Hanrahan, I'm sure you may be right about the water table rising in some instances (due to deforestation) and causing salinity. I have not done a lot of research on it recently, my point was that salinity has been a problem in WA since human intervention, sorry if I got the exact mechanism wrong.
To everyone else firing questions my way, the question should not be "what weather patterns would NOT indicate warming" but "what weather patterns DO indicate warming". I believe the extreme weather we are seeing is exactly what scientists and climate models have been predicting, and you don't, so we therefore have a disagreement.
If a doctor says to you that smoking will gradually kill you, do you continue smoking and say to him "you were wrong, I'm not dead yet" or do you take notice? A rational person will either quit smoking pending advice from the doctor, or continue smoking in the full knowledge (or denial thereof) that they will very likely suffer the consequences in the future. Unless of course, they get hit by a bus, plus not all smokers ultimately die from smoking related illnesses.
My point is, there is a statistical, scientific link between smoking and smoking related illnesses, just like there is a link between man-made warming and extreme weather events.
