Scientists Find No Human Impact On Extreme Rainfall Events In SE Australia

Well, maybe we aren’t all going to die in 11 1/2 years, like some surrounding Australia’s Labour Party were insisting before the recent elections.

Hat-tip: reader Mary Brown

A new study appearing in the Journal of Weather and Climate Extremes titled “Historical extreme rainfall events in southeastern Australia” – led by LindenAshcroft, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne – shows that much more extreme weather in terms of rainfall existed before 1900 in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide.

No real trend when examining Sydney, Australia, data going back 178 years. Image: Ashcroft et al 2019.

Moreover, the authors found a “moderate and relatively stable relationship between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and annual variations of total rainfall and the number of rainy days.”

What follows is the paper’s abstract (my emphasis):

Abstract

The cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide are home to almost half of the Australian population and are often exposed to extreme rainfall events and high year-to-year rainfall variability.

However, the majority of studies into rainfall in these cities, and southeastern Australia, in general, are limited to the 20th century due to data availability.

In this study, we use rainfall data from a range of sources to examine four rainfall indices for Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide for 1839–2017.

We derive the total rainfall, the number of rain days, wettest day of the month and the simple daily intensity index for each city over the past 178 years, and find relatively consistent relationships between all indices despite potential data quality issues associated with the historical data.

We identify several extreme daily rainfall events in the pre-1900 period in Sydney and Melbourne that warrant further examination as they appear to be more extreme than anything in the modern record.

We find a moderate and relatively stable relationship between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and annual variations of total rainfall and the number of rain days at all three cities over the research period, but no relationship between ENSO and the annual wettest day, in agreement with other studies using shorter time series.”

Note how the authors mention how “extreme daily rainfall events in the pre-1900 period” in Sydney and Melbourne “appear to be more extreme than anything in the modern record.”

So despite the constant claims of worsening weather globally, objective analyses of longer-term data consistently show that weather in terms of hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme precipitation, etc. was just as bad or even worse in the preindustrial times. It’s natural, stupid.

All the pagan-minded rain-dancing, socialism and wealth destruction, and redistribution aren’t going to change our weather.

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