storms | An Honest Climate Debate

Weather experts should check rainfall figures before being quoted by the media November 30, 2008

Posted by honestclimate in storms.
Tags: BoM, Bureau of Meteorology, climate change, global warming, Warwick Hughes
add a comment

Weather experts should check rainfall figures before being quoted by the media

Warwick Hughs

By Warwick Hughes, November 29, 2008

We have all seen articles such as this from The Australian, “Southeast Queensland storms in line with climate change: weather experts”. The article is referring to storms of 18-20 November and the journalist seems intent on getting his headline despite one of the experts cautioning against reading too much into the storms by saying, “..that a series of events by themselves did not “prove” climate change one way or the other.” Full text copied below.

The real interest for me is not the ridiculous headline but the two experts quoted state that “..November in southeast Queensland had generally been a dry month over the past decade..”.

These experts are University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone and Queensland weather bureau (BoM) spokesman Gavin Holcombe.

Now what are the facts about November rainfall in southeast Queensland over the past decade ? Lets look at November rainfall for central Brisbane and Gatton, home to the Professor’s University, taking November data for the 10 years 1998-2007 and comparing to long term averages for November. We find that for Brisbane and Gatton, the November average 1998-2007 is either very close to or exceeds the long term BoM mean(average). So we see that experts much quoted by the media are not fully in touch with simple realities of rainfall statistics, facts they could check in minutes. Is this more evidence of a national delusion about rainfall in Australia ?

Read the rest click below link

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=184

Back to the alarming future November 25, 2008

Posted by honestclimate in storms.
Tags: brisbane, climate change, global warming, Professor Bob Carter, storms
add a comment

Back to the alarming future

From the Andrew Bolt Blog, November 21, 2008

Even when the weather changes back to how it was, why, that’s consistent with “climate change” theory, too. Ask University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone, who analyses the meaning of the storms over Brisbane:

But this sort of violent weather activity is consistent with climate change predictions. We’re coming off a long drought in southeast Queensland, and that has been an extreme weather event. Now we’re getting these storms, and they’re also extreme weather events.

And ask Queensland weather bureau spokesman Gavin Holcombe:

But back in the 70s and 80s we did have plenty of Novembers which were very wet indeed. I just think people are now thinking of the sort of dry Novembers that we’ve had over the past decade as the norm, but if you look over the long term, there have been plenty of wet Novembers.

Dryer, wetter, worse-than, same-as – it’s all climate change, because climates always change. Difference is that changes alarm the thermostat generation.

UPDATE

Remember when an absence of rain over Brisbane was evidence of global warming?

Environmental researcher Tim Flannery has warned that Brisbane and Adelaide – home to a combined total of three million people – could run out of water by year’s end.

A year later, let’s check if Brisbane has indeed run out of water:

(Thanks to reader Professor Bob Carter, who has explained precisely why the warming panic is mad.)

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/back_to_the_alarming_future

Brisbane-Toowoomba floods 18-20 Nov 08 highlight failure of 28 Oct BoM rain Outlook November 24, 2008

Posted by honestclimate in storms.
Tags: BoM, climate change, global warming, storms
add a comment

Brisbane-Toowoomba floods 18-20 Nov 08 highlight failure of 28 Oct BoM rain Outlook

By Warwick Hughes, November 23, 2008

In three short weeks the BoM rain Outlook prediction gets shot to pieces by real world weather.
BoM predicted rain Nov08-Jan09 This inset map shows the BoM predicted on 28th October that the Brisbane region had only a 45% chance of average rain for the November to January period.

To see the original map select the 28th October 2008 rain prediction.
Sadly for the BoM prediction a series of high rainfall storms hit the region from the 18th-20th November
Real world rain 1-23 Nov08 see map inset of rain anonmalies from 1st to 23rd November.
You can make various rain maps at this BoM site;