A minor point.

The editor writes: Despite recording the two coolest years of the millenium in 2010 and 2011, Australia is continuing to observe rising temperatures over land that are consistent with global-scale warming, the climate report says.

I belive that should read "the two coolest years of the last decade"! By saying "the millenium" it is opening it up to spurious claims from the various bloggers who will take it to mean the last thousand years.

Regrettably, the post by Justin Norrie also repeats some of the more serious errors and shortcomings in the CSIRO and BoM' State of the Climate 2012.

For example, he writes: “Greenhouse gases have increased at more than 3% a year for the past decade to reach their highest level in 800,000 years, according to the latest summary of Australia’s long term climate trends by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.”
Justin like so many confuses emissions, which have indeed grown by more than 3% p.a. since 2001, with the atmospheric concentration of CO2, which has grown at only 0.3% over the same period. Not only that, CSIRO and BoM have no evidence for what the level atmospheric CO2 was 800,000 years ago – but we can agree that at 390 ppm now it is around 110 ppm more than it was in 1900.

Then Justin uncritically accepts the CSIRO-BOM claim that “most of the surface global warming observed since the mid-20th century” is due to man-made increases in greenhouse gases. That implies their authors have undertaken multi-variate least regression analysis of temperature change as a function of not only atmospheric CO2 but also atmospheric water vapour, which Tyndall showed experimentally in 1861 was much more significant than the CO2, but they have not, nor shown why Tyndall’s results are incorrect.

Yet infrared spectrum analysis (not mentioned by Justin) has shown that Tyndall was right and that the CSIRO-BoM conclusion is false (with apologies for length of this citation):

“Water vapour and carbon dioxide are the main greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide produces essentially the whole of its effect through absorption at infrared wavelengths from about 13.5mm to 17.5mm. Because the blocking by carbon dioxide over this interval is large, the band having steeply-falling wings, additions of carbon dioxide have only a second-order influence on the greenhouse effect and are inconsequential compared to the major factors which control the Earth's climate. The blocking effect of water vapour rises all the way from 17.5mm to almost 100mm.

The wavelength 13.5mm is important in two respects. In the energy
distribution of radiation emitted at ground and sea-level it marks the
halfway point, one-half of the energy being at wavelengths shorter than
13.5mm and one-half at wavelengths longer. It also marks a division in
the effectiveness of the blocking of greenhouse gases. Shortward of
13.5mm the blocking is comparatively weak, longward of 13.5mm it is
strong, excepting for a partial window from 17.5mm to about 20mm.
Shortward of 13.5mm there is a broad weak absorption from water vapour with its minimum in the region of 10mm, together with narrow bands from 03 and CH4. Of these, some current fuss is being made about CH4. But blocking by methane is somewhat shortward of 8mm, which is so far out on the short wavelength tail of the Earth's reradiated spectrum as also to be of no great consequence. Thus the Planck maximum for a reradiated spectrum of, say, an effective temperature 290K is at 17.6mm with respect to energy, and at 12.7mm with respect to maximum photon emission. Thus methane makes its contribution in a region of the reradiated spectrum where there is only 10 percent of the energy, for which reason fluctuations in atmospheric methane can produce only minor effects, like those produced by fluctuations of CO2. The gas that can produce major effects, and towards which one must therefore look for an understanding of large shifts of the Earth's climate, is water vapour.” (Hoyle and Wickramasinghi 1999, available from http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce120799.html
(h/t to CD).

Water vapour arises principally from evaporation produced by the sun, so it is not anthropogenic.

David Arthur commented on my statement that "Water vapour arises principally from evaporation produced by the sun, so it is not anthropogenic" by saying "Cobblers [sic]. Water evaporation is driven by the difference between water vapour pressure of water in the atmosphere above a water surface, and saturation vapour pressure which is a monotonic function of temperature only. As temperature increases, so does the saturation vapour pressure, and hence the propensity for water molecules to evaporate. The temperature rise HAS been driven by anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, which causes small increases in near-surface temperatures. These cause increased water evaporation, and water is a greenhouse gas which causes further warming which causes further evaporation. In other words, the role of water vapour is that of a positive feedback (effectively a "magnifier" of the warming caused by CO2)".

However, despite Arthur's cobblers, Wikipedia (also endorsed in basic texts) states that "Evaporation is an essential part of the water cycle. SOLAR ENERGY drives evaporation of water from oceans, lakes, moisture in the soil, and other sources of water. In hydrology, evaporation and transpiration (which involves evaporation within plant stomata) are collectively termed evapotranspiration. Evaporation of water occurs when the surface of the liquid is exposed, allowing molecules to escape and form water vapor; this vapor can then rise up and form clouds…. For molecules of a liquid to evaporate, they must be located near the surface, be moving in the proper direction, and have sufficient kinetic energy to overcome liquid-phase intermolecular forces. Only a small proportion of the molecules meet these criteria, so the rate of evaporation is limited. Since the kinetic energy of a molecule is proportional to its temperature, evaporation proceeds more quickly at higher temperatures" [e.g. in summer].

The idea that evaporation arising from the radiative forcing of all greenhouse gases as of now at about 3.7 W/sw. metre outweighs the sun's 342 W/sq metre, according to Kiehl and Trenberth, is characteristic of Arthur's accuracy. The Clausius-Clayperon relation shows that the actual 0.0125oC annual temperature increase since 1950 has had zero statistically significant impact on total evaporation since then (see Lim & Roderick An Atlas of the Global Water Cycle
Based on the IPCC AR4 Climate Models at ANU-E Press).