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Are the Climate Commission's claims of a hot summer correct?

By Anthony Cox - posted Tuesday, 12 March 2013


These floods were terrible disasters and caused great trauma and economic loss for the places affected. However, the CC does the victims no good by telling less than the whole truth.

The Rockhampton and Kingaroy daily rainfall records are accurately reported and there were also some very big falls in the ranges behind the Rockhampton-Gladstone-Bundaberg area. However, none of the records came within 'cooee' of the record from Crohamhurst [BOM reference 40062] in 1893 of 907mm.

In addition the Mt Florance 220mm rainfall total, is a January record; it's all month record of 295mm occurred on 5/2/1993.

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Similarly Maryborough's 258.8mm is not an annual record which remains at 359.9mm on 5/2/1931.

The record temperatures also fare badly. Canberra's ostensible 42.0 temperature record was surpassed by the Canberra Airport Comparison of 42.2 on 1/2/1968. Cape Naturaliste 37.7C on 30/12/2012 is only a record for December, with its all time record of 40.6C on 10/1/1978. And Birdsville's all time record of 49.5C on Christmas Eve 1972 still beats the January 2013 'record' of 49C.

So out of the 23 on the CC's featured page, 5 are not records, 2 refer to the one flood event on the same river only 50-60km apart, 1 is on a small tributary that had a geographically fluke flood while the rest of the catchment streams did not reach predicted heights. Eucla has no data before 1957 despite being open since the early 20th century, and 4 other temperature records are Australia wide records using the new method which can't be checked or replicated. At the very least 6 out of 23, more than 25%, are bogus. How many of the 123 are like that?

Apart from these instances where the CC and BOM cannot even get their own facts right there is the context of the alleged records. For instance Newcastle is listed as having a record temperature of 42.5C. This can be checked at the BOM site. It happened on Friday the 18/1/13. However on the same page the mean maximum for January is shown as being 26.9C. Compare that with the history of monthly mean maximum temperatures at Newcastle. The highest January maximum was in 1882 and the hottest period was before 1890.

The CC, BOM and ultimately the government would have us believe today is much hotter than the past. Such claims are based on misinterpreting their own data. If such basic facts cannot be presented correctly is it no wonder the official AGW science is also legitimately questioned?

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About the Author

Anthony Cox is a lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.

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