Australia: Choose your Future

In recent posts I’ve featured graphs of the average daily high temperature in Australia during summer. Here’s one of temperature throughout the entire year; black dots show each year’s average, while the red line with pink shading around it shows an estimate of the trend and its uncertainty range (just an estimate, mind you, but it’s based on math, not on “looks like”)

The trend line emphasizes two things Australians need to know:

1: The trend is going up — overall, Australia is hotter than it used to be and getting hotter.

2: Temperature doesn’t just follow the trend. In addition to its “overall” pattern it also fluctuates, incessantly.