Interactive Climate Anomaly Map
There’s a great mashup over at Australian tabloid blog The Punch, where they show the last month’s pattern of extreme weather anomalies using an interactive Google Map. See the originl story at “Australia’s scorching August”
View The Punch – August weather in a larger map
Weather records are often trivial matters, a question of a few tenths of some obscure measurement here and there. Last month’s heat highs streaked away from the norms like Usain Bolt taking on a field of suburban club runners.
It’s a shame the author of the piece then has to moan on and on about how climate deniers have a point, and the map is not evidence of climate change and that the whole debate is boring
anyway.
One anomalous month does not say anything about long term climate trends thats true. But this is just the latest in a series of climate anomalies and is in line with the general predictions of climate science. There is nothing here to refute the climate change argument either.
It wasn’t just a case of there being an occasional hot day, either. Alice Springs, not unaccustomed to a stretch of sun, had 16 days over 30C in the month, compared to its previous record of eight.
And the high temperatures, particularly in the east, weren’t just tenths of a degree here or there. Maximum temperatures in Queensland averaged more than 4C above the long-term trend for August. Brisbane temperatures got well into the thirties, repeatedly. Inland, the town of Windorah had never breached 35C in August. This year, it got at least that hot on seven different days.
The author seems afraid to actually choose a side in this phoney debate. To be clear, on one side of the argument, there is over 99% of the world’s climate scientists and experts who agree the evidence of human activity heating the planet is unequivocal. Then there are the shills, the bitter old geologists and the lunatic supernaturalists who either throw up the same old debunked ‘counter-theories’ they think explain the warming we’ve seen, or they wheel out parts of graphs and purport to show there is no such warming. These are not credible people yet they get airplay as if they were credible because the press like to ‘present both sides’ and, as Chomsky warned us years ago, frame the debate to restrict what can be said. — DS