The US is shifting to a new set of climate ‘normals’ – data sets averaged over the past 30 years. But normal is a relative concept in a time of climate change.
In an unchanging climate, we would expect record-breaking temperatures to get rarer as the observation record grows longer. But in the real world the opposite is true - because we are driving up temperatures.
Thredbo, scene of the latest attack on the Bureau of Meteorology’s methods.
AAP Image/Alison Godfrey
Three years ago The Australian newspaper launched a broadside at the Bureau of Meteorology. But when it did it again this week, it seemed to get less traction from the top echelons of government.
A new paper improves our estimate of the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide.
NASA/Wikimedia Commons
A new analysis suggests that weather records have not yet had time to capture the full effects of climate change, some of which are likely to take centuries to play out.
The record floods of 1954 and 1974 still stand as Lismore’s high-water marks. But Tropical Cyclone Debbie delivered her deluge far more abruptly than the rains that triggered those historic floods.
Sydney’s summer was the hottest on record.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
A new millennium-long record reveals that Australia has suffered longer droughts and wet periods than those recorded in the past century’s weather observations.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Australia image from www.shutterstock.com
Former PM’s business advisor Maurice Newman recently claimed that satellite temperature data tell a different story to data collected on the ground. He’s right - but that’s how it’s meant to be.
Tennis fans at the 2014 Australian Open were treated to days of temperatures above 40C.
AAP Image/Joe Castro
Melbourne, Canberra and much of southern Australia have shivered through a cold winter. But on a longer view, record cold snaps are disappearing, while Australian heat records continue to be broken.
Despite adjustments to temperature data in the Arctic, the overall global warming trend remains the same.
Flickr/P J Hansen
Attacks on institutions that keep records of global temperatures, such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Met Office, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, continue…
Adjusted data from Australian weather stations has been peer-reviewed before. But the government’s new technical panel could still offer useful advice.
Bidgee/Wikimedia Commons
The federal government’s new “Technical Advisory Forum” on weather data, announced by parliamentary environment secretary Bob Baldwin last week, will “review and provide advice on Australia’s official…
What does Paraguay have to do with the global temperature record?
dany13/Flickr
An article in The Australian today has once again raised the question of why scientists, in trying to estimate how the global and regional surface temperatures of Earth may have changed over the past century…
El Niño means drought in Australia – and floods in America.
Len Matthews
It’s confirmed: 2014 produced the highest global temperatures since records began in the 1880s. As if that’s not cause enough for concern, this year threatens to see the return of El Niño, which like some…
Nationals MP George Christensen told Parliament that the hot temperatures of 1896 have been “wiped from the official record”. It’s a bit more complicated than that.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
“How could it be getting hotter … if it was really hotter 118 years ago? It’s relatively simple: the early years are simply wiped from the official record.” – Nationals MP George Christensen, House of…