Victoria Was 4C Hotter Back In 1932 Than It Is Today
Despite the news headlines about the hottest ever heatwave in Victoria this week — old Australian newspapers are mysteriously full of reports of hotter temperatures
These inconvenient temperatures are either ignored, or deleted from the records.
Consider, for example January 1932.
The town called Ouyen reached 47.5 °C this week — the “hottest temperature ever recorded” we’re told, but 94 years ago it was reported to be 51.1 °C.
Not far away, Mildura reached 50.6 °C and to the south, Hopetoun reached 45.6 °C.
You might wonder if these local stations were inaccurate or badly managed, but in New South Wales, Pooncarie recorded 49.4 °C in the shade at 2 pm, Wilcannia – 47.2 °C at the same time, Broken Hill reached 45.6 °C, Menindee was 46.7 °C, and Bourke – 46.7 °C.
The heat stretched across to Port Augusta which recorded 48.3 °C.
Were they all crazy, or was it really hot?
You might also wonder if they were using non-standard thermometers or the wrong screens, or enclosures which might bias the measurements. Except the Bureau of Meteorology standardized official thermometers to Stevenson Screens around the turn of last century, and it was mostly finalized twenty years before these temperatures were recorded.
And not only were blisteringly high temperatures recorded across vast distances– but then there are the birds. Lordy but the parrots and zebra finches fell from the skies in mass deaths due to the heat.
As a kind of macabre proxy thermometer, we know the temperature crossed some kind of terrible threshhold when there were piles of dead birds “two feet high”, and stories of people hauling out thousands of dead birds from dams, including in one case, as many as 60,000 dead parrots.
Credit for this goes to Lance Pidgeon, (Siliggy) the volunteer who dug out all these old temperature recordings from National Archives 15 years ago and found stories about the mass bird deaths during that heat wave which he and Warwick Hughes published.
Unlike the BOM, none of us is paid by taxpayers and yet we managed to find these old records.
But the BOM is paid nearly a million dollars a day to give Australians the truth the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and yet they don’t seem to be able to do a basic internet search?
And even if we do the search for them, they still can’t find it.
It’s time the BOM stopped hiding Australia’s climatic history from Australians. In 1909, the town of Bourke had a Stephenson screen and they recorded 125F or 51.7°C. But the BOM deleted that record because it was measured on a Sunday.
Given that modern thermometers are electronic, and prone to picking up one-second records, and interference from airport radar, in new small 60L screens, placed near hot tarmac, and then corrected with thermometers up to 1,500 kilometers away, it’s hard to imagine how thermometers in 1932 needed adjustment to correct anything, when they were probably far more accurate than todays errant batch.
In this case even if Victoria is somehow a tenth of a degree hotter now that it was in 1932 before China built 1,000 coal plants, it’s a big So What? Is this what we’re turning our economy inside out to change?
Australia has always had extremely hot days.
The ABC receives a billion dollars a year to tell Australians the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Yet they serve up biased stories which are poorly researched and which coincidentally favor the political team most ABC journalists vote for.
Below, the sad story of the mass death of thousands of birds, where dams and wells for hundreds of miles were piled with dead birds…
A heatwave kills thousands of birds — was this ‘climate change’ in 1932?
So much for 94 years of ‘climate change’.
See more here joannenova.com.au
Header image: ANU
Some bold emphasis added