July Temp

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The average minimum and maximum July temperatures
in Melbourne since 1855.

Pick the trend.

The Age, 19th May, 2015

Myth 8

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Trending...up.

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The average annual minimum and maximum temperatures in Melbourne since 1954.

November Temperatures

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The average minimum and maximum temperatures

in Melbourne in November since I was born in 1954. Both are trending up.

No, no case for causality.

For J Cosmo Newbery

Average October Temperatures in Melbourne since 1855

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Seems to be trending up recently.

First Rely - France

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I wrote to all members (bar one) of the G20, asking for climate change to be on the agenda.

This is the first reply (Babelfish rough translation):

The President of the French Republic has received mail that you have wanted to send him and told me the care to respond to you. 

Be sure that he has been aware of your expectations for the next G20 Summit which will be held on 15 and 16 November next in your country in Brisbane. 

Please accept, Sir, the assurance of my highest consideration.

A couple of garden bits...

A poetry site had the prompt "What do you see out your window?"  

I took a photo but never wrote the poem.

◊◊◊

With a week of 30-40 degree days, possibly more, 

I have opted to turn the vegetable garden into a tent.

And another thing...

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Well, the same thing really, different outlet.

Colourful pic but things look black.

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Nah, couldn't be climate change.

Just a natural variation that has a longer cycle than the news archives, I guess.
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Wow, that was lucky!

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Cyclone Yasi heads towards Queensland (you remember, that place that had the floods).

The biggest one on record but then record falling is so passé nowadays.

It is a good thing that climate change is a myth, one could start to worry.
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Well, that's a good thing!

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Enormous number of weather records set in the US this last week - highs as well as lows.

Good thing 'climate change' is just a plot of the Lefties and not actually real, isn't it?
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August Hotly

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◊ August was the hottest August on record for all parts of Australia.

◊ The first eight months of 2009 were the driest first eight months of a year on record in Melbourne.

Not that climate change is a real or serious issue, of course.

Sure.
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Hot August Night

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Late Saturday night was the hottest August night on record in Melbourne.

Climate change? How could I even dream of suggesting such a thing.
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Yeah, I know. But...

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Yeah, yeah, I know. I have been mislead by the scientists who should know better. I should not have tried to apply logic to God's great plan. I should fall to the feet of Tom and Bartek and Avus and all those wise people who say we innocents are being hoodwinked by the climate change chorus.

But you can't avoid one fact...

This has been the driest start to the year here since records started to be kept.

I keep plugging away, pointing out the succession of new records being achieved here in Melbourne, as I can't help feeling, despite the wise and venerable panel of worthy gentlemen telling me otherwise, that if we keep hitting the dusty end of the superlative spectrum over and over again then, perhaps, something is really happening.

...

First of the season.

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It is spring in Melbourne. The vegetable garden is growing apace.

My Granny used to plant and tend her tomatoes, shading them from frosts, early in the season and considered it some achievement if she managed to get tomatoes before Christmas.

I picked my first tomato yesterday.

November 27th.

Four weeks before Christmas.

Just another pointer at the 'non-existent' climate change.
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A reply to Bartek...

Bartek commented on one of my previous posts and suggested that weather patterns are not a good place to look for evidence of climate change as, firstly, our ability to measure the weather accurately was not as great 100 years ago and, secondly, one hundred years is not long enough to determine the true natural cycles of the earth's climate.

I should point out that Bartek and I travelled together in Morocco in August and, while I am serious about this subject, it should be read in a friendly tone.

Before I look at his two points, let me just step back a bit and take a broader view of the carbon cycle. Carbon is one of the 92 naturally occurring elements on the planet. We cannot make it and, excluding the odd rocket leaving the planet and the odd meteor entering, the amount of carbon on this planet is a constant.

It is found in three places:

1. The biomass - plants, insects, fish and animals.

2. Ground storage - oil, gas, coal and carbonate minerals.

3. The atmosphere - carbon dioxide.

The general trend of human occupation of this planet is to reduce biomass and consume the ground reserves. The carbon has to go somewhere, and that is to the atmosphere. Reafforestation and carbon sequestration are attempts to reverse this trend. Reafforestation is good but lags well behind still ongoing deforestation. Carbon sequestration sounds good in principle but I can't help having a sneaky suspicion that the carbon dioxide will leak out of what is effectively a hot rock sponge. We will see on that one but the catch is that it is an energy intensive process to capture, liquify and pump the carbon dioxide. Which produces carbon dioxide.

But the mass balance for the carbon cycle is irrefutable. The carbon has to be somewhere.

The question is: will it being in the atmosphere affect the climate?

It is easy enough, in the laboratory, to show that increasing the level of carbon dioxide in an enclosed atmosphere results in more absorbed infra-red radiation and subsequently raised temperatures. I should add that other gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, the most important of them being water vapour.

Water vapour is an important greenhouse gas? Yep. And if other gases, such as carbon dioxide, raise the atmospheric temperature you get more water in the atmosphere which raises the temperature further.

One of the problems that Melbourne has been having is that the humidity of the air has been too low for it to rain. Frustratingly, the clouds just drift past. Humidity is a function of temperature; raise the temperature of a gas and it will lower its relative humidity and it will hold much more water vapour.

To a chemist, all the chemistry and all the physics say that the process of global warming is a realistic one. The theory holds together.

As a gardener, I can agree that we are getting very little rain in Melbourne. As the friend of a farmer in central Victoria who has seen poor or failed crops for the last ten years I can tell you that the drought is having a devastating effect, financially, physically and mentally.

But is is really a drought? Or has the climate changed?

So, back to Bartek's issues:

Issue 1. Measurement techniques were flawed in the past.
Which measurements? My original post lamented the number of months when rainfall was below average. It is hard to get rainfall measurements wrong, if anything the old ones, if they were inaccurate, would be expected to be lower rather than higher, which only enhances my argument (and increases my lamentations). If they were randomly wrong then you would expect to see larger variation in the older data in charts like this:

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The last ten years have been consistently below the median. The variation, visually at least as I can't be bothered doing the maths, seems fairly consistent 1855 - 1997.

Issue 2: That the natural changes in the climate are on much bigger cycles.
No doubt true. But that does not discount man-made additions to the cycles.

Melbourne's weather seems to have changes abruptly in 1997. I don't know why. If it was a natural cycle, I would expect a smoother change over a longer time.

That will do, I need to go and bucket water onto my vegetables.
...

I still don't care what you say...

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In a previous post, Tom took at shot at me about my concerns about climate change.

Is it real, or is it natural variation?

Well, the above graph displays Melbourne's rainfall against its expected average for 2008.

So far this month, two thirds through, we have received 9.0 mm (expected average = 66.5 mm).
Not looking good for October, Tom.

You can see that we have had eight months below average and only one above this year. If you say that you can reasonably expect half the readings to be above average and half to be below, then there is a binomial probability of 1.8% of this occuring.

But it you go back to the start of the century, there have been only 27 months with above average rainfall. That's out of 105 months. The probability of this occurring is less than 0.00005%

If it was a coin toss competition you would be starting to suspect foul play.
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Wicked but nice.

We had a log fire on Saturday night.

In this whole climate change environment we probably shouldn't have but it was lovely. Wicked things often are.

We had had our dinner and sat in front of the fire, flipping through travel brochures and planning our adventures.

2008 is going to be very busy.

And then I found myself reading some psychology articles on travel. Big mistake.

The gist of the findings were:

1. We have an overly rosy view of our holidays before we go.
2. While on holidays our view is generally positive but tempered by all the minor annoyances that we didn’t include in our rosy anticipation. Such as weather, lost things, bugs, etc.
3. Looking back on a holiday we return to having a rosy view, comparable to the pre-trip view. We edit out the boring bits; sort of like the edited highlights of a cricket match.
4. The same rosy view applies to our view of our home as our return from holidays approaches.
5. The worst holidays make the best memories.
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