Comments on: Queensland in Jones et al 1990

By: David Stockwell

David Stockwell — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:37:56 +0000

data is unlikely to be sufficient to fully rebut the hockey team at this point.

Just bring the data for the rural stations up to date and recalculate HADCRU including them up to the present. If the result shifts temperatures since 1990 downward then the result is biased by UHI.

By: Peter Hartley

Peter Hartley — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:02:00 +0000

Following up on Steve’s comment about how ridiculous it is that many of these Queensland records have not been kept up to date, if one goes to the GISS site linked by Warwick one finds that the only stations in NE Queensland with records complete up to 2006 are

Mackay, Rockhampton, Townsville, Gladstone, Cairns

and

Willis Island.

This leads one to ask — how did they let Willis Island slip into the up-to-date data set? It spoils the Team story line! Fire the person responsible for that mistake! The rest of these places are all rapidly developing regional cities with nicely growing UHI effects that can be passed off as “global warming”, no sweat.

By: Warwick Hughes

Warwick Hughes — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:12:14 +0000

Pertinent to the revealing of disparate trends in North Queensland temperature histories is the flat trend 1939-2006 from Willis Island (16.3 S 150.0 E ) in the Coral Sea. I have a graphic here on a blog post last year which was in response to a Govt proposal to protect the Great Barrier Reef with shadecloth.
Willis Island mean T trend
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=69
If you use GISS to find the data, you see that 2006 was a bit cooler than 2005.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/

By: Al

Al — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:19:17 +0000

Are there any satellites with a sufficiently wide focus angle and frequency sensitivity to measure ‘outgoing heat flux of planet Earth’ _directly_?

Because the more time spent wandering through piles of data from weather stations show only a couple of things conclusively.

1) Cherry-picking by the hockey team. (By picking start dates, end dates, included stations, excluded stations, applied adjustments etc.)
2) Complete chaos in methodology.

Even an extremely rigorous reevaluation of _all_ of the weather station data is unlikely to be sufficient to fully rebut the hockey team at this point. And there’s no way to go back a hundred years with concrete ideas on how to monitor local temperature systematically.

By: David Stockwell

David Stockwell — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:26:02 +0000

For example, just an hypothesis, if the sub-tropical climate were to advance north, resulting in a decrease in afternoon thunderstorms that typically reduce the maximum daily temperatures, it could explain Cardwell increasing in annual temperatures while Innisfail showing no trend. You could explain such an advance by regional forest clearing and conversion to grassland and eucalypt.

By: David Stockwell

David Stockwell — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:19:37 +0000

There are just so many issues. The changing land-use from rainforest to dairy farming to cane farms, all changing with economics of the time. Changing landuse on the tablelands around the area as orographic effects are very important there.

Another non-human cause could be the shifting boundary of climate regimes. With such a large gradient, if the sub-tropical dry region shifts slightly north I imagine it could affect Cardwell but not Innisfail which is probably dominated by the orographic effects of the ranges.

I would also be concerned about the range of skill and training of the recorders of these instruments.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:50:00 +0000

Interesting gradient. But Cardwell and Cooktown have similar sorts of precipitation. David, do you think that these sorts of differences could be climatic as opposed to nonclimatic? In any event, shouldn’t these folks spend a little time showing the validity of taking an average (one of the underlying problems in this entire area is that this is more suited to technical reports than little articles in academic climate journals.)

By: David Stockwell

David Stockwell — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:39:57 +0000

It is obviously inconceivable that the differences between Innisfail and Cardwell are due to differing “regional” climate

It is a very variable area weather wise with a huge rainfall gradient. See this rainfall map, where Innisfail has over 3 meters and Cardwell only 1 meter for 2005. And the wettest town in Australia, Tully is between them with an average of 4 meters and a record annual rainfall of 5 meters.

http://www.nrw.qld.gov.au/water/statistics/pdf/aws2005_map2.pdf