David Archibald tells lies about Australia's climate, at WUWT

David Archibald is someone who often predicts the world is about to get very, very cold. He's not a denier, he's a disinformer. He tells lies. One of the many who Anthony Watts promotes on his climate conspiracy blog WUWT.

I couldn't let this one pass, because this time he was claiming it hasn't warmed in Australia in 40 years. He's wrong. It has.

Below is a chart showing the surface warming from data recorded and analysed by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, one of the foremost climate and weather offices in the world. It includes a LOESS smooth (red line) and a linear trend line from 1979 to 2017.

Where has it warmed in Australia?

The Bureau of Meteorology has a lot of information on temperature and precipitation and other data relating to weather and climate. There is a map showing how the mean temperature has changed across the continent since 1970. Two tiny pockets in the north west have cooled a tad. Most of the country is heating up a lot.

The latest 10 year period is 0.5 C hotter than it was forty years ago

There's more. Below is a decadal chart of the above, which makes it even easier to compare the average 10 year temperature of four decades ago with that of the most recent 10 year period.

As you can see, the most recent 10 year period had an average surface temperature 0.5 C higher than the 10 year period forty years ago. That's a lot. That's the average increase over the entire continent.

Now what David used to support his claim was the temperature of the lower troposphere as estimated by the UAH team. Here is what David wrote:

Australia’s atmospheric temperature has been a paragon of stability. There has been no increase over the last 40 years. Since global warming has to start in the atmosphere, there has been no global warming in Australia. No Australian under the age of 40 has experienced global warming. Given the way the Sun is going, they are likely to miss out altogether.

He's wrong. He's telling lies. I'll show you the decadal chart of UAH data for the lower troposphere over Australia using the same data that David says he used.

So David lied. Even for UAH, the lower troposphere was 0.49 C hotter for the latest decade than for the 10 year period forty years ago.

There is another data set. It's the one put together by the team at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). That data doesn't show the air over Australia. What they show are the changes in the air over the latitudes 20 South to 70 South, which covers all but the very top part of Australia and a lot of the ocean below (down to Antarctica). Here is a decadal chart:

The RSS data for this latitude range shows the most recent 10 year period as being 0.41 C hotter than that forty years ago. Bear in mind that these data cover the entire latitude band, which is mostly ocean. The land warms faster than the ocean and, in any case, this isn't the surface (where we Australians live), it's measuring the temperature up to about 10 km above the surface, with most weighting at around 2.5 km up in the air.

If there's anyone who mistakenly thinks that WUWT is a science blog, let this be another lesson for you. It's not. It's a blog where people who want to disinform the public go to post misleading articles and ridiculous comments. It's full of wacky conspiracy theories, appalling pseudo-science and fringe right wing politics. It's got nothing to do with climate science.