Hottest November in Australia - during a La Niña!

 What can I say? This is climate change.

Figure 1 | November mean temperature anomaly Australia. Source: Bureau of Meteorology

We're in the midst of a La Niña so it's not meant to be hot like this, let alone the hottest November in the record. 

Okay, for the purists and deniers instead of saying this *is* climate change let me say this is *expected* with climate change. No, it's really not expected. It's just what's happening. 

How about this is *consistent with* climate change. Is it really? Is this really expected this year, in 2020, when emissions are lower because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there's a La Niña? 

I must ask you, what the heck will be "consistent with" or "expected" for the rest of this decade?

It's climate change on top of drought, heat and wind, not arson, that's behind Australia's fires

Know what? If I see another know-nothing denier try to claim "it's not climate change it's arson" or "backburning" or "not enough prescribed burns" or "it's not happening", I'll scream.

I was going to deal quickly with "it's arson", then move onto prescribed or controlled burns. However, I'll now devote this article just to the arson furphy, because the false meme is appearing all over the place, even being insinuated in mainstream media. Some people are suggesting it's an organised disinformation campaign. I don't know about that, but it is being fanned by the usual crowd of deniers, including many from the USA and other places outside Australia. [Edit: I've added a tweet below, which expresses my disdain for the people spreading this meme.]

The people spreading lies about arson are dangerous, arguably worse than any arsonist.

The "it's arson" disinformers are downplaying the extreme hazard of fire and the huge risks of going into fire-prone areas when fire conditions are extreme or catastrophic (Code Red).

— Sou at HotWhopper (@Sou_HotWhopper) January 9, 2020

Let me be clear. Arson is not the reason for the catastrophic fires this summer. There has always been arson but never a fire season as bad as this one. These major fires are there because the bush is so dry and because it's been so hot. Fires need ample fuel, wind and an ignition. The fuel is ample, because even though there's not been much growth in vegetation because of the drought, what's there is dry and easily ignited. There've been enough windy days to fan the flames and spread the fires further. And there's been ignition, obviously. Mostly (in the case of the major fires), the ignition has been lightning.

2019 goes out with many bangs - Australia's hottest year and hottest decade on record

Australia has just had another "hottest year" on record beating the last by quite a way. The average mean annual temperature was a huge 1.52 C above the 1961-1990 mean. The average maximum was a whopping 2.09 C above and the average minimum (not a record) was 0.95 C above the 1961-1990 mean.

I've plotted all these on the same vertical axis for comparison. Scroll over the charts to see the data labels:

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.

Experts react to the Finkel Review on the future for Australia's electricity generation

Many of you will have been glued to the internet (or television) over the past few hours, first watching the Comey session before the Senate Committee in the USA, then the elections in Britain. While you were being entertained, an important report was released here in Australia. It's known as the Finkel Review, because the panel preparing it was headed by Australia's Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel.

The report is called the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market. It has important implications for how Australia manages the transition away from fossil fuels (particularly coal) into the new energy economy.

Some people are being pragmatic about it, others are concerned that it will mean that Australia will not move quickly enough, and that we won't meet our international obligations.

Below is an article about the report, just published at The Conversation.

Luddite Eric Worrall huffs and puffs and wants to bring back smog @wattsupwiththat

This is interesting. Probably without knowing it, Eric Worrall at WUWT is arguing for a national strategy for the shift to renewable energy. He was writing about an anti-renewables article in The Australian. In part, the article was about how, in the absence of a national electricity strategy, more people will leave the grid. However, the article was clearly propaganda against the shift to renewables, as is the norm for The Australian and it's war against humanity.

That article in The Australian was a Murdoch slant on the preliminary report released last month by the Energy Expert Panel, chaired by the Chief Scientist, Dr. Alan Finkel: Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market (saved here).

Australasian temperatures are unusual in the context of the last thousand years - Joëlle Gergis

You might recall how four years ago science deniers, led by that unsavory character Steve McIntyre, went beserk over a paper by Dr Joëlle Gergis and a team of scientists. The paper was originally published in Journal of Climate but the authors requested it be put on hold. What the researchers were reporting was that recent decades of temperatures recorded in Australia were warmer than at any time in the past millennia.

The paper has now been taken off hold and has been published in the latest issue of the journal. About the paper, Joelle Gergis has said:

We found that the nature of warming experienced in Australasia since 1985-2014 is unusual in the context of the last thousand years...Analysis of climate model simulations shows that the warming experienced since 1950 cannot be explained by natural factors alone, highlighting the role of human caused greenhouse gases in the recent warming of the region.

In the paper the authors describe research looking at proxy reconstructions of temperatures in the warm season in the Australasian region between 1000 and 2001 AD (see Figure 1 below). Since then Australia has got even hotter. The paper is very detailed and interesting, including discussion of the temperature changes over time. For example, the authors point out that in medieval times, warming occurred in the Australasian region later than in parts of the northern hemisphere. However the timing of the minimum temperatures in the Little Ice Age was similar to that in the northern hemisphere.

I'll let Joëlle Gergis tell the rest of the story, from her article at The Conversation. It's not just a story about the research, it's also about sexism, FOI harassment, and general misbehaviour of the sort the world has come to expect from "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists.

The real story of honey bees and a straw man from Anthony Watts at WUWT

Any time there's a chance to reject science, Anthony Watts will grab it with both hands. Today he's decided to build a strawman out of bees. He's found a rather shallow article at Washington Post, which looks to me to have a lot wrong with it. The article was about how beekeepers have managed to rebuild the honey bee population in the USA. It's not yet back to its heyday of 1990, however it's increased from the low days of 2006 by about 20%. Close to the end of the article, a couple of economists are quoted cheerily calling the recovery "a victory for the free market", oblivious to the government support that helped address all the huge problems.

Anthony Watts' strawman

Anthony Watts wrote the headline: "Bee-pocaclypse called off, bees doing OK, global warming was never a cause" and referred to an old article from Wired. I say he referred to it, but he didn't link to it, he just copied and pasted a snapshot of the headline. That very short 2007 Wired article was about an article at Salon. That Salon article in turn was about how scientists were starting to look into the massive decline in the US population of honeybees. There were a lot of possible reasons put forward in the Salon article, but at the time (2007), all the research wasn't in.

Needless to say, Anthony Watts didn't give any insight into US honey bees. He doesn't do background research. His forte is copying and pasting slabs of text pinched from somewhere or other, putting his "claim" dogwhistle headlines on top of scientific press releases, and promoting logical fallacies and wacky climate conspiracy theories.

Five people died in Queensland floods

The weather in much of eastern Australia has been extreme over the past few weeks. That's only one of the words I can find to describe it. In just the last 24 hours, five people have died as a result. That's in a country where people are not unused to floods.

This is May already. The wet season should be done. In any case, this is south of the tropics. Yet not long after incredible downpours and floods in the Hunter region in NSW, there've been such heavy rains over part of south eastern Queensland that it's taken the lives of five people - in three separate events of cars being washed away by floodwaters.

Please, people - take care out there. Weather can be extremely dangerous.

Wildfires add to atmospheric CO2: A lesson for Australia from California

There still isn't a lot happening in deniersville. Anthony Watts and his readers are gloating that their campaigns against climate science are having an effect. Well, Anthony doesn't actually admit that denier smear campaigns might be giving graduates second thoughts about doing research in climate - however, he and his denier friends are clearly delighted to hear that some conference in India didn't get enough papers to go ahead. Or so they say. (Archived here.)

Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of scientists beavering away expanding our understanding of the climate and the earth and all its systems.

Just one more example: Anthony hasn't mentioned this new paper about his home state, California. It's from a team led by Patrick Gonzalez, of the U.S. National Park Service. The scientists found that wildfires (and deforestation) are contributing quite a bit more to greenhouse emissions than previously known.

Australia's coolish (almost normal) January - where are the fake sceptics?

This January has seemed to me to be relatively cool, almost "normal" where I live in south-eastern Australia. That is, normal compared to the past few years.

I've been looking to find articles on denier blogs claiming the Bureau of Meteorology has been fudging the temperatures downwards. But not a peep or a squeak, let alone a squawk of the type during our record hot summers. On the contrary, some deniers are now taking the BoM reports as gospel and claiming that it means that an ice age cometh.

Jo Nova (who I've been told complains I don't write about her nonsense enough) hasn't written anything. Jennifer Marohasy, who likes to keep a close (closed?) eye on Australian temperatures has been quiet. (Actually, I had to check both because they are not regular haunts of mine. I discovered that Jennifer's been away since last October.)

I first commented on this a few days ago saying that at the Australian Open they were wearing jumpers this year, unlike last year when people were collapsing on the court from the heat. It felt more like last century than this one. Anecdotal isn't all that reliable so I went to the repository of Australian temperatures to see what's been happening.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Australia - plus more

Here is the article about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with particular reference to Australia. I'll warn you in advance - it's long, a bit meandering, probably could do with more illustrations, and not a complete guide to everything. That's my excuses out of the way. I figure I've spent enough time on it so here it is. Feel free to add what you know and correct what I don't :)

In the previous article, I referred to some comments by a contributor, trying to argue that Australia's record heat of the 2012-13 summer was caused by a (non-existent) spike in the PDO index, or was an advance reaction to a spike that had not yet appeared. His comments were not easy to follow. Thing is, the PDO index wasn't positive during the Australian summer of 2012-13. In fact it did not register as positive until January 2014. There's more to it than that, in any case.

Heat, Heat Waves and Angry Australian Summers (and Years)

I recently wrote a short article about the summer of 2012-13 in Australia. It got some reaction from one person in particular who was claiming the record heat couldn't be attributed to global warming, he postulated that it was caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (eventually having some comments moved).

Rum Runner's challenge

He also posed a challenge. Rum Runner wrote: (October 9, 2014 at 2:26 AM)

@Lou "Why do you think I run this blog?"
A sense of empowerment I suppose. On other people's blogs you'd have your ass handed to you on a plate in an open debate. But here you can just *pop* delete any responses that are a bit too challenging for you.

I assume that by Lou he meant Sou. Here are the comments Rum Runner would have been talking about.

Now since Rum Runner regards the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society as "political advocacy", and says that therefore doesn't take his information from there; and since he doesn't seem to have recognised as Australians, the scientists who wrote the papers I referred him to, I'll admit it's not much of a challenge.

Still, I thought it worthwhile doing two things. First, reporting some of the latest scientific findings about the weather Australia experienced in 2012 and 2013. And secondly, briefly touching on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - what it is and what is known about it and its effects on weather - in Australia and elsewhere. (I've written about the PDO a couple of times - here and here.) This article is about the former. I'll be writing a separate article on the PDO in the near future.

Australia looks forward to still hotter from the extra CO2

There are four papers in the BAMS supplement relating to the years 2012 and 2013.

The first one is: "The role of anthropogenic forcing in the record 2013 Australia-wide annual and spring temperatures" by Sophie C Lewis and David J Karoly.

What they did was investigate the roles of anthropogenic climate change and natural variability in regard to the record-breaking heat of 2013.

No, Anthony Watts, this global warming is not "natural"

They really are a pack of duffers at WUWT, aren't they. Anthony Watts has an article about a doctoral thesis on climate change communication, which was based on farmers in Sweden (archived here). The paper was by Therese Apslund of Linköping University, The Tema Institute, Department of Water and Environmental Studies. Anthony reckons that:

Swedish farmers reject the 97% climate change consensus
...The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund, who led the study, was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change, but got a lesson in reality from swedish famers [sic].

I looked over the paper and, while many of the farmers involved in the study were questioning whether global warming is anthropogenic in origin or merely some local variability, it's clear it wasn't all farmers in Sweden who doubt climate science. However farmers are a conservative lot in the main. If Swedish farmers are anything like Australian farmers then there will be a large proportion of them who are slow to accept science (including agricultural science). The more progressive the farmer in regard to adopting new farm technology, the more likely she is to accept climate science.

Climate change and agriculture

Here's a short article on some of the downsides of climate change and opportunities that climate change may create for Australian agriculture. And here's a list of just some of the research that is going on in my part of the world, to help farmers adapt. And if you think farmers as a whole are oblivious to the science you'd be wrong. Australia's peak farmer organisation, the National Farmers' Federation has this to say in it's policy statement on climate change:

The changing climate is potentially the biggest issue facing Australian farmers in the future. As a sector so dependent on natural resources, climate change poses a significant challenge to agriculture.

Anyway, the doctoral paper was about communication and framing of information about climate science and its implications. It wasn't an opinion poll of Swedish farmers.

Cyber-clubs for fools

As you know, deniers will turn to anyone to support their rejection of science. They find it reassuring that there are other wilfully ignorant people in the world. That doesn't make the science wrong, it just means that if you reject science (be it evolution, climate, geology, medicine or whatever) you can find like-minded people on blogs created as cyber-clubs for fools - like WUWT.

From the WUWT comments

Jean Parisot says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:07 pm
So the hypothesis that the farmers are right didn’t make it into the study?
God Forbid we listen to people with decades and generations of experience dealing with weather and climate professionally.

earwig42 doesn't realise that consensus is intrinsic to science. There'd be virtually no scientific advances if not for consensus. Researchers would be stuck in a loop forever repeating research from first principles. earwig42 says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:12 pm
Consensus is (or should be) irrelevant in Science. In Politics it is everything.

john piccirilli has a very strange view of scientists who research how the earth works, and says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:16 pm
Who do you believe, a farmer who is out in the weather every day 12hours a day, or some clown
Sitting in an air conditioned cube playing with his computer trying to get grant money? 

Mac the Knife is proud of his scientific illiteracy and says:

June 30, 2014 at 9:19 pm
God Bless the Farmers, every one!
From an old Wisconsin plow boy, bale chucker, and …. manure shoveler,
Mac

ntesdorf mimics john piccirilli says:

June 30, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Farmers around the World are practical people. Their livelihood depends on their having a knowledge of weather that is rather lengthy and rather detailed and which is passed on over the generations. Who would you rather believe on the Climate, a farmer who spends much of his day out in the weather or a government paid scientist who spends his day hunched over his computer, submitting applications for CAGW Grants?

NikFromNYC is a very mixed up chappie. He believes in the "climate science is a hoax" conspiracy but at the same time denounces Tim Ball's idiocy when he says:

June 30, 2014 at 10:54 pm
The full opening sentence is: “Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing because of the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide humankind pumps into our fragile atmosphere.”

This claim lives on and on as if alarm too is agreed upon and as if mainstream skepticism denies the textbook greenhouse effect. Alas, just enough do in fact loudly deny it to allow this slander to continue. Gee thanks, Tim Ball, a regular writer here, coauthor of the Sky Dragon book. Thankfully Mark Steyn has taken Ball’s ball and run with it with a counter suit against Mann, minus the maverick background. Sure, perhaps the greenhouse effect is lesser than assumed, but it’s self-defeating to promote that idea out of the blue in the face of clear evidence of scientific fraud coupled to highly speculstive amplification of that assumed greenhouse effect. A focus on fraud is now dearly needed, and you can’t cry fraud unless you also utterly and fully distance yourself from mavericks, because it won’t otherwise work, since no layperson will believe you when Al Gore can sincerely point to your association with greenhouse effect denial. 

Mario Lento has no idea that the climate has been relatively stable throughout human civilisation. He's going to be in for a rude shock in coming decades (depending on how old he is):

June 30, 2014 at 10:57 pm
The argument is silly. Climate changing is a given. Otherwise the word climate would have been defined as “homeostasis until the advent of industry.” The real deniers are CAGW believers.

---

Asplund, Therese. "Climate change frames and frame formation: An analysis of climate change communication in the Swedish agricultural sector." (2014). DOI:10.3384/diss.diva-105997

CO2 Downunder: The greening of Anthony Watts and his greenhouse effect deniers

Update -- see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up (archived here) about a new paper in Nature, except he doesn't know what he's writing about (as usual). His headline was:

Unsettled science: New study challenges the consensus on CO2 regulation – modeled CO2 projections exaggerated

No, Anthony. Modeled CO2 projections aren't exaggerated.

WUWT conspiracy nutters thrive with high CO2

Anthony's opening line was not only wrong, it was pure conspiracy ideation:

I’m really quite surprised to find this paper in Nature, especially when it makes claims so counter to the consensus that model projections are essentially a map of the future climate.

That's feeding the paranoia of the nutters at WUWT, who think that journals filter out science that doesn't support a consensus.  The opposite is true. Journals, particularly high profile journals like Nature, prefer papers that buck the consensus, that make headlines, that help promote the journal.  This paper doesn't buck any consensus in any real way. Instead it probes the detail and adds more knowledge.

Fact is, Anthony is getting his (dis)information from another denier website. Not a wise thing to do if you are interested in science, which Anthony isn't. He's a science disinformer so naturally rather than interpret the science, he interprets interpretations of science disinformers :)

Floods led to massive plant growth in semi-arid regions

Anthony got the paper right up to a point. What the large team of researchers found was that the record floods in Australia boosted vegetation so much that it sucked up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.  As the abstract states (my paras and bold italics):

We use a terrestrial biogeochemical model, atmospheric carbon dioxide inversion and global carbon budget accounting methods to investigate the evolution of the terrestrial carbon sink over the past 30 years, with a focus on the underlying mechanisms responsible for the exceptionally large land carbon sink reported in 2011 (ref. 2). 

Here we show that our three terrestrial carbon sink estimates are in good agreement and support the finding of a 2011 record land carbon sink. Surprisingly, we find that the global carbon sink anomaly was driven by growth of semi-arid vegetation in the Southern Hemisphere, with almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems, where prevalent La Niña conditions caused up to six consecutive seasons of increased precipitation.

In addition, since 1981, a six per cent expansion of vegetation cover over Australia was associated with a fourfold increase in the sensitivity of continental net carbon uptake to precipitation.

Our findings suggest that the higher turnover rates of carbon pools in semi-arid biomes are an increasingly important driver of global carbon cycle inter-annual variability and that tropical rainforests may become less relevant drivers in the future. More research is needed to identify to what extent the carbon stocks accumulated during wet years are vulnerable to rapid decomposition or loss through fire in subsequent years.

What happened in Australia

Australia's long term average precipitation over the period 1900 to 2009 was 453 mm. In 2010 it was 703 mm and in 2011 it was 708 mm. That's a lot more rain. That made those two years combined the wettest since records began in 1900 and is attributed to La Niña, which also brought above average rain to southern Africa and northern South America. The rain was extra heavy, even for La Niña, because of global warming. The seas are hotter so more water is evaporating.  As reported at The Conversation, GRACE satellites estimated a decrease in ocean water mass of 1.8 trillion tonnes, with water shifted from the oceans to land. Sea levels dropped by a massive 5 mm.

Here is an illustration of what happened to the vegetation:

Modelled carbon uptake of the Australian landscape in December 2009 (before) compared with the start of the big wet in December 2010 (after). Adapted from Source: The Conversation.

Semi-arid regions vs tropical rainforests as carbon sinks

Thing is, conventional wisdom holds that it's tropical rainforests that are the most important carbon sink and will continue to be so. However this new research shows that semi-arid regions may become increasingly important as carbon sinks if events such as those described above occur more often. Semi-arid regions represent around 40% of the world's land surface.

A roller coaster of carbon shifts?

Australia as you know is also prone to drought and bushfires. Australia is the second driest continent on earth, after Antarctica. Any person who lives up the bush will tell you that the worst fire risk comes after a "good season". Lush vegetation dries out and fires take hold. What that does is unleash all that carbon that's been taken up by the extra growth and returns it to the atmosphere.

During the big wet, there weren't so many fires. It wasn't just Queensland that got wet, half of my own home state was under water for much of the 2011 summer. Much of Central Australia was virtually a giant lake. Western Australia had huge floods as well. The authors state that fire emissions were suppressed by about 30%, which "contributed even further to the continent's greening".

The good news of this carbon sink is tempered by the bad. In wet seasons there will probably continue to be a lot more carbon stored in new vegetation and in the soil. However with the projected climate change across much of Australia, it's likely that there will be more droughts and fires, which will result in all that carbon going back into the atmosphere. It won't stay locked up.

The interesting thing buried in the detail of the article at The Conversation, is that Australia has been greening more since the 1980s, not all with a good outcome (note the expansion of invasive species). The authors write:

In addition to the unprecedented vegetation greening of Australia during 2010 and 2011, we also observe a greening trend over the continent since 1980s, particularly during the months of the Australian autumn (March, April, and May).

That has happened for a number of reasons, including increased continental rainfall over the past few decades; plants growing in an atmosphere with increasing carbon dioxide using water more efficiently; and changes in land management such as fire suppression, expansion of invasive species, and changes in livestock grazing that have led to more woodland.

There have been previous studies that show that the increased carbon dioxide in the air is leading to more growth in Australia's native flora (as elsewhere in the world), particular in the arid regions. I wrote about this research on my slumbering Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera blog.

Where Anthony Watts gets it wrong - a short-lived sink

Of course Anthony Watts misrepresents the science. He isn't even aware of the paper itself. He only linked to an article in Nature about the paper calling it "a new paper". And he missed out completely on showing the article in The Conversation by two of the paper's authors.

Anthony wrote (my bold italics):

The authors find links between the land CO2 sink in these semi-arid ecosystems “are currently missing from many major climate models.” In addition, they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated.

Obviously Anthony is wrong when he claims that land sinks are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, otherwise atmospheric CO2 wouldn't be above 400 ppm or rising at 3 ppm a year, like it is. It's simple arithmetic. While it is quite possible/probable that some climate models don't provide for CO2 sinks in semi-arid regions during big wets like the recent ones in Australia, I don't know where Anthony got his bit about exaggeration from either. It's not in the page he published from the Nature article about the paper (by Daniel B. Metcalfe). He probably got it from his denier blog source or maybe he just made it up. What the authors say at the Conversation is that the large uptake of carbon in 2011 was likely short-lived, because there was a rapid decline in the sink strength in 2012. So that suggests that Anthony is wrong as usual.

More volatility in CO2 levels

The ramifications of the research are that there is likely to be a lot more volatility in CO2 levels. Vegetation in semi-arid regions isn't like that in tropical rainforests.  The latter store carbon in hardwoods, which can lock it up for centuries. By contrast, in semi-arid regions carbon is stored in grasses and shrubs, which are relatively short-lived and prone to fire and drought, which quickly releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.  The authors say:

Increasingly, semi-arid regions are driving variability in how much carbon dioxide remains in the Earth’s atmosphere each year. And that has major implications for the long-term, including whether future climate change will slow down or accelerate further.

There's not very much information about the carbon budget in arid and semi-arid regions and I expect this research will lead to more. It could be that climate change will accelerate a lot, or proceed more slowly. I won't be betting on the latter until there's a lot more information.

Update

There is an excellent FAQ on this topic, prepared by the researchers.

From the WUWT comments

As usual, deniers at WUWT only like stuff that they think supports their ideology. Being fake sceptics, they don't check facts for themselves.  Also, the greenhouse effect deniers are out in force, suggesting that Anthony is rapidly losing faith with more rational, intelligent fake sceptics (if there is such a beast). Maybe Anthony's readership is shrinking to the utter nutters:

RayG is a greenhouse effect denier who refuses to read science. He stopped reading at the first hurdle, and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:14 am
I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

hunter is another greenhouse effect denier and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:18 am
While the assertion that CO2 is *the* climate thermostat is dubious, at least this article is exploring one of the significant failings of the current CO2 obsession.

Latitude says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:23 am
Well, I mean really….
who was stupid enough in the first place to think an additional 2 ppm/yr would overwhelm the system

Dave says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:41 am
RayG says: I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

Obama said it’s a fact. So it’s gotta be true, right? 

Londo says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:43 am
“I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.”

Perhaps that was the price to pay to get the paper through toll gate known as peer review. If there is one unsupported claim that you probably can publish in any climate journal that’s probably it.

Rhoda R says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:44 am
RayG says:
Ray, it may be that that statement was the only way that this study could have been published. I suspect that if the man-made, developed countries driver for C02 is shot down there will be much less interest in government funding of AGW research. 

Michael Gersh isn't just a greenhouse effect denier, he doesn't even accept basic chemistry, that burning hydrocarbon releases CO2 and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:48 am
As many of the actual scientists who have been espousing the “CO2 as Devil” meme walk away from the bad science, this paper tries to reveal that humanity may not even be the cause of higher CO2 concentrations. Those to whom Warmism is a religion will pretend not to notice.

Eliza is hopeful that it's one of the nails in the coffin and figures if climate science gets the chop then the world will magically stop warming. She says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:23 pm
Its probably a discrete “first” way out for NATURE so none of the big AGW shots notice. Its a climb down and we will be seeing more and more of this until the “norm” will in fact be the skeptic position, The whole AGW scam will only completely disappear when the funding dries out. For example, it is highly unlikely that Labor if they win the next election in Australia will pick it up again since Abbot has basically cut off all funding for AGW research and propaganda.

José Tomás says:

May 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Nature and other papers have obviously noticed that CAGW has no future (they are not idiots), but you cannot backtrack and save face at the same time.
So, expect lip service paid to CAGW for a long time, even while published articles go in the opposite direction. 

pokerguy says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:10 am
Can’t speak to the particulars, but seemingly excellent news that this paper has seen the light of day in the current repressive atmosphere. Is it possible things are changing a bit?

agfosterjr says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:52 pm
We see little mention of the Andean Altiplano, where possibly the growth of some species is limited more by CO2 scarcity (partial pressure) than by temperature or rainfall. Current interpretation of mud cores from Lake Titicaca indicates no certain history of Holocene forestation, but oddly enough, introduced eucalyptus (from Australia, of course) has no trouble growing at 4000 meters. It has been in the region for over a century, and is used for firewood and pole wood. If I were concerned with carbon capture I would plant lots of trees up high.
Of course eucalyptus introduces the potential for forest fires, as we have seen in Oakland and recently in Valparaiso. –AGF

This little curiosity caught my attention, not just because agfosterjr seemed to think that aforesting the tiny percentage of the world's land above 4,000 metres would make a huge difference to CO2, but because of his comment about eucalypts. When I looked it up I came across this article from 1999 that stated: The most abundant tree specie is eucalyptus. Growth and development of eucalyptus in the Altiplano is very slow, due to the adversity of the environment such as constant frost and prolonged period without precipitation. So it looks as if eucalyptus growth is retarded by cold and dry conditions.  According to the paper, the trees grow (very slowly) as spindly shrubs. Cold is the main thing stopping trees growing above the treeline generally.  (I guess that means the treeline will rise with global warming.) In the Andean Altiplano, lack of water doesn't help either.

David Ball fails arithmetic

A lot of comments were generated after David Ball failed arithmetic. David Ball, is a chip off the old block,  and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:47 am
As Don Easterbrook pointed out (do not recall the thread), a change from 300ppm to 400ppm is NOT a 30% increase in Co2, as alarmists constantly shout.

No, David, it's a 33% increase. The increase from preindustrial 280 ppm to 400 ppm is a 43% increase in atmospheric CO2. When he's corrected by Scott Scarborough, David doubles down on his arithmetic failure. David Ball says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:28 pm
Firstly, have the courage to address me directly. Secondly, go back to math class.
The clue is ppm. Get a clue:

Various other commenters weighed in, all supporting Scott Scarborough. David Ball retorts with his weird arithmetic, which has nothing to do with his original claim. What he's calculated isn't the amount of increase in CO2 (which has increased by more than 40%), he's talking about the change in CO2 as a percentage of the total atmosphere - going from 0.03% to 0.04%:

May 22, 2014 at 2:41 pm
The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.

What a nutter. Typical of the denialati David Ball is not just very confused about what it is that he's calculating, he's doing a fairly standard version of "how can a trace gas keep the world warm". His dad is a greenhouse effect denier, too, and co-author of the "sky dragon slayers" book - among other things.

---

Benjamin Poulter, David Frank, Philippe Ciais, Ranga B. Myneni, Niels Andela, Jian Bi, Gregoire Broquet, Josep G. Canadell, Frederic Chevallier, Yi Y. Liu, Steven W. Running, Stephen Sitch & Guido R. van der Werf, "Contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13376

Daniel B. Metcalfe, "Climate science: A sink down under." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13341

Donohue, R. J., M. L. Roderick, T. R. McVicar, and G. D. Farquhar (2013), "Impact of CO2 fertilization on maximum foliage cover across the globe's warm, arid environments", Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, doi:10.1002/grl.50563.

Roberto Quiroz and Sassan Saatchi, (1999) "Mapping Aquatic and Agricultural Vegetation of Altiplano Using Spaceborne Radar Imagery",  from JPL-NASA website.

Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat makes a fool of himself (again), this time in the southern hemisphere

I've often noticed that Anthony Watts doesn't read the articles he puts up on his blog. He doesn't even read the articles he posts himself, let alone his guest articles.

This time he's done it again (archived here), with another "claim" article, getting overexcited thinking he's finally found something that will make scientists look foolish - writing as a preface (my bold underline):

From the Australian National University and the department of “claim anything” comes this reversal over what was said two years ago about Antarctica:

“If this rapid warming that we are now seeing continues, we can expect that ice shelves further south along the peninsula that have been stable for thousands of years will also become vulnerable,” said Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University.

So which is it? Rapid warming, or not warming as much because the winds are “strengthened by carbon dioxide”? 

Reversal? Not at all. Anthony thinks he's caught the scientist contradicting herself. But it's only Anthony who, as usual, doesn't understand what he's blogged. Compare the above snippet from his two year old article with this excerpt from today's article, which Anthony himself copied and pasted but claims is contradictory (my bold italics):

While most of Antarctica is remaining cold, rapid increases in summer ice melt, glacier retreat and ice shelf collapses are being observed in Antarctic Peninsula, where the stronger winds passing through Drake Passage are making the climate warm exceptionally quickly.

And if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract of the paper that his article was all about (but of course not, Anthony doesn't even link to the press release he copied let alone cite the paper itself), he could hardly have missed this sentence (my bold italics):

We find that the SAM has undergone a progressive shift towards its positive phase since the fifteenth century, causing cooling of the main Antarctic continent at the same time that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed.  

So there's no "reversal" at all and, as usual, it's Anthony Watts who looks foolish.

As you know, the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica are warming rapidly (think Pine Island Glacier). The east not so much. As well as wondering about his cognitive disorder, you've got to wonder if Anthony Watts realises just how big the continent of Antarctica is. Perhaps he thinks that it's just a tiny island covered in ice. That's if he is aware that Antarctica is a land mass at all, and not floating ice.

The paper itself obviously includes new research, but the fact that the weather patterns in my part of the world (south eastern Australia) are shifting southward has been known for decades. What's new is that scientists have reconstructed the past 1,000 years of annual mean changes in the Southern Annular Mode, using proxy records spanning the full mid-latitude right down to the polar region across the Drake Passage sector. Here's an excerpt from ScienceDaily.com:

Until this study, published in Nature Climate Change, Antarctic climate observations were available only from the middle of last century.

By analysing ice cores from Antarctica, along with data from tree rings and lakes in South America, Dr Abram and her colleagues were able to extend the history of the westerly winds back over the last millennium.

"The Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years," Abram said.

"The strengthening of these winds has been particularly prominent over the past 70 years, and by combining our observations with climate models we can clearly link this to rising greenhouse gas levels."

Study co-authors Dr Robert Mulvaney and Professor Matthew England said the study answered key questions about climate change in Antarctica.

"Strengthening of these westerly winds helps us to explain why large parts of the Antarctic continent are not yet showing evidence of climate warming," said Dr Mulvaney, from the British Antarctic Survey.

"This new research suggests that climate models do a good job of capturing how the westerly winds respond to increasing greenhouse gases," added Professor England, from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.

"This isn't good news for farmers reliant on winter rainfall over the southern part of Australia." 

From the WUWT comments

There aren't many yet and those that are there are largely incoherent nonsense. None of the people commenting so far have read the press release either, just like Anthony. One thing is for sure, no-one goes to WUWT to learn anything from people commenting. (Why do people go there? Is it to have a laugh at the crazy science deniers?)

climatereason as usual shows no ability to live up to his nickname and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:16 am
Dear Anthony
Sigh…
I would like some funding to continue my research into historical climates.
I am willing to put anything into the title of the submission in order to secure some funding, no matter how fanciful.
However, official researchers seek to be cornering the market in all possible explanations of what co2 can do. We need a brainstorming session with readers here so they can submit some plausible titles, no matter how daft they are on closer examination. The only rules are that the words ‘co2′ ’1000 years’, ‘escalating’ and ‘alarming’ should be somewhere in the title.
tonyb

LevelGaze could be an admirer of Professor Matthew England's work but, more likely, he is just another WUWT science denier, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:18 am
Oh, Matthew England is a co-author.
That tells you everything you need to know.

Jeff thinks the research can't be true, not because he has other evidence, but because he's been told that the world as a whole is warming. He can't conceive that some places might warm more quickly than other parts of the globe. I guess he's never travelled more than a mile in either direction from his front door (and doesn't have a radio or television and doesn't know how to get anywhere on the internet except WUWT).

May 12, 2014 at 12:28 am
If this were true we wouldn’t be worrying about global warming at all. It would be ice age time. The problem is, despite this so-called “consensus,” these people can’t keep their stories straight and literally say opposite things which contradict each other. It’s obvious many of these people have no clue what they are talking about.

Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) mutters something meaningless adding, for some reason known only to Otter, lots and lots of dots followed by an interrogation mark:

May 12, 2014 at 12:54 am
Wait… CO2 is trapping cold air over the Antarctic…. but CO2 is causing cold air to break free and flow all over, from the Arctic……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………?

Jones manages only one word. Wonder of wonders, s/he even manages to spell it correctly.

May 12, 2014 at 1:06 am
Magical

I missed a few but you get the gist. That's pretty much it.  The sum total of wisdom and intelligence at the scientific illiterati society aka WUWT.

---

Nerilie J. Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Françoise Vimeux, Steven J. Phipps, John Turner, Matthew H. England. Evolution of the Southern Annular Mode during the past millennium. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2235 

Killer cold, killer heat and Dunning Kruger at WUWT (again)

There was a recent article at WUWT about some research that compared deaths associated with cold in Adelaide and Sweden (archived here).

The implication being, I guess (given that its WUWT), that the cometh-ing ice age will kill everyone, or lots of people, or people who live in Adelaide, or something like that.

The headline Anthony used was: "Forensic science reports more deaths in Australia than Sweden due to cold" but that's a bit misleading.  The press release was only about deaths in South Australia, not Australia as a whole.  Still, it's not that odd, when you think about it, that cold would kill more people in climates where extreme cold is rare than it would in places where cold is the norm.

Here are maps of Australia, showing South Australia and Sweden:

Here is the essential bit from the press release:

South Australia has a higher rate of deaths from extreme cold compared with the northern European nation of Sweden, according to new research from the University of Adelaide.

The study, by a team from the University's School of Medical Sciences, analysed forensic cases of hypothermia deaths from 2006-2011 in both South Australia and Sweden.

The results show that South Australia had a rate of 3.9 deaths for every 100,000 people, compared with Sweden's 3.3 deaths per 100,000. In total, there were 62 fatal cases of hypothermia in South Australia and 296 cases in Sweden over the six-year period...

...Hypothermia is defined as a decrease in core body temperature below 35°C, with fatal hypothermia occurring at body temperatures of 26°C to 29°C...

...The results of this research will be published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences later this year.

The press release went on to say that most of the deaths in Australia were elderly women living alone and found in their home.  Most of the deaths in Sweden were of middle aged drunken men found in the open.

Naturally that brought out all the WUWT-ers who were decrying the rising cost of electricity and gas, as if the price of electricity and gas is going up in South Australia but not in Sweden.

People in Sweden pay around 0.21 Euro/kWh and in South Australia - well there are so many plans that it's hard to be precise, but let's say around 35c/kWh.  In US dollars that would be around 29c/kWh in Sweden compared to 31c/kWh in South Australia.  None of which tells you much about heating bills.  It's a lot colder in winter in Sweden than it is in winter in South Australia. I don't know how the cost of living or average earnings compare either.

Heat is a big killer in Australia

In any case, lets take a look at how many people die from heat in Australia, compared to the number cited as dying from cold.

According to the press release, there were on average around 10 people a year who died from cold in South Australia.  By contrast, while estimates vary widely, this paper by pwc is among the more conservative and estimates there are currently around sixty heat related deaths in Adelaide alone each year (refer page 29). (Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia.)

Here is another paper that studied heat related deaths and hospital admissions during recent heat waves in South Australia.  That's excess deaths from heat waves, which I guess wouldn't include the "background" deaths from summer heat. It discusses the type of problems that excessive heat waves can cause, particularly renal failure and ischemic heart disease (the latter particularly in the 15 to 64 year age group).  Heart disease was cited as having the biggest ambulance callouts during the recent heat waves in Melbourne this year, too.

What about Sweden?

Okay, you say. But that wouldn't be the case in Sweden, would it.  Well, yes it is but heat isn't as big a killer in Sweden.  At least according to this study by Åström et al, published late last year in Nature Climate Change.  The paper found that:

the number of deaths attributable to climate change over the past 30 years due to excess heat extremes in Stockholm is estimated to be 288...

Not accounting for urbanization and the urban heat island effect would yield a net reduction of 12 cold spells and 33 (95% CI: 18, 49) lives saved owing to fewer cold extremes. The increase of the number of heat extremes would be even more remarkable with 273 excess heat extremes occurring in 1980- 2009, resulting in 447 (95% CI: 252, 646) excess deaths attributable to changes in the frequency of heat extremes. The estimates derived from the observed data would increase the excess number of heat related deaths due to climate change by as much as 55% as compared with the adjusted data

In other words, if you include heat from UHI effects, which are real, in Stockholm alone there were around 15 extra deaths a year attributed to heat but only 3 fewer deaths a year because of having not so many cold spells.  (Stockholm pop.789,000 is smaller than Adelaide pop. 1.2 million.)

From the WUWT comments

A selection of comments from the archived article.

Gary says:

February 12, 2014 at 11:18 am
I’m not surprised at all. Swedes have more experience culturally with cold and most cases of hypothermia result from foolish behavior. Control for that and South Australia would rank even higher.

philjourdan says:

February 12, 2014 at 11:28 am
Bu-bu-but! They just had their “hottest” year on record!

On a serious note. Man can survive cold (thrive is a different issue). It does take preparedness however. That is why another glacial period would be more deadly than the mild temperatures we have experienced. But that does not fit the alarmist meme.

A.D. Everard says:

February 12, 2014 at 11:32 am
I’ve lived in rural South Australia. The houses are old with little or no insulation. Many are almost ruins, which is why they are so cheap. Also, most houses here are designed with Summer in mind, with ample shading, which backfires in Winter. My mother, who came to Australia as a young woman, always said she was far colder in Australia than she was in England or Canada.

ghl says:

February 12, 2014 at 11:40 am
South Australia has the most wind farms and the most expensive electricity of all australian states.

The first part is true.  South Australia gets about 30% of its electricity from wind these days.  However I don't know about the second part.  We're charged around the same tariff as those I saw for Adelaide (we're in rural Victoria).  Not that we have to pay for electricity, thank goodness.  We get paid instead for now.


Boadicea says it's cold and wet in South Australia - huh?:

February 12, 2014 at 1:49 pm
The climate in SA is one of long cold and wet winters with shorter hot summers. 

When I lived in Adelaide it seemed like one long summer, with June, July and August milder than December, January and February :)  As for wet, well South Australia is the driest State in the second driest continent (after Antarctica). Here is the annual temperature range for Adelaide and Oodnadatta (for those who like it hot).  Click to enlarge.

Source: BoM and BoM

Here is the annual rainfall range for Adelaide and Oodnadatta (for those who like it dry).  Note the very different scales. Click to enlarge.

Source: BoM and BoM

And for comparison, here is a chart showing temperature and rainfall data for Stockholm, Sweden.  The blue bars are the rainfall and the red line is temperature:

Source: ClimateData.org

Eric Worrall says it was warmer in the 1930s - Huh?:

February 12, 2014 at 2:40 pmTry to sleep overnight in the cool southern states, in any Aussie house built in the 1930s and you will freeze your nuts off. Why? Because houses built in the 1930s were designed for a much warmer climate.

Here's Australia's "much warmer climate" of the 1930s:

Data Source: BoM

---

Åström, Daniel Oudin, Bertil Forsberg, Kristie L. Ebi, and Joacim Rocklöv. "Attributing mortality from extreme temperatures to climate change in Stockholm, Sweden." Nature Climate Change 3, no. 12 (2013): 1050-1054.

Nitschke, Monika, Graeme R. Tucker, Alana L. Hansen, Susan Williams, Ying Zhang, and Peng Bi. "Impact of two recent extreme heat episodes on morbidity and mortality in Adelaide, South Australia: a case-series analysis." Environ Health 10, no. 1 (2011): 42.

A sign of the (hot) times...Heat wave forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology is piloting a new product - a heat wave forecast.  It's a new product that is based on a specific definition of heatwave conditions for Australia.  This is: three days or more of high maximum and minimum temperatures that is unusual for that location, plus it takes into account conditions preceding the hot weather, allowing for whether people have acclimatised to the heat or not.

As I understand it, the same temperature over consecutive days in September might rate as a heat wave that wouldn't rate as one in February, because people would have been acclimatised to summer conditions in February.  Not that we won't have heat waves in February.  That's when we can get the worst of them.  Just that the temperature would probably have to be consistently higher than it would have been in September, to be classed as a heat wave.

In the same way, what is considered a heat wave in Cairns might not be considered one in Melbourne, because Melbourne, despite being much further south of the equator, can get quite a bit hotter than Cairns.

We're heading for a heatwave over the next few days.  I've animated the BoM charts below.

Source: BoM

The heat wave maps will help service providers such as power companies, ambulance, hospitals etc, as well as ordinary people.

You can read more about the new product and its purpose here.  And here is a 2013 technical report from CSIRO on heat waves, written by John Nairn and Robert Fawcett.

Australia's hottest year was no freak event: humans caused it

By Sophie Lewis, University of Melbourne and David Karoly, University of Melbourne

The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that 2013 was the hottest year in Australia since records began in 1910.

Unusual heat was a persistent feature throughout the year. For the continent as a whole, we experienced our hottest day on record on January 7. Then January was the hottest month on record, and the 2012-13 summer was the hottest recorded for the nation.

The nation-wide temperature record set for the month of September exceeded the previous record by more than a degree. This was the largest temperature anomaly for any month yet recorded.

Averaged across all of Australia, the temperature for 2013 was 1.2C above the 1961-1990 average, and well above the previous record hot year of 2005 of 1.03C above average.

What caused these extreme temperatures? Climate scientists have a problem: because climate deals with averages and trends, we can’t attribute specific records to a particular cause.

But our research has made significant headway in identifying the causes of climate events, by calculating how much various factors increase the risk of extreme climate events occurring. And we have found sobering results.

We previously analysed the role human-caused climate change played in recent extremes across Australia.

For various record-breaking 2013 Australian temperatures, we investigated the contributing factors to temperature extremes using a suite of state-of-the-art global climate models. The models simulated well the natural variability of Australian temperatures.

Using this approach, we calculated the probability of hot Australian temperatures in model experiments. These incorporated human (changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols and ozone) and natural (solar radiation changes and volcanic) factors. We compared these probabilities to those calculated for a parallel set of experiments that include only natural factors. In this way, natural and human climate influences can be separated.

In our previous studies, we then applied an approach (known as Fraction of Attributable Risk) widely used in health and population studies to quantify the contribution of a risk factor to the occurrence of a disease. Health studies, for example, can quantify how much smoking increases the risk of lung cancer.

Using the climate models, the Fraction of Attributable Risk (FAR) shows how much the risk of extreme temperatures increases thanks to human influences.

In our earlier study of our record hot Australian summer of 2012-13, we found that it was very likely (with 90% confidence) that human influences increased the odds of extreme summers such as 2012-13 by at least five times.

In August 2013, Australia broke the record for the hottest 12-month period. The odds of this occurring increased again from the hottest summer. We found that human influence increased the odds of setting this new record by at least 100 times.

Recent extreme temperatures are exceeding previous records by increasingly large margins. The chance of reaching these extreme temperatures from natural climate variations alone is becoming increasingly unlikely. When we considered the 12-month record at the end of August, it was nearly impossible for this temperature extreme to occur from natural climate variations alone in these model experiments.

We have just completed a preliminary investigation of contributing factors for the record Australian temperature in the 2013 calendar year.

In the model experiments, it is impossible to reach such a temperature record due to natural climate variations alone. In climate model simulations with only natural factors, none of the nearly 13,000 model years analysed exceed the previous hottest year recorded back in 2005.

Australian annual temperature changes (relative to 1911-1940 average) for observations (dashed black) and model simulations with natural influences only (green) and with both human and natural influences (red). The grey plumes indicate the range of values simulated across nine global climate models used. Average Australian temperature anomalies are indicated for 2013 and the previous hottest year on record in 2005. David Karoly & Sophie Lewis.

In contrast, in model simulations including both natural and human factors, such as increasing greenhouse gases, record temperatures occur approximately once in every ten years during the period 2006 to 2020. (On a mathematical note, as there is no instance in which the record hot yearly temperature occurred without human contributions, the FAR value is one.)

Probabilities of annual average temperatures for Australia from climate model simulations including natural influences only (green) and both natural and human climate influences (red) for model years 2006-2020. The vertical lines show the temperature anomalies observed in 2013 and in 2005 (the previous hottest year observed). David Karoly & Sophie Lewis

Clearly both natural climate variability and global warming from humans contribute to recent temperature records. Natural variability always plays a major role in the occurrence of weather and climate extremes. But in the case of our recent hottest year on record, human-caused global warming made a crucial contribution to our extreme temperatures.

Our extensive catalogue of 2013 record-breaking events in Australia occurred in a global context of increasing temperatures that must be considered. Globally, 2013 will likely rank as the 6^th hottest year recorded.

So to return to our question, what caused the 2013 record hot year across Australia? Simply put, our climate has changed due to human activities. Recent extremes, such as this hot year, are occurring well outside the bounds of natural climate variations alone.


Sophie Lewis is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

David Karoly receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and the Australian Antarctic Division. He is a member of the Climate Change Authority and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

WUWT Weather Games: Coldest day since 1974 vs hottest several days since 1906.

Anthony Watts has just posted an article (archived here) with the headline:

New record low set in the coldest city in the continental USA – much of the country headed for a deep freeze

Oh boy! We're heading for an ice age.

Thing is, his NEW RECORD LOW is for International Falls, Minnesota, USA.  Guess how long they've been keeping records - a whole forty years.  Yes, that's right.  According to this weather website:

This report describes the typical weather at the International Fa (International Falls, Minnesota, United States) weather station over the course of an average year. It is based on the historical records from 1974 to 2012. Earlier records are either unavailable or unreliable.

Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -21°C to 25°C and is rarely below -33°C or above 30°C.

So what was the "record low" that was recorded?  It was cold.  Very cold.  It was -42ºF, breaking the previous cold record of -37ºF.  I'll translate for most of my readers - that's -41ºC with the previous record a well-below freezing cold of -38ºC.

Now while Anthony has in his hand a single town in the USA that had the coldest morning in forty years, in winter time, I'll raise him two countries including an entire continent with extremely hot temperatures, not just for a day - but for days on end.

Argentina

Argentina is only now experiencing relief after some areas have had the worst heat wave since records began.  When did the records begin, you ask?  They began not forty years ago, not fifty years ago, not one hundred years ago but one hundred and eight years ago - back in 1906.

And this isn't a single town we're talking about with a few hours of record heat.  This heat wave affected the large part of a nation and lasted more than a fortnight.  Okay, it might not seem that hot to some people with temperatures in the high thirties but in some parts it got into the mid-forties.  Argentina isn't used to these sort of temperatures and its power grid can't cope with the demand.

What happens in record heat waves?  Well it happened here too so I relate to the people of Argentina who can't use their air conditioners because of power cuts.  It's causing all sorts of problems for the nation, exacerbating political problems as well as daily living.  The power cuts have made people angry, stopped shops that should have benefited from the hot weather, like ice cream parlours, from being able to earn a crust.  Yep, expect more civil unrest in various parts of the world over coming decades. 

Australia 

Australia is reporting massive areas only now getting relief from a wave of heat that emerged in the west on Boxing day and shifted across the continent.  It brought temperatures in the low to high forties (102ºF to 114ºF) to large parts of Australia sparing only Victoria and Tasmania.  This is what it's been like - not from latte-sipping city slickers in air-conditioned luxury, but from tough people who live in the bush and have lived through all sorts of weather extremes.  (Australians tend toward understatement not exaggeration or over-exuberance.)

Queensland isn't out of the woods yet - it's still in the grip of the heat wave.  They aren't used to temperatures that high in the tropics.

This after Australia's Angry Summer last year, various "hottest days" on record and the hottest year on record - with no El Nino.

USA

I wonder why Anthony didn't report this hot spell last month, a bit closer to his home.

From the WUWT comments

Okay, let me have my fun.  Sometimes I get the impression that WUWT readers think that the USA is the entire world - except for Alaska which is sometimes hot when the rest of the country gets chilly and maybe Florida which has been warm and toasty.

John Eggert doesn't remember even a month ago, when the whole world had the hottest November on record. Or 2012 when the USA had its hottest year on record - and says:

January 2, 2014 at 7:50 am
This brings to mind a question to add to Bob Tisdale’s list. For 25 . . . years we’ve been promised . . . global warming. Where . . . is it? I want a refund. Profanity free, but can be added for effect. -35C this morning. “Normal” minimum is -17C. Wind chill is cheating and isn’t included in that.

IIRC it was only yesterday that it was pointed out that the "CAGW crowd" = deniers.  They are the only people who use the acronym.  I've never tried to measure the thickness of their skulls with a ruler. physics geek says:

January 2, 2014 at 8:52 am
2014 is setting out to be another inconvenient year for the CAGW crowd.
That presupposes that a) the weather and temperature will be honestly reported and b) that reality will somehow penetrate the overly thick skulls of the CAGW crowd. I would opine that no evidence exists for the latter supposition.