<< All I am saying is that "it is reasonable to suspect" is not a particularly powerful argument, when faced with graphs that indicate the opposite. >>

Well Pericles, my obvious retort is, as I made clear my first post; that Jennifer’s ‘evidence’ doesn’t ‘indicate the opposite’.

There is far more to it than just the history of temperature trends at one locality, as Rhrosty suggests.

Yes I am just speculating that there is a connection between this fire episode and AGW. That’s all I’m doing, in the absence of any data, and just based entirely on the very unusual conditions which have occurred so very early in the season.

It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect (and speculate) that these fires are connected to climate change…. is it?

Rhrosty Ludwig and Pericles

The point has been made many times now by both academics and laymen. Australian seasonal conditions are just so variable that its not really possible to point to any one set of conditions and say that its due to climate change. The detailed records (as opposed to the paeloclimatology stuff) are so short that working out trends about hotter drier springs and so on would be nearly impossible, given the still very small variations involved. In any case, hotter and drier is not the whole story.. there also has to be wetter seasons to generate the fuel to burn for the really big fires.

Assertions that really its all due to climate change would be far more convincing if they were declared before the fires, not after. As it was before the fires all we heard was "hotter and dryer". Nothing was said about wet seasons generating fuel.

Jennifer,

"In December 2012 the UK Met Office admitted there had been no global warming for 16 years. In February 2013 Rajendra Pachauri admitted there had been no global warming for 17 years."

?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/australian-pachauri-global-warming.html

"So the reality is that global warming continues unabated. Despite this reality, an article by Graham Lloyd in The Australian (paywalled) claims that the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri agreed that there has been a 17-year pause in global temperature rises. Unfortunately we don't know exactly what Pachauri said on the subject, because Lloyd did not quote him directly (which is a red flag).

The IPCC communications office tells Skeptical Science that The Australian has not provided a transcript or audio file of the interview for verification, but it does not accurately represent Pachauri's thoughts on the subject - namely that as discussed in this post, global surface temperatures have plateaued (though over the past decade, not 17 years), and that this in no way disproves global warming.

Despite the lack of useful verifiable content, the story headline has nevertheless gone viral. This is not the first time Lloyd has been caught misrepresenting climate science in The Australian - in January of this 2013 he wrongly claimed that a study had found no link between global warming and sea level rise. Oceanographer John Church, who was co-author on the misrepresented research in question and also Nuccitelli et al. (2012) from which Figure 1 above originated, set the record straight, and The Australian was forced to retract the article......"

"The claim about the "peak climate-science bodies" undoubtedly refers to another misleading newspaper article wrongly claiming that global warming stopped by the Mail's David Rose, and Lloyd's comment about the Met Office prediction is also inaccurate. Ultimately the only statement the Australian article attributes to Pachauri on this subject is that "global average temperatures had plateaued at record levels and that the halt did not disprove global warming."

The Australian is first rate at misrepresenting the views of climate scientists....wrangling them into trite sentences of the ilk you have employed above.

Ludwig,

Ms Marohasy has interrogated the database in response to previous complaints about the method in her argument earlier this week, and provided seven metrics in this article. None of these show any trend that would change her previous argument. At the moment the ball is in your court to convince us otherwise. She has indicated her source, so here's your chance to go there, and extract and process some data. If you find some trend that could provide a basis for your counterview, present and defend it here. And if you can't find anything you should tell us about that too

It seems to me that the only viable option for the people who claim the fires were caused by global warming is to argue that, but for global warming, we would have seen a decreasing trend in temperature over the latter part of the period Marohasy graphs.

I also find it interesting that while Poirot could find BOM data which suggested September on the east coast has become markedly hotter over the years, it's not reflected in this long-running plot of temperature. It's interesting because the long running plots often tend to show no to little warming at all in any month of any year. The BOM figures are not long-running, and are subject to heat island effects, as well as subjective adjustment of data as weather stations are dropped or added.

I've suggested before that we ought to only use unadjusted results from those weather stations that have century long records and which have not been moved during their life, as I suspect that adjusted bureau stats measure confirmation bias along with actual temperature.

Attention Poirot: from Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis, and not, please note, the Summary for Policymakers (SFP) nor press releases derived from the SFP, we have clearly stated and agreed to by the contributing authors the following paraphrased extracts (find them for yourself):

On droughts: the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated.

On heatwaves: However confidence on a global scale is medium due to lack of studies over Africa and South America but also in part due to differences in trends depending on how heatwaves are defined.

On heavy rain events: In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.

On cyclones and storms: In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extra-tropical cyclones since 1900 is low. There is also low confidence for a clear trend in storminess proxies over the last century due to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH).

Model response error: Almost all CMIP5 historical simulations do not reproduce the observed recent warming hiatus. The discrepancy between simulated and observed GMST trends during 1998–2012 could be explained in part by a tendency for some CMIP5 models to simulate stronger warming in response to increases in greenhouse-gas concentration than is consistent with observations.

Virtually all of these summations appeared to be based on lack of standard definitions or a lack of observed data, yet you spin, spin, spin. In other words Poirot, [deleted for abuse].