last year.

The most important thing is to not be silenced, shout about this! I received an email last week: “Bought Climate Change, The Facts 2017, as requested, to support Peter Ridd. I’m not making any friends at dinner parties at the moment. Stuff ’em.”

‘Kill Climate Deniers’ – Now Showing at a Sydney Theatre

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JUST two generations back, in the 1960s, mainstream Australian society shunned both unmarried pregnant women and also homosexuals. They were loathed, and it would have been considered reasonable for the local police to turn-a-blind eye should misfortune befall members of either group – should they be killed.

In my opinion, human-beings are not naturally hateful, though powerful institutions often look to squash dissent by turning the tribe against groups with certain characteristics – particularly those likely to possess special knowledge.

The loathing of unmarried pregnant women and homosexuals back in the 1960s was a consequence of preaching, particularly by the Catholic Church. During this period the church, while preaching abstinence, employed thousands of priests active in the community, many of whom were secretly molesting young boys and girls. No doubt getting some of them pregnant, and grooming others to be their homosexual lovers. Key findings from the recent child sexual abuse royal commission include: abuse mostly occurred in religious institutions (58%), most victims were male (64%), most of those perpetrating the abuse were male (94%), the average age of the victims is now 53 years.

After some decades, finally, Australian society has woken-up and owned-up to this scandal. Times have changed, and unmarried pregnant women and homosexuals are now embraced.

It is my observation that homosexuality is now almost revered; at least by those who consider themselves progressive, trend-setters, supporters of the arts – our most virtuous. So, what does it say about this same group, that they now actively support hatred of so-called climate change deniers?

The arts community successfully sought government funding for a play entitled ‘Kill Climate Deniers’ that has just now opened at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney.

What special knowledge could so-called ‘climate deniers’ possess that would turn the now most virtuous in our society so against us – against my group. Find more than 40 unique weed seeds strains, including regular feminized, auto-flowering, and high-CBD medical marijuana seeds.

This is a screenshot, incredibly in Australia in 2018, it is fine to advocate on the internet the death of those who hold a different perspective on climate change. Indeed, I can’t see anywhere the words ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’.

Concerned About Prof Peter Ridd

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I have been chatting off-and-on with Peter Ridd, now Professor of Physics at James Cook University, for nearly two decades. We both resent the lack of honesty in the reporting of many environmental issues.

Peter Ridd, Professor of Physics, James Cook University, Townsville

Earlier this week, Prof Ridd was concerned that his recent comments to Sid Maher at The Australian newspaper [1], and then his appearance on Sky News TV with Alan Jones and Peta Credlin [2], had not been received at all well by the University.

In particular, he has written and said:

“Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.”[3]

There is a website Retraction Watch [4], reporting on both the circumstances of papers being retracted, and more widely on the issue of fraud in science. It shows that there is a widespread problem: that Prof Ridd is correct to be concerned about what he often refers to as the general lack of ‘quality control’.

Rather than James Cook University sacking Peter Ridd for having the courage to speak out, it would be good if they would get behind him, and his calls for urgent reform.

*****

1. Maher, S. 2017. ‘No proper scrutiny’ of $1bn reef rescue funding’, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/no-proper-scrutiny-of-1bn-reef-rescue-funding/news-story/3a317e01f01c2ec61b102718be2feff1

2. Jones & Co. 2017. Sky News TV, https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/892337964851712000

3. Ridd, P. 2017. The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Corals, and Problems with Policy Science. In Climate Change: The Facts, Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, Editor J. Marohasy, Pages 282-296.

4. Retraction Watch, http://retractionwatch.com/

Her Best Memories Were of Lying on the Sand in Dry Creek Beds, Watching the Stars

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When I was at University in Brisbane in the early 1980s, some of my friends used to going skiing during the winter holidays; the two or three weeks in June or July between semesters. I assumed I didn’t have enough money for skiing, and anyway I was looking for warmth. It was possible to get a discounted student ticket on the train, on the Sunlander north to Cairns. From there, I once hitchhiked to the hippy camps where we protested against a proposed road into the Daintree rainforest.

I also liked to go to Cairns because of my Aunty Diana, who lived there in a brightly-painted little wooden Queenslander on very high stilts. She collected all manner of things, but mostly old blue bottles, dug up from mining sites, which she stacked high on purpose build shelves. This shelving was concentrated against one wall of the dark interior living room where the bottles on the wooden shelves reached from the floor to the ceiling.

Aunty Diana, on her birthday, four years ago, just north of Cairns.
Aunty Diana, on her birthday, four years ago, just north of Cairns.

Aunty Diana never married, but had a partner who was once a brickies’ labourer. He was not always agreeable, but he tolerated me as a freckle-faced late teen with a large smile and no shoes who refused to shave her legs or under-arms. When I arrived once with Louise, a uni student studying architecture, Tony sat us at the kitchen table, gave us beers, and then went on about architects, and how most of them didn’t actually know the first practical thing about building a house.

The next day we went to Green Island with Diana, and the day after she insisted on hiring us a mini moke so we could explore the Atherton Tablelands. She hired it from the motel where she worked as a cook. We were just 18 years old, but I remember she ticked the box “over 21”, a condition of hire, while winking at me. Then she signed the document on my behalf.

On another visit, when I climbed their front wooden stairs late one night with a ‘Furious Turtles’ band member and some others, Tony let me in. But, despite my protests, he insisted that the boys could only stay until morning and they had to sleep under the house.

I turned-up over and over, because tropical Cairns was where I went in winter, and I enjoyed my Aunt’s company.

We would walk about her garden finding caterpillars. She deliberately planted particular native vines in her garden to attract the rarest of native butterfly species. When there were too many on a particular plant, she would move them. She would even bring home foliage to feed them in boxes.

Aunty Diana would keep the chrysalises safe until they hatched as butterflies, and then release them. Well not all of them. There was the odd butterfly that she killed, pinned and framed.

She was delighted when I decided to become an entomologist.

Reminiscing some years ago, Aunty Diana then in her early seventies, told me that her very best memories where of sleeping out in the ambien open, under the stars with Tony when they were young. She told me that they would spend the day digging like archeologists at abandoned mining sites in remote locations. Not for gold, but for the items the gold miners had discarded, especially old bottles. Then she said, it was wonderful to find a dry sandy creek bed, make a fire, and eventually fall asleep watching the stars.

Aunty Diana died Wednesday night.

She has arranged for there to be no funeral. She is just to be cremated, and then buried with her dog, in the back garden of the house in Cairns.

If I was 18 again, I would just turn up, and wait until that happened, so I could be there to say goodbye.

Instead, I simply put on the crystal earrings that she gave me so many years ago, and write something. Vale Aunty Diana.

Will the Senate Select Committee Care About the Fish, or the Estuary?

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I will be in Goolwa, just to the north west of the Murray River’s sea mouth, on Tuesday 8th December to give evidence to the Senate Select Committee on the Murray Darling Basin Plan.

Map-MDB-circleGOOLWA

This committee is chaired by David Leyonhjelm, the libertarian senator from NSW, and has a mandate to report on both the positive and negative aspects of the new Basin Plan by 26th February 2016.

The Basin Plan, a requirement under the Water Act 2007, has resulted in the redistribution of vast quantities of fresh water previously used to grow food upstream in places like the Riverina, ostensibly to the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth.

Much of the campaigning for water reform, led by the Australian Conservation Foundation, has specifically and falsely claimed that this water is needed to flush the Murray’s mouth. Never mind that river flow must first make it across a vast shallow lake and through a series of barrages before it can get to the mouth.

If the barrages were removed, the tides of the Southern Ocean could score the Murray’s sea mouth each autumn at no cost to Australian tax payers.

The barrages are massive sea dykes built in the 1930s to prevent inflows from the South Ocean, and are often closed to ensure the Lower Lakes are kept above sea level. The entire Lower Lakes environment is artificial, something resembling a duck pond the size of Port Phillip Bay, where Adelaide’s elite like to go sailing on the weekend.

We really are a rich nation that we can divert water once used to grow food, to this contrived oasis in the driest state on the driest continent. It is of course a lie that this water is for the environment. It has been taken from agriculture, but it is not sustaining a natural system.

My submission to the Senate Committee includes some discussion of the need to restore the estuary, but it is more generally focused on fish. I explain that despite tens of millions of dollars spent on a native fish strategy, many species show no signs of recovery to preEuropean levels. This is because issues of cold water pollution, predation from introduced salmonids, and also restoration of the estuary, have not been addressed.

This submission, on behalf of The Myth and the Murray Group, can be accessed here:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/JenniferMarohasy-Think-About-The-Fish.pdf