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

This is a 111 year record of sea-level measurements at one particular location in the Pacific, but it is perfectly typical. The blue trace is sea-level, the green trace is CO2. If you know how to read graphs, then it will be obvious that CO2 is not affecting sea-level:

My own comment is that the trend here is remarkably similar to Fort Denison in Sydney over a similarly lengthy period.

As time goes on we are likely to see more and more of these datasets that are not presented by government. That is a good thing. I will return to these issues when Professor Humlum, to whom we owe a great debt, has issued his 2016 summary map, and on sea levels, when I have mastered the website!

Postscript: The great virtues of homogenisation have been praised again, so I thought I might just cross-post something I saw this morning. No further comment is needed, from me at any rate.

‘The raw data that is fed to NASA in order to develop the global temperature series is subjected to “homogenization” to ensure that it does not suffer from such things as the changes in the method of measuring the mean temperature, or changes in readings because of changes in location. However, while the process is supposed to be supported by metadata – i.e. the homogenizers are supposed to provide the basis for any modification of the raw data.

For example, the raw data for my home city, Cape Town, goes back to 1880:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_141688160000_0_0/st ation.txt

The warmest years were in the 1930’s, as they were in many other parts of the globe. There was then a fairly steep decline into the 1970’s before the temperature recovered to today’s levels, close to the hottest years of the 1930’s.

In NASA’s hands, the data pre-1909 was discarded; the 1910 to 1939 data was adjusted downwards by 1.1deg C; the 1940 to 1959 data was adjusted downwards by about 0.8 deg C on average; the 1969 to 1995 data was adjusted upwards by about 0.2 deg C, with the end result that GISS Ver 2 was:-