Thursday, June 21, 2007
DEEP NORTH DEEPLY GORTHED
Darwin yesterday endured its coldest June day on record:
Rugged-up Darwin residents yesterday shivered through the coldest daytime-high temperature ever recorded in June - and the second equal coldest day on record in the city. At 1pm the mercury plummeted to 22.7C ...
The daytime high was only 1.6C above the coldest day ever recorded in Darwin, 21.1C in July 1968.
I doubt they were shivering; 22.7 Celsius equals 73 Fahrenheit. But what might explain this bizarre (relative) coldening? Just possibly, it may be due to a pre-emptive Gore Effect - the great Chill Bringer’s An Inconvenient Truth is scheduled to show at Darwin’s Deckchair Cinema on August 2.
(Via Ian C.)
UPDATE. R. Timothy Patterson:
Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade - 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset
environmentalists.
(Via Ninme, who summarises findings thusly: “The Sound You Hear Is the Polar Bears Weeping Over a Photograph of a Stranded Human on a Dwindling Palm Springs Golf Course.”)
UPDATE II. A storm decline is forecast:
The North Atlantic is likely to see around 10 tropical storms this year, fewer than the long-term average for the July to November period, Britain’s leading weather forecaster said on Tuesday.
UPDATE III. So much for the global warming-caused Australian drought:
Dr Hamish McGowan, a senior lecturer in climatology with UQ’s School of Geography, Planning & Architecture, has been using peat samples from North Stradbroke Island to reconstruct a picture of what Australia’s climate has been like over the past 40,000 years.
“People talk about Australia being in the worst drought in 100 years,” Dr McGowan said.
“But what the evidence is showing us is that in the last 5000 years South-East Queensland has been much drier than at present.”