As the smell of seasonal bushfires hang heavy in the air and the politicians are again supporting and denying that the Australian climate is changing.
Probably the most extreme denial was from Warren Truss standing in for the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott who is off fighting bushfires. He is the Member for Wide Bay,
coffed any suggestion of the records being set this week were significant : "It's too simplistic to link one hot spell to climate change."
But he did say record temperatures the prime cause of the fires. What he ignored was the slow ramp up of temperatures over the last century, a fact affirmed this week by the US Government and Australian weather authorities. Here is the world wide graph from the US EPA site
But perhaps the third generation farmer out of Kingaroy, Warren Truss is thinking about his own little patch of the world, the Wide Bay Electorate around Maryborough. I decided to do a little mathematics of my own on easily available data.
It was so simple:
- Went to the Australian Weather Bureau and hunted down the weather statistics for the Maryborough Electorate. That turned out to be a station in Maryborough only three kilometres from Truss's electoral office.
- As it happens Maryborough has been keeping records for the last century so I was able to cut and paste the data for the last 100 years of maximum temperatures for each month into a spreadsheet.
- Displayed as a graph I noticed immediately that all the monthly series were trending up.
- But it was to messy so I cut it down to January and added a linear trend line to show the upward trend within the yearly variation. See at top.
Why do so many people continue to disregard the predictions by the scientists? The change is real, its here and it is now. It is simple really.
You ask, "Why do many people continue to disregard the predictions by the scientists?" It's because we have farmers, lawyers and accountants, etc. for politicians. None has any science literacy, so we have to forgive them, because they just can't compute the scientific evidence intelligently.
ReplyDeleteAlso, we must remember the following -
"""Dick Smith asked via video:
My question is to Heather Ridout: Heather, you have been a supporter of high immigration levels and you are also on the board of Skills Australia, which recently delivered what I think is a quite disturbing report on the skills level of Australian workers.
That report found that 4 million Australians suffered from a severe lack of literacy and numeracy skills to the point of being functionally illiterate. It would appear to me that that’s a shocking waste of local talent.""""
No wonder we vote in these unqualified people to run the country, the voters have no critical thinking abilities....... and can be indoctrinated by glib 5 second sound bytes by the likes of Tony Abbott, UNDO Newman, et al............. including, of course the fanatical mining lobbyists. As you know NSW Premier O'Farrell has been found to have taken on board those lobbyists and cut the funding to the NSW EDO, which means ordinary Australians have lost a means for being heard in their fight against coal and CSG which are destroying not only their lives and social structure, but our natural assets and environment as well as economic stability.
No doubt UNDO Newman also was lobbied by these criminals destroying Australia's economic, social and environmental order and stability. The Qld EDO has also had their State govt funding stopped.
The litany of injustices to the stability and productivity of our country by this small band of mining moguls, who are only playing games to see who can outdo the other in influence, will continue until the populace becomes literate and trained.
Keep up the good work, Lee.
Diane.
(Even though I have chosen "anonymous" in the Comment As:selection choice, I don't mind if my name is used.