Tag Archives: Urban heat island

BoM Australia, IPCC, Jones et al, Surface Record, Urban Heat Islands

Some rare balance on the taxpayer funded ABC for a change

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Article by Alan Moran pointing out that the behaviour of pro IPCC scientists as revealed in the Climategate emails, is nothing new. There is much to tell about the BoM of the early 1990’s.

The Balling, Idso and Hughes. 1992 paper “Long-Term and Recent Anomalous Temperature Changes in Australia.” – referred to in the ABC article is now scanned online.

Timeline of AGW research from two decades ago

  • 1986 – Jones et al papers compiling hemispheric temperature trends, truly the birth of IPCC global warming. Note each journal paper was backed by the non peer reviewed “phone book” sized TR022 and TR027 station documentation and description of project methodology books published by the US Dept of Energy (now out of print).

I am working at getting both books online – probably too big a job for me – but the smaller southern hemisphere book TR027 should be done within a week – will be a world first.

If anybody could assist with scanning circa 250 A4 pages, we could get the giant northern hemisphere TR022 online – which would greatly assist a scheme to review data from the old USSR, the core of GW. Back to the timeline.

  • 1988 – Dr Fred Wood published in the Elsevier journal his critique of Jones et al 1986 – online with the tetchy Wigley & Jones team reply. Reading Wood and the team reply is a great way to build your understanding of the poor science prevailing around the birth of GW.
  • 1990 – The Australian BoM assembled their paper “Trends in Australian Temperature Records”, scanned online scroll a third way down page. This page found chapter and verse evidence of UHI bias in Australian city temperature records yet the BoM failed to Comment on Jones et al 1986 in the journals.
  • 1991 – I started researching Australian temperature data at the Tasman Institute in Melbourne. By the end of 1991 I had three draft papers that were all circulated to the BoM and others for comments.
  1. The Australian Record on “Global Warming” (TARGW), a 20 odd A4 page review of the Australian component of Jones et al 1986. I am progressively getting this online – some capital city figures have not survived in the word doc and I am reconstructing those. This blog article was on a section of TARGW.
  2. The Introduction of the Stevenson Screen and the phasing out of Open Thermometer Stands, in Australian Meteorology. This was eventually published in 1995 in the International Journal of Climatology.
  3. Heat Islands in Country Towns – South Eastern Australia. I have the text but graphics have not survived – would be a big job to reconstruct. (If anybody knows of a copy, please let me know).
  • 1992 – The Balling, Idso and Hughes paper, “Long-Term and Recent Anomalous Temperature Changes in Australia.” published in Geophysical Research Letters – referred to in the ABC article is now scanned online. This was attacked by the BoM who ended up failing to get their Comment into GRL – the story of this is far too long for now and can wait till 2010.

It highlighted warming bias in the Australian component of the key IPCC paper – Jones et al 1990 letter to Nature Jones PD, Groisman PYa, Coughlan M, Plummer N, Wang WC, Karl TR (1990) Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperatures over land. Nature 347:169-172

No wonder Hughes and Balling (~1995) was killed in review. The pro IPCC processes revealed in the Climategate emails are not new.

In 1991 I was lucky to obtain 2 diskettes of rural South African data from a source in the Weerburo. The above paper spells out the urban warming bias in Jones et al southern African grid point data.