Socrates, himself, is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed

From Tamino, some nice graphs about the current situation in Australia. With all the wild excitement, it can be hard to see what's actually happening - after all, recall the Bazillion Rainforest fuss of not long ago.

As to ppn, as Tamino puts it, Australia has had dry years before, and will again. Although 2019 was the driest on record, there’s no trend detectable in rainfall amounts, at least not yet; it looks like an unfortunate but random occurrence. This isn’t climate change, it’s bad luck. And that seems a fair assessment.

As to temperature, clearly that is a record high, and part of a trend; though also clearly above the trendline.

Now I draw your attention to the correlations; wet years tend to be cold, and dry years tend to be hot. I'm doing that by eye; Tamino didn't leave his data lying around and I can't be bothered to look for it; but look at e.g. 2000 (and then 2002), and 2010/11; or 1974. 1994 is less convincing. Anyway, as you'd expect, there's a correlation: a dry year has less moisture to cool the earth by evaporating, so tends to be hot².

And that then suggests that this year's disastrous fire season is unlikely to be replicated in the near future; if it's caused by the exceptional dryness, then it's bad luck. Anyone wanna bet, that 2020's ppn will be back at or above the bottom pink band; and next year's Temp will be at or below the pink; and next year's fire season will be unexciting?

Recall that we discussed this somewhat in the comments at Climate emergency? in November. At least my thoughts there suggest that yearly averages might not be fine enough¹.

Notes

1. And now Tamino with prompting has done another post on more regional stuff, but still doesn't find much in the way of trends.

2. Although this isn't obvious when you scatter-plot it; see RR.

Refs

* Hot enough to boil a monkey's bum!
* Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like; by Nerilie Abram on December 31, 2019
* Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now; by Michael Mann
* ‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos… - Dominic Cummings
* Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale - Sebastian Sippel, Nicolai Meinshausen, Erich M. Fischer, Enikő Székely & Reto Knutti; Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages35–41(2020)
* Atlantic and Pacific oscillations lost in the noise; Absence of internal multidecadal and interdecadal oscillations in climate model simulations (arch); Michael E. Mann, Byron A. Steinman & Sonya K. Miller; Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 49 (2020)
* A pre-hurricane climate change analysis gets major revision after the storm. Effort had predicted half of Hurricane Florence's rainfall was due to warming; Arstechnica (h/t VV).
* Australia Rain: Seasonal by State - Tamino

* Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia - Abram, N.J., Henley, B.J., Sen Gupta, A. et al. Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia. Commun Earth Environ 2, 8 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-020-00065-8.