Bonzo - say what you will about the models not reflecting physical
reality, but in fact, the media for the past few years have repeatedly
reported on unusually severe wildfire seasons in different places,
haven't they?

And most of these dramatically intensified wildfire seasons have been
associated with unusually dry, unusually windy and unusually hot
weather -- by unusual weather that arguably may have been generated by
AGW.

It looks as if this new Univ of Berkeley / Texas Tech modeling project
actually may suggest that AGW was not involved in a spectacular set of
wildfires that I've been jumping on as evidence for AGW effects in
Australia.

If the press release is correct, the conclusions of this modeling
study suggest that as AGW proceeds over the next few decades, severe
wildfire seasons should become less common in Australia, not more so.

It's not at all clear that the study results go counter to recent
outbreaks of severe wildfire seasons that have occurred in southern
California and the Rocky Mountain states of the USA, however.

Or the severe wildlife seasons that have recently accompanied drought
and extreme hot weather and high winds in northern Florida during the
terrible drought of a few summers ago -- ditto regarding the dramatic
wildfires that swept across Southern and Eastern Europe and a big
swath of the Mediterranean world during a very hot, dry spring a few
years back.

Whether the Berkely/Texas Tech climate model had just the correct
parameters is debatable, obviously.

But it's not as if they were engaging in some wildly counterfactual
hypothesis testing when they posited a coming causal connection
between shifts in wind intensity and high temperatures and shifts in
wildfire behavior. Apparent connections of this kind have been seen
quite recently in the real world.