Perth is one of the epicentres of Global warming. OUr rainfall has dropped about 20% since the 70s. Happened very fast too. After 1976 we no longer received high rainfall years.

Last January we had our longest heatwave in history, and the december heatwave on your picture above (between Xmas and New Year) was the longest December heat wave. We get severe heatwaves every year now.

The drought and heatwaves are causing mass die offs in the forests around Perth and to the south.

The heat is now also in the Indian Ocean offshore and is playing haoc with our Lobster fishery and we look like losing the Abalone fishery as weel (that was badly depleted by over fishing though).

Bad times… And most people who live here see it as caused by AGW. It’s quite a conversation topic.

One thing I’ve not seen commented on is the fact that this ‘big heat’ we’re having is in the absence of the anticipated El Nino.

Also, February is usually the hottest month. Let’s hope it’s not the case this year.

The Bureau has added to the temperature scale for it’s predicted temperatures reaching more than 50C in parts in a few days.

As we speak, literally as I typed that last paragraph, my colleagues in Australia, between bouts of putting ice on their heads, have been sending more info, and I’ve decided that a full blown blog post may be in order. I’ve got a peer reviewed paper predicting future Australian temps and a very current report from the Aussie BoM about the current heat wave, and it is worth passing all of that on.

The ABS 2008 Yearbook (1301.0) has this to say:

“While there have been short-term meteorological observations in various parts of Australia since the earliest years of European settlement, the first long-term rainfall data set, in Adelaide, commenced in 1839. Until the late-1850s there were only a handful of stations, in the major cities. The observing network then grew through the 1860s in parts of New South Wales and South Australia, then through the 1870s and early-1880s in much of the rest of eastern Australia, and in some key Northern Territory locations. Apart from a few locations near the coast, there were few pre-1900 observations in Tasmania or Western Australia, nor in many of the more remote parts of central Australia. Temperature observations also occurred over this period through many of these regions, but as most of these were made using instrument shelters which are not directly comparable with current standards, they are of little use in assessing long-term trends.”

Jo Nova (and her crew of deniers) launched an audit of BOM temperature records in March 2012 and found anomalies that caused them to question the reliability of 10-30% of records.

Link to science denialist site deleted.