Today on one of the TV morning programs the young woman reading the news announced that after a brief respite, the continent would be returning to heat wave conditions. Adelaide would soar to 39 tomorrow and 41 later in the week. This was after a ‘scorching’ Christmas and New Year, with everyone urged to stay indoors in the hottest part of the day, drink lots of water, and look after the old and the very young.
What a load of bollocks.
Adelaide has a Mediterranean climate. That is, dry, hot summers and cool, wet winters. Temperatures of 39 and 41 are par for the course. Every. single. year. We call it Summer.
There were warnings of a heat wave up the Australian East Coast over the holiday period, with Brisbane expecting temps in the mid-thirties. Ooooh. Shock-horror. We’d be surprised if the summer temperatures in Brisbane weren’t in the mid-thirties.
I lived in Perth, which also has a Mediterranean climate, between 1955 and 1996. The day our migrant ship arrived in Fremantle in 1955 the temperature was 100°F – it was 7th April, well into Autumn. During Summer Perth routinely has a week and more with temperatures over 40C every day. As I recall, February was the hottest month when cyclones building up North would push hot, humid air down to the city. Heavy cloud formed a blanket preventing the heat from escaping. We’d pray for rain which rarely came, while the temperature stayed over 40. We didn’t have air conditioning at home and neither did schools. That was how it was. You shrugged and went about your business.
Basically, I believe the ‘news’ broadcasters are sensationalising normal events. I also have to wonder why these announcements of heat waves are always accompanied by images of people sun bathing at the beach? Sun bathing in temperatures of 35+ is NEVER a good idea and never was, yet the footage is never accompanied by suggestions that keeping covered up and in the shade might be wiser.
The other day I received an email via a friend of a friend of a friend about REAL heat waves. The content was pretty much what you’ll read on this The Higgins Storm Chasing Facebook page with a few bits highlighted and some changes to fonts to make it more dramatic. (I went looking for verification, you see.) This is a partial quote.
“The earliest temperature records we have show that Australia was a land of shocking heatwaves and droughts, except for when it was bitterly cold or raging in flood. In other words, nothing has changed, except possibly things might not be quite so hot now!
Silliggy (Lance Pidgeon) has been researching records from early explorers and from newspapers. What he’s uncovered is fascinating! It’s as if history is being erased! For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.
In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days.
Links to documentary evidence (1)(2)(3) [Note – these links go to newspaper reports in the Australian Government’s public archives, Trove.] The maximum was at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight!
Use the several links below to read the news reports at the time for yourself.
- By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets.
- Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, thermometers recorded 109F at midnight.
- Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F.
- On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”.
- By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels).
- Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains.
As reported at the time, the government felt the situation was so serious that to save lives and ease the suffering of its citizens they added cheaper train services.
What I found most interesting about this was the skill, dedication and length of meteorological data taken in the 1800’s. When our climate is “the most important moral challenge” why is it there is so little interest in our longest and oldest data? Who knew that one of the most meticulous and detailed temperature records in the world from the 1800’s comes from Adelaide, largely thanks to Sir Charles Todd. The West Terrace site in Adelaide was one of the best in the world at the time, and provides accurate historic temperatures from Australia’s first permanent weather bureau at Adelaide in 1856? Rainfall records even appear to go as far back as 1839.
Lance Pidgeon went delving into the National Archives and was surprised at what he found.
The Great Australian Heatwave of January 2013 didn’t push the mercury above 50C at any weather station in Australia, yet it’s been 50C (122F) and hotter in many inland towns across Australia over the past century.”
You can read more about Lance Pidgeon and the Adelaide meteorological station, at forgotten -historic hot temperatures recorded with detail and care in adelaide.
All of this brought to mind the recent claims that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is fiddling with historical climate records. They’ve homogenised figures and glitches in their equipment have filtered out some of the lowest temperatures. Jo Nova is a climate change sceptic but it’s worth reading what she has to say about historical climate data. BOM scandal: “smart cards” filter out coldest temperatures. Full audit needed ASAP! By the way, it was Lance Pidgeon who noticed the Goulburn anomaly as the recorded minimum temperature changed from -10.4 to 10, then disappeared. [4]
I have to wonder, I really do, about when a normal summer became a shock-horror heat wave.
And just as a reminder – I don’t deny the world’s climate is changing. I just don’t believe we Humans did it, or that we can stop it. ‘Believe’ is the wrong word, since the reasons for climate change are supposed to be based on science. As far as I’m concerned the climate models are dodgy and based on insufficient and sometimes spurious data. There is sufficient scientific evidence to suggest that climate change is dictated by large, slow factors, such as the sun’s cycles, the movement of tectonic plates and subsequent shift in ocean currents. We have to learn to adapt.
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