Looks like a significant part of Australia's temperature rise was an artifact of switching to electronic thermometers. Jo Nova has a report, here .  We've had similar issues in the United States due to electronic thermometers. We've written about this before. The NWS/NOAA solution was to "adjust" the data.  National Weather Service cooperative weather station  with air conditioner blowing hot air on the  electronic thermometer.  Because of these issues, including controversy over the adjustments, NOAA received funding from Congress to install a state-of-the-art U.S. National Climate Research Network which required no adjustments. Interesting, when you plot all 18 years of data from that network, there is no warming at all. See below. This is why merely measuring the amount of warming the last 100 years is far more difficult than non-meteorologists would expect. 

Here we go again.  The phantom issue of "privatizing" meteorological data.  Yesterday, a hearing was held in the House of Representatives on a number of meteorological topics. "Privatizing" weather data came up, but I'm not sure why. No one is, or to my knowledge ever has, proposed the government's meteorological data be taken out of the public domain. The discussion about the (non-) issue of privatizing meteorological data transitioned into a conversation on Twitter this afternoon that has gotten a number of people confused. I'm going to try to fix the confusion, especially since this may make the news. Our federal government creates lightning data through its "total lightning mapper" on the new generation of GOES weather satellites. An example, from a few minutes ago, is below. The colored dots are the lightning. If you want to see it for yourself, go here ,  then click on the globe, then click "GOES Derived," then cli...