I think you would agree that following three examples indicate that in the SW of Western Australia, temperatures have been rising. The long term linear trend is a bit misleading in that it suggests that temperatures have been rising for a long time. That is incorrect. If you look at them all you will see that the major increase occurred from 1970.
Now that trend might not alarm you, but you will have to admit that the trend needs to go down rapidly to get back to pre-1970 levels.
As a sceptic are you going to say that the trend does not exist. Maybe the measurements that the BOM have in their data bases have all been doctored in one great conspiracy.
Are you going to say that in 30 years time maybe it will come back to pre-1970 levels. We don’t know of course. If it does, we can at least say that for the next 20 years things are going to be about the same before we get to cooler and wetter conditions in the SW.
Now there is apparently some fairly basic atmospheric physics that can calculate the greenhouse effect that the increase in CO2 levels produces, and, I am told that these calculations suggest that the temperature increases in the SW are in the correct order of magnitude. There are also some fairly basic calculations that can attribute a major proportion of the recorded CO2 increase to the increased usage of carbon being burnt by anthropomorphs.
OK, it might be some weird coincidence that the temperature trends from Leeuwin, Naturaliste and Katanning are in parallel with the CO2 trend from Moana Loa.
Some sceptics appear to suggest that this increase is a natural, geological phenomenon and nothing to be alarmed about and that the climate will revert back to an interglacial going into a glacial period sometime in the next few thousand years. Sceptics refer to the European warm and cold patches in the medieval period and the Little Ice Age, as evidence of natural climate variability. The cause(s) of this variability is not fully understood, with theories of changes in the earth’s magnetism and changes in solar activity among the postulates. As we do not yet know the causes of those events, we cannot as yet find those causes in the present global warming. That these events caused global warming (as opposed to local events over a global scale that averaged out) is also open to debate.
It would thus be very good if the sceptics could come up with a cause for the trends as shown in the graphs. If there is no relationship between anthropomorphic activity and global warming, then we should see a disjunct soon. CO2 is predicted to continue to rise with the increased burning of carbon by India and China not the least. But temperatures should start to fall soon, if it is a short term cycle.
I’ve got charts for the rainfall of these areas, and there is a one to one correspondence in the temperature trends and the rainfall trends.
Finally, the SW of WA is just a small part of the globe. What a funny coincidence that everywhere else that you look, there are similar trends. Where increased temperatures increase humidity, then of course there will be an increase in rainfall, or as in parts of Antarctica, increased snow fall. Where increased temperatures increase aridity, as in the SW, then this is what we see here.
So I look forward to some solid geological data from the sceptics that proves that this is a short term, natural trend that will quickly revert back to pre-1970 levels in the next 10-20 years. Good luck!
