This year the Australian Bureau of Meteorology waited until after close of business on Friday 6th January 2023 to release the official climate statistics for 2022. After claims of unprecedented extreme rainfall all year, the statistics must be disappointing for those animated by the idea of a climate catastrophe:

Nationally averaged rainfall was [just] 25% above the 1961–1990 average at 582.2 mm, which makes 2022 [only] the ninth wettest on record for Australia.

It is the sixth wettest year for Eastern Australia, where there had been extensive flooding.

Flooding that the Climate Council relentlessly blamed through 2022 on climate change. The Council is headed by Tim Flannery who at the end of April 2007, when most of Australia remained in the grip of severe drought, hyped global warming by claiming our dams would never fill again. Last year they filled to overflowing – again.

Eastern Australia, situated to the immediate west of the southern Pacific Ocean, has always experienced cycles of drought or flood depending on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation which modulates global temperature and rainfall.

Farmers like my father always linked this cycle to changes in the declination of the Moon and there are now research papers explaining the phenomenon. For example, Jialin Lin & Taotao Qian’s ‘Switch Between El Nino and La Nina is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ published in 2019 by Nature.

Wet years are usually cooler years in Australia though the BoM claims last year to have been 0.5 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 average. In fact, discounting for the new electronic probes that I have shown can record 0.4 °C warmer for the same weather and the industrial scale remodelling (the technical term is homogenisation) that strips away past cycles of warming and cooling to the extent that past temperatures are artificially cooled relative to the present, sometimes by almost 3.0 °C (yes that much!) – in reality, last year is likely to have been on average much cooler.

But what about the rainfall statistics? Are all 697 rainfall stations spread across the land mass of Australia actually used to calculate Australia’s average rainfall, and how reliable are the new electronic rainfall gauges?

According to the BoM’s newly released 2022 statistics, the wettest year on record for Eastern Australia is still officially 1950 with 1021 mm, followed by 2010 (1012 mm), then 1956 (986 mm). The 1970s were also wet, especially 1974 with 960 mm, and 1973 with 853 mm.

The official rainfall total for Eastern Australia, where there was so much flooding through 2022, is 819 mms – much less than I expected.

There had been images on television of families huddled on the roofs of homes in Lismore on the morning of 28th February 2022. Waters rose, first entering backdoors, then filling living rooms, then forcing families to hitch each other onto rooftops. Surely the rainfall in places like Lismore was unprecedented?

Many of the submissions to the NSW Flood Inquiry from the Lismore community blamed the new highway built across the floodplain, not the rain, for all the flooding. They explain that the highway acted as a dam stopping water from flowing away and downstream.

Official reports blamed global warming, and either incorrectly reported the 24-hour rainfall total for Lismore (they published 146 mm which is the total for the 24-hours to 24th February, not 28th February 2022) or the reports ignore this important statistic altogether because the official rainfall gauge in Lismore failed. Yes, failed on 28th February 2022. And the Bureau has failed to acknowledge anywhere that there were no measurements from this official rainfall gauge in Lismore from 27th February through until 22nd July 2022.

The Bureau has also failed to acknowledge that there is data available from an alternative rainfall gauge in Dawson Street Lismore that recorded 467 mm to 9am on 28th February. This record only exists as a screenshot taken by a concerned citizen reposted at my blog on 23rd August 2022.

What should be acknowledged as a new 24-hour rainfall record for Lismore of 467 mm on 28th February has not been entered into any of the official reports or into the official Australian Data Archive for Meteorology. It presumably is not therefore part of the data used to decide that 2022 was (only) the ninth wettest on record for Australia.

There was a Special Climate Statement 76 – Extreme rainfall and flooding in south-eastern Queensland and eastern New South Wales published by the BoM on 25th May 2022 replete with regional distribution maps of rainfall across broad geographic bands and with intervals of varying quantity, with the highest value of 200 mm to an unknown total amount (pg. 5). It claims that there has been an increasing trend in extreme hourly rainfall (pg.18) but no actual data is provided – the reference is to State of the Climate 2020. I’ve also been through that report. It provides no actual observational data, nor does it cite any peer-reviewed study.

There is no mention of the reliability of any of the data – temperature or rainfall – by the Climate Council. It can only be concluded that they care more about the narrative. A narrative that is intentionally about blame and frightening especially women and children into action. It might give purpose to the lives of activists like Tim Flannery but at an enormous cost to our children, many of whom are now chronically anxious about the weather.

I was woken on Friday morning at 4am to the sound of rain. Not soft, steady rain. More like a herd of buffalo pounding across my tin roof – intense rain here in Yeppoon, to the east of Rockhampton and to the west of the South Pacific, a vast body of water that reaches about halfway around the Earth. As a child who grew up in the tropics on a farm to the south of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, I used to be reassured by the drumbeating of that intense rain. It signified the beginning of the monsoon and the end of the bushfire season. Now children are being taught to fear something as natural as heavy rain in northern and eastern Australia. The messaging on television has been relentless: rainfall is more intense now – we have a climate emergency. Fear of rainfall is increasing in Australia that is one of the driest continents on Earth.

Climate activist Mali Poppy Cooper, 22, made national headlines when she locked herself to the steering wheel of her car on the approach to a Sydney Harbour tunnel to protest all the flooding in Lismore. Terrible flooding. She was bailed on condition she get psychiatric help. There are stories emerging now of children who experience panic attacks every time it rains.

All through 2022 there was reporting and storytelling, now incorporated into the school curriculum, about how the intensity of the rainfall has increased at Lismore and other locations. Never mind that the new automatic rainfall gauge at Lismore failed and that other gauges in the flood zone show no increase in rainfall intensity or volume when considering the historical record back to at least 1900.

Back in May 2022, Chris Gillham and I made a submission to the NSW Flood Inquiry showing that for the 20 longest rainfall records for locations in the 2022 flood zone there has been no overall increase in the intensity or frequency of extremely wet days to 2021. The wettest year, measured as the year with the highest number of 99th percentile rainfall days by volume since 1900, is still 1974.

We have updated this report* to include the daily rainfall values to the end of 2022 and an additional 5 locations. Our analysis combines data from days with extreme rainfall and compares values since 1900 and for 25 locations both within the flood zones and south to the Sydney region which did indeed records its highest annual total rainfall during 2022. There is still no general trend of increasing rainfall intensity, and therefore it is nonsense to blame climate change for the 2022 flooding. The year 1974 remains the year of most intense rainfall, which was also a year of above average cyclone activity including the infamous Cyclone Tracy.

It is not only a fact that the volume and intensity of rainfall is not increasing, but neither are the number or intensity of cyclones crossing the Australian coastline. They have in fact been in decline since at least 1979, the first year from which we have reliable satellite data.

It was very wet in southeast Queensland through 2022. I was in Brisbane on 3rd March 2022 helping with the clean-up after the devastating flooding of that city.

The Brisbane city flood gauge reached 3.85 metres on the morning of 28th February 2022. This exceeds the major flood level mark but falls short of the 1974 and 2011 floods which reached 5.45 metres and 4.46m, respectively. The Brisbane city flood gauge record goes back to 1832, with the highest flood being recorded in 1841. There was also flooding in 1873 and 1893. According to Aboriginal legend the Brisbane floodplain was not a place for building humpies, yet the European settlers who followed have built a whole city.

The flooding of Brisbane in 1974 was predictable in that the SOI index was an incredibly high 31.6 in November 1973, showing an extraordinary pressure gradient across the South Pacific as measured between Tahiti and Darwin. I was fearful of flooding in late 2010 as the SOI was again very high, 27.1 in December 2010.

After the floods of 1974 the Wivenhoe dam was constructed to ensure Brisbane never flooded again.

Despite the very high SOI and warnings from the mayors of some regional councils and farmers interested in long range weather forecasting and lunar cycles, the Wivenhoe reservoir upstream of Brisbane – built for flood mitigation – was kept full of water because it was believed by the authorities that the ‘dams would never fill again’ because of climate change. They had heard Tim Flannery. The dam operators kept Wivenhoe brimming with water as we entered the 2010-2011 summer despite the high SOI values.

When the torrential rain began to fall, as it always does, and because Wivenhoe was so full of water already, the flooding of January 2011 has officially been documented as a ‘dam release flood’ caused by the emergency release of water. This from a dam originally built for flood mitigation following devastating flooding in 1974. If water levels in Wivenhoe had been reduced through 2010, there would have been no climate emergency.

A class action brought against the Queensland government and one of the dam operators found they were negligent in the way the dam was managed and awarded compensation to those that had suffered loss as a result. But no money has yet been awarded, in part because of subsequent appeals.

During the worst of the flooding last year, in 2022, the dam operators again kept releasing water causing the city of Brisbane to flood. However, this time the torrential rain had stopped. Water kept being released because the BoM incorrectly forecast that more – even worse – rain was imminent. Rain that never eventuated. Now the mantra is that it just keeps raining and the dams will inevitably overflow.

I have benchmarked the skill of the BoM’s simulation modelling for seasonal rainfall forecasting in a series of papers with John Abbot. Our research papers, published in international peer-reviewed journals, as conference papers and book chapters from 2012 to 2017, show that the rainfall forecasting methods developed over a period of 20 years by the BoM provide no significant improvement in forecast skill beyond just simply calculating a long-term average rainfall for the period in question. This is despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive computers and models that attempt to replicate atmospheric processes.

There are much better methods for seasonal rainfall forecasting that use statistical modelling coupled with the latest advances in machine learning. This is a method that John Abbot and I pioneered and that is detailed in those same scientific papers. The first of these papers was rejected by the BoM’s own publication series, but accepted and published by the Chinese Academy of Science (Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 29, Number 4 – Application of Artificial Neural Networks to Rainfall Forecasting in Queensland, Australia) in 2012.

While the SOI was very high during December 2010, and thus the extreme rainfall of January 2011 easily forecast, the SOI was only 13.8 during December 2021. It was thus not at all obvious to those interested in pressure patterns across the Pacific Ocean as an indicator of seasonal rainfall that we should expect flooding.

The flooding through 2022 was likely exacerbated by an atmosphere exceptionally high in volcanic aerosols from the explosion of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano a month earlier. If the BoM had been tracking volcanic ash from that volcano and using a more reliable system of rainfall forecasting, and there was better town planning with the new highway through Lismore built on piers to let the water flow under the road and across the floodplain, there may have never been the tragedy at Lismore.

Exceptionally high rainfall totals in Hong Kong in 1982 correlate with the arrival of stratospheric aerosol plumes from the eruption of El Chichon in Mexico. Atmospheres high in aerosols can contribute to exceptionally high rainfall, but this is ignored by mainstream climate scientists including meteorologists at the BoM who continue to run simulation models inventing a role for carbon dioxide.

El Chinon was a large volcanic eruption, reaching 31 kms (19 miles) into the atmosphere. Mt Pinatubo that erupted in the Philippines in 1991 was larger, reaching 40 kms (25 miles) and causing surface cooling in the Northern Hemisphere of up to 0.6°C. The eruption of Hunga Tonga in the South Pacific on 15th January 2022 was even larger, reaching 57 kms (35 miles). Yet the BoM continues to deny it has had any effect on temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere. And the Climate Council would be hard pressed to blame us for explosive volcanic activity.

The aerosol plume from Hunga-Tonga travelled west, reaching Australia on 18th January 2022. Flooding followed with main railway lines and roads in central Australia washed away. By February 15th, the volcanic ash had circled the Earth and was back over Australia, evidenced by unusually intense sunsets. After that, it began to rain so intensely that Brisbane flooded – again, and so I was part of the clean-up on 3rd March 2022.

That afternoon a group of us working in Sandford Street, St Lucia, were told to down tools at 2pm. The BoM was announcing on radio that our situation was ‘dangerous’ and ‘potentially life threatening’. All the while the sun kept shining. Not a drop of rain fell from the sky and the waters of the Brisbane River below continued to recede.

As I drove out of Brisbane a few hours later, the flash flooding forecast for that same afternoon was cancelled. Next, on radio there was talk of the climate emergency and the scary ‘rain bombs’ of five days earlier. How it was all ‘unprecedented’ – the volume and intensity of rainfall. More than one metre of rain had fallen at some locations in just a few days.

The rain that fell in Brisbane was not unprecedented, neither in volume or intensity. Back in February 1893 nearly two metres of rain had fallen over a similar period of time at Crohamhurst just to the north of Brisbane. And there was no mention of the 24-hour record of 907mm, the amount of rain that fell at Crohamhurst on 3rd February 1893. This remains the highest 24-hour rainfall total for anywhere in Australia and it was 130 years ago. That rainfall recording station has since been closed.

There was also no mention on the radio of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano a month earlier, the largest volcanic eruption anywhere on Earth so far this century, and how these volcanoes can supercharge the atmosphere to make Eastern Australia even more susceptible to heavy rainfall – and that the ash plumes could be monitored as they cross the Pacific Ocean just as weather stations monitor air pressure and so provide an SOI index.

There was also no mention on the radio that evening of 3rd March 2022 that the BoM seasonal rainfall forecasts are completely lacking in any skill. That the BoM consistently gets its seasonal rainfall forecasting wrong, and that not only did it not forecast the torrential rains at Lismore on 28th February 2022 but that it has so far refused to record any value for the 24 hours to 28th February 2022 at Lismore into the Australian Data Archive for Meteorology.

The most accurate seasonal weather prediction systems rely on statistical models using advances in machine learning to elucidate patterns in historical data. So, the integrity of Australia’s temperature and rainfall record is paramount. Yet both temperature and rainfall records are being constantly eroded by the BoM. Major rainfall events are not being entered into the database. Important weather stations are being closed and the available temperature data remodelled, stripping away evidence of past cycles of warming and cooling that correspond with periods of drought and floods.

But of even more concern to me is that since 2011 the BoM has stopped numerical averaging of the instantaneous one-second readings from the electronic probes in its automatic weather stations used to measure temperature. I have shown that this could result in a probe recording up to 0.4 °C warmer for the same weather. To know the effect of this more generally on Australia’s climate through 2022 the parallel data – the measurements taken from mercury thermometers and electronic probes in the same weather stations – needs to be made public. Since 2015, when I first requested this data, the Bureau has steadfastly refused to release it but my appeal against this will finally be heard on 3rd February 2023 by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Brisbane.

*Report to be published by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Guest Post by Javier Vinós

No minimally informed person denies that climate changes. The climate has always changed. Since 1860 the predominant climate change has been warming, which is fortunate because if we had a winter like those of 1800-1850, we would be in for a shock. No one has been able to prove that global warming is primarily a consequence of our emissions. It is reasonable to assume that increased CO₂ has contributed to warming since the mid-20^th century when our CO₂ emissions increased significantly, but no one knows how much they have contributed, no matter how much the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insists that “humans are the dominant cause of observed global warming over recent decades.” (IPCC AR6, page 515).

There is no evidence for this statement. I know this because I have read thousands of scientific papers looking for it. And no, computer models are not evidence of anything but the programming skills of their authors. Models and their predictions are constantly changing and when our knowledge of climate changes, they must be redone.

The absolute lack of evidence contrasts sharply with the decision to cut our CO₂ emissions to zero by completely changing our fossil fuel-based energy system and calling CO₂ a pollutant—when it is as essential to life as oxygen. All this while most of the world doesn’t give a damn about emissions and many are only on board for the promised money.

To get to the good news about global warming we need to look at variations in the rate of global warming, i.e., the speed of warming. Today we are going to use satellite-calculated global temperature data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, UAH 6.0. They are plotted in Figure 1.

As we can see, the temperature trend decreases since 2016, so 2022 is the seventh warmest year. For 7 years the planet has been cooling. Does that mean that warming is over? No, periods of 7 years of cooling are frequent in the record, there being 8 of them since 1979, and the warming continues. But there is only one period of more than 15 years of cooling, from 1998 to 2014, that appears in the record for the last 45 years. It is known as the “Pause.”

To analyze the evolution of the warming rate, we subtract from each monthly data the previous one to calculate the monthly increase. We then deseasonalize the monthly increase by finding the 12-month moving average to remove a lot of the noise. Finally, we calculate the 15-year average warming rate in °C/decade by calculating the 180-month moving average and multiplying the resulting data by 120.

Each point on the curve in Figure 2 is the warming rate for the 15 years before that month. The Pause shows up prominently as the only period with a negative rate. For the current cooling period to appear on that graph with a negative rate would require the global temperature to remain below the 2016 level at the end of 2030.

But the good news that no one is telling us is that global warming is slowing down. The 15-year rate was very high from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, reaching 0.35 °C/decade. The average over the entire period of satellite records is 1.3 °C per century or 0.13 °C/decade, but the long-term trend has fallen from 1.6 °C/century to 1 °C/century today. The current cooling period is contributing to this decline in the long-term warming rate.

This good news is not told to us, firstly, because it has been achieved without doing anything to reduce our global CO₂ emissions, which calls into question the peremptory need to make a major effort to reduce them.

Second, we are not told this “good” news because the reduction in the rate of warming has taken place while rate of increase of atmospheric CO₂ is accelerating, as shown in Figure 3. The data from NOAA has already been deseasonalized, so we skipped this step. We follow the same process for the same period (1979-2022) as for the graph in Figure 2.

The problem with the theory of anthropogenic warming is that while the rate of warming is slowing down, the rate of change of atmospheric CO₂ is steadily increasing, and in the same period it has gone from growing 14 parts per million (ppm) per decade to 23.5 ppm/decade. In other words, its growth rate has almost doubled.

According to the greenhouse gas climate change theory, it is not possible for warming to slow down while CO₂ is strongly accelerating. The consequence of the CO₂ increase on the greenhouse effect is well known. Each additional molecule intercepts infrared radiation, raising the average height of emission from the atmosphere and requiring an increase in surface temperature for the planet to maintain its radiative balance, that is, to radiate an energy equivalent to that which it receives from solar radiation. The theory does not allow global warming to slow with accelerating CO₂ emissions. The theory is wrong or incomplete. There are fundamental things about climate change that we do not understand, that are capable of offsetting, canceling, and even reversing the effect of the CO₂ increase on temperature. I have already proposed an alternative, which is not considered by the IPCC, in the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis, based on changes in poleward energy transport.

Thirdly, we are not bombarded daily with the good news that global warming is slowing down because the models predict just the opposite, which indicates that despite costing a fortune these models are useless. The 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) was already projecting greater warming for the period 2006-2022 than has been observed. To the dismay of climatologists (Voosen 2022), the changes introduced in the CMIP6 models cause much more warming to be projected, so they have decided that, instead of averaging all models as was done in CMIP5, only the coolest ones should be averaged. Even so, the deviation between models and reality becomes more unbearable with each passing year (Figure 4).

Other good climate news

2022 has been full of more good climate news that we haven’t heard about.

In September, sea ice reached a minimum extent of 4.87 million square kilometers in the Arctic. This is higher than the extent in 2007, which means the Arctic summer sea ice trend is zero for the past 16 years (Figure 5). We were told ad nauseam that the Arctic was melting, and Greenpeace used it to raise money from the unwary. Well-intentioned money which it used, among other things, to maintain the high lifestyle of its executives. The Arctic melted significantly between 1990 and 2007, but it has not done so for the past 16 years, and I don’t think it is because of the money given to Greenpeace.

With data available till September, sea level has risen only 2 millimeters in the first 9 months of the year. The decreasing sea level rise trend over the last 10 years continues (Figure 6). This indicates that sea level rise is probably linked to temperature rise, which is logical. Therefore, sea level rise models are at least as wrong as the temperature models, and those sea level rise figures of one meter or more that the media are trying to scare us with are ridiculous.

It must be said that satellites measure a rate of sea level rise that is about twice that recorded by coastal tide gauges. Either the sea is rising more in the center than on the coasts, or there is a problem in measuring sea level rise to the center of the Earth that does not take into account what is happening at the bottom of the oceans.

In any case, the ridiculous sea level rise is only a problem in areas where there is subsidence by human action, due to groundwater extraction or excessive coastal construction. As an example of the non-existence of a serious problem here are two photos separated by 45 years of the same building located just 10 meters from the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, where I spend my vacations (figure 7). Coastal erosion has affected the profile somewhat, but the sea level does not appear to have risen detectably. The local Alicante II tide gauge shows a sea level rise of about 10 cm in 60 years or one-and-a-half millimeters per year.

Despite all the continuous claims that climate change is making extreme events more intense and frequent, there is no data to support this, which is why the data are never presented. The IPCC reports do not conclude that extreme events are getting worse, except heat waves, which are definition dependent.

2022 has been a very quiet year in terms of hurricanes, continuing the downward trend since the mid-1990s in both frequency and energy (Figure 8).

I have already mentioned on occasions that in a warmer world, the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles is smaller, reducing the amount of energy to be transported and the intensity of atmospheric circulation, so we should not expect warming to increase the frequency of extreme events, just as we should not expect the global precipitation level to decrease.

Conclusion

2022 has been a good year in terms of climate, and it also reaffirms the positive trends toward a reduction in the intensity of climate change in many of the main indicators: temperature, Arctic sea-ice extent, sea level, and extreme phenomena. Let us not be fooled by those supported by our taxes. We have nothing to fear from climate change now or in the foreseeable future. Richard Feynman, one of the best physicists of the 20th century, said in 1966 that “science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”, and Stuart Firestein teaches us that ignorance is the fuel that makes science advance. Those who believe they know what is wrong with the climate, who refuse to accept their ignorance, are not advancing science, but hindering its progress by slowing it down. They do not deserve to be called scientists because they do not serve the cause of science, which is to increase knowledge. They are only trying to line their pockets by defending an orthodoxy of clear political interest. It is clear why the climate panel is called “intergovernmental.”

Lightly edited by Andy May