Agronomist, you have some real comprehension issues.

First, the article does allege a link, which means they attributed the fires to global warming to some degree. QED. No argument.

Second, no-one has suggested that the increase in temperature over the whole of the 20th Century is due to CO2. Only that after about 1945 is said to be attributable to CO2, and that is 0.6 degrees, plus or minus a few tenths of a degree.

Not sure about your "probability model" and on the basis of your previous argument that we shouldn't give much credence to people who can't read straight, not inclined to take it seriously. Where did you pull your 10% figure from?

<< Ludwig, after indicating earlier that you were somewhat sceptical of AGW, now you are showing your true, alarmist, warmist colours. >>

Not at all.

Raycom, you are not getting the most important point of all:

It shouldn’t matter whether you or I or anyone else is an ardent denialist, sceptic or warmist, we should all be united in pushing for the same sorts of things. The whole AGW debate really is …. or should be…. largely an aside to the all-important discussion on a sustainable future.

Can you appreciate that?

GrahamY, I did ask before whether you knew the difference in meaning between the words attributed and link. I am sure you do, so I don’t know why you are choosing to confuse them here. They are not synonyms.

Indeed GrahamY, no one has suggested that the whole of the warming is due to carbon dioxide, which is why mention of how much warming is due to carbon dioxide is an irrelevance.

The probability model I constructed is simply a normal distribution centred on the mean and with a standard deviation of 1.5 degrees, which roughly matches the pattern of monthly mean temperature distributions for spring in the Blue Mountains (Katoomba to be precise – data is on the BOM site for station 063039). About 2% of the distribution falls outside 2 standard deviations (i.e. 3 degrees or more) above the mean. Now if you shift that distribution 1 degree higher, then about 10% of the distribution will fall above the same temperature. It is fairly straightforward math.

Agronomist I don't know what your problem is with English but to say that the fires and global warming are linked is the same thing as saying that the fires are attributable to global warming. In this context they are synonyms.

I also don't know why you persist in claiming the increase due to CO2 is 1 degree when the IPCC figure is 0.6 of a degree, and that has to be a maximum. I've developed this category of the "neo-denier", which is people who support the catastrophic version of global warming, but diverge from the IPCC consensus when it doesn't suit them.

OK, now I get your mathematical model, but you are plugging the wrong figure into it. You're also not taking account of the fact that this fire has been caused by the maximum temperature being 2.6 standard deviations, meaning it is well outside the normal probabilities, and has never occurred in the previous 100 years, let alone twice.

And no, the percentage of warming due to CO2 is not irrelevant at all. How can it be? Without knowing that we could just be arguing about natural variation.

Now, I've been looking at the data you referred to, which runs from 1907 through to last year. Can you explain why there was a sudden decrease in interannual variability around 1990? Is there a catastrophist rationalisation of this? If the much lower temperatures weren't there the trend to warming would decrease or disappear as there were months just as warm back in the 20s and 40s.

GrhamY: to say two things are linked is not the same as attributing one to the other. For example, there is a link between genetic factors and lung cancer, but no sensible person would attribute lung cancer to genes. Likewise, no sensible person would attribute these fires to global warming, because the causes of the fires were army exercises, power lines and arsonists. Any sensible person who looked at the data would conclude, on the basis I pointed out above, there is a likely link between climate change and these fires. The increase in underlying temperature resulting from climate change made higher temperatures more likely.

To conclude that by stating there is a link someone is attributing the fires to climate change is both careless and wrong.

GrahamY, you seem to have trouble reading what I have written. In my last post I stated “no one has suggested that the whole of the warming is due to carbon dioxide”. I don’t know how you could interpret that to mean I was claiming all the 1 degree warming was due to CO2. It boggles the mind.

I haven’t looked at how far this year’s temperatures departed from the mean. If it is 2.6 standard deviations from the mean, then those conditions would be expected in about 0.3% of years. If the underlying temperature were increased by 1 degree, then such conditions would occur more frequently; 2% of years. It doesn’t change the conclusion that increasing the underlying temperature through global warming will lead to weather conditions capable of propagating a fire to occur more often.

You are correct; if the world was as warm in 1910 as it is now there would be no global warming. One of the things that global warming does is to reduce the probability of lower temperatures occurring. Therefore, you see more of those lower temperatures back in the 1920s than you see now. But you have to remember that the temperature record is inherently variable, so a single year or even a few years in a row might depart widely from the underlying trend.

<< Luddy old mate, in your quest for your "sustainability" you are loosing contact with reality. >>

Dear o dear Hazza! Where’s your sense of sustainability??

You insist that AGW is bunkum and assert that all alternative energy sources are fundamentally unviable.

It would seem to me that you are the consummate antisustainabilityist!

So do you really think that we should just be charging forth with maximised exploitation of fossil fuels and not worrying too much about alternative energy, population growth, and economic adjustments to a largely renewable energy regime?

<< To be sustainable we have to find an economical way of turning CO2 back to C >>

YES!

So let’s work on that with all our musterable fervour…instead of putting the vast majority of our efforts globally into continuing to turn C into CO2… and at the most staggering rate.