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japie said..
Email copied from an Alumni site:
Hello Jan,
Australia's Hottest Day on Record 1828
Not 2019, BUT 1828 - a blistering 53.9?C
Back before man-made climate change was frying Australia, when CO2 was around 300ppm, the continent savoured an ideal pre-industrial climate .
We are told today's climate has more records and more extremes than times gone by, but the few records we have from the early 1800s are eye-popping.
Things were not just hotter, but so wildly hot it burst thermometers.
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!
Lance Pidgeonhas 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.
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. 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 1800s 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 media are in overdrive, making out that "the extreme heat is the new normal" in Australia.
You're welcome....or as it is written nowdays Your welcome.
Baba
Misleading rubbish from someone with an obvious lack of honesty (Pidgeon, not you). It's well known, both from modern sources and from old ones, that until the BoM was formed (and sometimes even later) temperatures were often wildly inaccurate. Many reports came from unscreened thermometers, sometimes exposed to the full sun. Some were under hot tin roofs. This is NOT some modern conspiracy - I've already shown a link where the BoM said
IN 1908 that the earlier recordings were dodgy because the thermometers were not properly positions.
As far as Adelaide goes, even decades later there were complaints (available in old papers) that the measurements were way too high. Here's one as early as the 1880s;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/36323252?searchTerm=thermometer%20Adelaide&searchLimits= . There's also an expert opinion that the thermometers in the observatory that Pidgeon praises were reading too high, sometimes by 1.6 degrees, as early as 1898;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/209128426?searchTerm=thermometer%20observatory%20screen%20Adelaide&searchLimits=Here's a detailed piece from a bit later, noting that the Adelaide thermometers Pidgeon talks about were not screened by Stevenson screens until 1886;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/36322792?searchTerm=thermometer%20observatory%20screen%20Adelaide&searchLimits=If Pidgeon was actually going through old papers as he claims he was, he would have noticed these reports that show how bad the old records were;
Here's an 1886 paper which says that no Stevenson Screens were used in oz until Clement Wragge introduced them;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/36322792?searchTerm=thermometer%20observatory%20screen%20Adelaide&searchLimits=Here's a 1907 record where stations that did not have the proper Stevenson screens were recording SEVEN DEGREES too high;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/196159366?searchTerm=thermometer%20%22Stevenson%20screen%22&searchLimits=Here's one from 1913, mentioning that the old thermometer was unreliable and read too high;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/100885196?searchTerm=thermometer%20%22Stevenson%20screen%22&searchLimits=Here's a 1908 piece about how unreliable thermometers were unless they were properly sited;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/72806514?searchTerm=thermometer%20%22Stevenson%20screen%22&searchLimits=Here's a piece where the head of the BoM said as early as 1929 that the high temperatures recorded in earlier days were probably due to "faulty exposure" of thermometers;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/244300915?searchTerm=thermometer%20%22Stevenson%20screen%22&searchLimits=Here's a 1908 piece saying that the earlier thermometers were reading SEVEN TO EIGHT DEGREES TOO HIGH;
trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/10645889?searchTerm=thermometer%20%22Stevenson%20screen%22&searchLimits=Intriguingly, the claimed all-time heat records from Bourke was recorded on the "Federal Refrigerator" according to contemporary reports, which may indicate that it was not recorded by a standard thermometer.
So the fact is that it's been known for over 100 years that the early recorded temperatures were often wildly inaccurate and often way too hot. This is not some modern conspiracy to erase old records, but a century-old fact. When the old papers Pidgeon was using contained clear and definite information about the unreliability of many of those temperatures, he should have said so. He's apparently a liar with an agenda.
It's also illogical to compare the heatwave deaths in 1896, when people wore heavy clothing, when there were few mechanical fans and no air-conditioning and few cold drinks. Pidgeon is just spinning bulldust.
beefarmer
> 9 months ago, 11 Jan 2020
