In terms of temperature, what sort of a year did we have in Australia?

April: a little warmer

May: a little cooler in the southwest; in the far north, warmer; the rest, a little warmer

June: a little cooler in the southwest; a little warmer in the north; the rest, same as the ten-year average

July: cooler in the southwest, warmer in the northwest and east

August: cooler everywhere

September: cooler everywhere

October: cooler everywhere

November: cooler everywhere

December:  a little cooler in the west, a little warmer in the east

On the face of it, there can’t have been much change from 2015 to 2106, and while we await the 2016 summary in climate4you, our BoM has suggested that Australia had its fourth warmest year since 1910, the year with which the BoM starts its own records. Maybe so. None of this should get anyone’s knickers in a twist, since the change is small, and much of it due to the el Nino. As it happens, no la Nina has started yet, but it would be somewhat unlikely if a further el Nino arrived before the next la Nina episode. (For those for whom these are new terms, el Nino and la Nina are weather episodes produced by shifts in water in the Pacific, the former bringing hot and relatively dry weather to eastern Australia, the latter cooler and wetter weather. They are aspects of the El Nino Southern Oscillation.)

One aspect of climate that is missing from the Humlum website is sea level. But there is a fine new website that seems like to fill the gap and, like Professor Humlum, the originator has assembled all the data from the official sources. The website is SeaLevel.info, and it is great fun too. I am only at the beginning of learning how to operate it. The originator, Dave Burton, was an expert reviewer for AR5 WG1, and he credits the well-known site WoodForTrees as the inspiration for his own work. Here is a summary of his views on the whole sea-level brouhaha.

The worst effect of anthropogenic climate change is supposed to be accelerated sea-level rise. But that fear is the product of superstition, not science. The measurements show that anthropogenic GHG emissions have had no detectable effect on the rate of sea-level rise. At some coastal locations, sea-level is rising, and at other locations it is falling, because of vertical land motion. The global average is slightly rising, but only about 1.5 mm/year (six inches per century), and the globally averaged rate of sea-level rise is no greater now, with CO2 over 400 ppmv, than it was 85 years ago, with CO2 under 310 ppmv.