At least 14 people are believed to have died in Australian wildfires raging across the south-east of the country, with unconfirmed reports that the death toll could climb beyond 40.

A deadly combination of scorching temperatures and gale-force winds saw out-of-control bushfires sweeping through parts of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. [...]

As temperatures reached 47C (117F), more than 10,000 volunteer firefighters were put on standby. In New South Wales, helicopters and planes dumped water from the air on several fires which left a haze in the sky over Sydney.

The fires have been caused by the most severe heatwave for a century, low humidity and strong winds.

People who deny global warming like to point to winters like we are having this year as proof that it is all a myth. But weather isn't climate. Weather is a transient phenomenon influenced by many temorary factors such as the El Nino phenomenon. But climate does effect changes in weather patterns, and the increase in droughts and heat waves and, yes, wild fires, is directly attributable to changes in climate driven by man made global warming. We can't say that one year's weather is directly caused by global warming but our changing weather patterns over the past 15 decades is direct evidence of climate change which is the result of global temperatures rising on average. Year after year of upward trends in average temperatures, expanding deserts, increasing areas of drought, melting glaciers, rising ocean levels, etc. -- all these items support the vast multitude of climate scientists who have been screaming from the roof tops that we indeed have a problem here on Earth. Mother Nature isn't happy with the greenhouse gases and the deforestation and the other changes we humans have made over the last 200 odd years or so to are only home. We are conducting a grand experiment testing the limits of what the Earth can endure. And the results are now in.

Indeed, the evidence for global warming is increasing, even in places that the denialist industry has pointed to as refuting that climate change is occurring: Antarctica:

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Antarctica has warmed over the past half-century, scientists said, dashing a key argument by skeptics who say climate change is overstated.

Temperatures rose an average 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.22 Fahrenheit) per decade since 1957, researchers led by Eric Steig, a professor of glaciology at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in the journal Nature. Using new measurement methods, they discovered warming in the continent’s interior, which United Nations-sponsored scientists theorized was cooling.

The findings may help puncture arguments by global-warming skeptics such as the late author Michael Crichton who have pointed to cooling in parts of Antarctica as an indicator that climate change is exaggerated.

“This has put the last pieces of the jigsaw in place,” Gareth Marshall, a British Antarctic Survey climatologist in Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the research, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “If you consider Antarctica as a whole, it shows a significant warming of similar levels to the rest of the Southern Hemisphere.” [...]

The study indicates that the breakup of ice shelves already seen in the Antarctic Peninsula, a spit of land reaching toward South America, may “eventually” extend to other parts of the continent, Steig said in a telephone interview.

“The fact that the warming that is appearing on the peninsula extends way down into West Antarctica would suggest that eventually, if that trend continues, ice shelves in West Antarctica are also going to similarly be affected,” Steig said, pointing to a timeframe of “hundreds of years.”

As the climatologists at Real Climate point out, the evidence for warming in Antarctica reported in this new study are "robust." That means there are multiple points of agreement among the data sets used by the scientists in the study who found temperature increasing, that is, warming and not cooling, for the continent of Antarctica.

Of course, those who have a vested interest in finding fault with the ever increasing mound of evidence demonstrating global warming is a real threat to life on this planet and will have dire consequences for humanity, will continue to do so. So expect to see even more strident op-ed pieces by those who claim anthropogenic global warming and the climate change it brings are figments of our imagination. But please, don't be misled by their deceitful and misleading arguments, and inform those who buy into their phony claims to actually look into the research that has been done by legitimate scientists around the globe. It isn't hard to find after all. All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to believe what you are seeing with your own eyes.