Andrew Bolt Blog Posts
CSIRO and Bureau should apologise for this scare
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
October 28, 2016 7:28am
The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology this week published their latest
State of the Climate report:
Observations and climate modelling paint a consistent picture of ongoing, long-term climate change interacting with underlying natural variability.
Strangely, the report fails to explain why past predictions by the Bureau and the CSIRO of a permanent drought turned out so wrong.
Here is the Bureau, quoted in 2008:
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation's most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
"Perhaps we should call it our new climate," said the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones....
"There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent..."
Here is the Bureau's Jones in 2007:
As Jones wrote to the University of East Anglia the year before: "Truth be know, climate change here is now running so rampant that we don’t need meteorological data to see it. Almost everyone of our cities is on the verge of running out of water and our largest irrigation system (the Murray Darling Basin is on the verge of collapse..."
Here is the CSIRO, quoted in 2009:
A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed what many scientists long suspected: that the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change...
''It's reasonable to say that a lot of the current drought of the last 12 to 13 years is due to ongoing global warming,'' said the bureau's Bertrand Timbal. '
'In the minds of a lot of people, the rainfall we had in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was a benchmark. A lot of our [water and agriculture] planning was done during that time. But we are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.''
Yet, with floods and rains and filling dams is so many states, an author of this latest report
gets a very soft interview from the ABC's Fran Kelly, who also fails to note an astonishing bit of cherry-picking that discredits the whole report.
The report's authors present
this alleged evidence of man-made climate change hurting us:
Observations also show that atmospheric circulation changes in the Southern Hemisphere have led to an average reduction in rainfall across parts of southern Australia.
In particular, May–July rainfall has reduced by around 19% since 1970 in the southwest of Australia. There has been a decline of around 11% since the mid-1990s in April–October rainfall in the continental southeast. Southeast Australia has had below-average rainfall in 16 of the April–October periods since 1997.
Note the strange decision, given our rainfall records go back more than a century, to pick apparently random and inconsistent dates - 1970 and 1997 and "mid 1990s" - as a base point from which to measure declines in rainfall. Note further that this decline is curiously only in patches of the country, and then only in - again - inconsistent periods, "May–July " and "April–October".
These are classic tell-tales of cherry picking - tricking to find some arbitrary period that can produce a statistical and scary decline which you can then present as troubling evidence that global warming is drying up our rains. (Even then, none of this comes even close to showing the "permanent" drought the agencies once claimed were leaving our cities desperately short of drinking water.)
This trickery becomes even clearer when you check the Bureau's rainfall records for the whole past century or more. Amazingly, the impact of man-made warming becomes impossible to detect.
Here, again, is what the
State of the Climate report says:
Observations also show that atmospheric circulation changes in the Southern Hemisphere have led to an average reduction in rainfall across parts of southern Australia.
But here is the Bureau's own record of rainfall for southern Australia:
Rain - southern Australia
Judged over the century, then, there is no evidence at all of rainfall decline.
Again, from the Bureau's report:
In particular, May–July rainfall has reduced by around 19% since 1970 in the southwest of Australia.
Rainfall in the south-west is indeed declining, and has done for most of the past 120 years, the first half of which almost no scientist would blame on man's emissions, which even the IPCC says only had a real effect after World War 11:
Rain in south west
State of the Climate's authors also claim that "Southeast Australia has had below-average rainfall in 16 of the April–October periods since 1997".
But the longer record for the south-east again shows no ahistoric change:
Rain in south east
Once again, a decline from the unusually wet 1970s, but little sign of change over more than a century.
And for the continent as a whole, more rain, not less - and certainly no permanent drought:
Rain Australia
And as for the Murray Darling, that the Bureau once said was on "the verge of collapse":
Murray Darling
This is disgraceful. The Bureau and the CSIRO must explain why they have fed us such scares.
