Say "Australia" to the climate skeptics

Australia, which elected a new Prime Minister bent on getting rid of their forward-looking and future-leading carbon tax (for which they have my admiration), is a demonstration site for the dangers of global warming.

Now wait.  I have chastised skeptics for exploiting short-term variability for their own propagandistic goals, so for me to express that the heat down under is proof or something like it of global warming would be wrong.  So I shouldn't.  All it serves therefore is as a counterpoint to the skeptics who present a generally normal cold winter in the U.S. and northern hemisphere (yes, there was snow in Egypt recently) as something that somehow disproves global warming.  We live in a great big world, and there will be areas that are cool and areas that are warm.  In the case of Australia, record warm. All-time record warm.

Records melt in our hottest year: Australia's heat maps were literally off the charts

"2013 will go down as the year that registered Australia's hottest day, month, season, 12-month period - and, by December 31, the hottest calendar year."

and 

"But for Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis at the bureau, the year's stand-out event was a whole month largely overlooked by a media diverted by the football finals and federal elections. ''From a climate point of view, what happened in September was probably the most remarkable,'' he says.

September's mean temperature soared to be 2.75 degrees above the 1961-90 average, eclipsing the previous record monthly deviation set in April 2005 by 0.09 degrees. Maximums were a stark 3.41 degrees over the norm, with South Australia's top raised by 5.39 degrees and NSW's by 4.68."  (NSW = New South Wales)

Keep up here.  September is a transitional month for Australia - early spring in the southern hemisphere,  early autumn in the northern hemisphere.  So just as the northern hemisphere is seeing major shifts in the spring (like early ice thaws, early blooming seasons), Australia is seeing the same basic thing, perhaps even more pronounced.  And thus even though the world is a variable place and winters still get cold where they are supposed to get cold (despite the fact that winters are not as cold as they used to be, overall), the general pattern, i.e., climate, is still getting warmer.