Brass monkeys
It certainly felt like it. Another from the Weather Isn’t Climate Department:
The skies are finally clearing in Sydney, allowing it to warm up above average after the coldest weekend in four years.
Today’s sunshine enabled it to reach 19 degrees early in the afternoon, one degree above average, Brett Dutschke, senior meteorologist at Weatherzone, said.
This is noticeably warmer than it got all weekend, which had a 15.6-degree maximum and a wind chill of 10 degrees at times.
Not only was it the coldest weekend since 2008, it was the gloomiest weekend since the start of winter with less than six hours of sunshine. This was quite a contrast to the previous weekend, which had more than three times the amount of sunshine. (source)
Australian Climate Madness 
True, winter isn’t finished yet, but wasn’t it the Bureau of Meteorology, which said, ‘A warmer late winter to mid-spring likely for southeast Australia’ back in July 2012.
More evidence of the ‘make it up as you go along’ hypothesis!
Baldrick…. one day on the NW coast of Tassie (last week) it did not go over 8.6 degrees and those brass monkeys were out for all to see. A few days later spring arrived…… maybe it is only passing thru on its way up to the island to the north of us. It is a tad early in Tassie for spring in August! I seriously suspect that Jack Frost is still lurking about and those poor shorn sheep will have an ABC weather alert again!
I think all those models they use to try and predict coming weather need new batteries and new operators!
My challenge to each of Will Steffen, David Karoly, a representative of the CSIRO and a representative of the BoM is to make a comment they believe to be appropriate on this post.
A warm woolly jumper goes to the one who’s comment is most hilarious.
BTW I have purposefully omitted Greg Combet and Tim Flannery from this challenge. Either of these two gentlemen would have an unfair advantage.
Carbon Tax working much quicker than expected.
But it never rains Tim!!!