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P a g e
SECTION 2
European Heat Wave
A
It was the summer, scientists now realise, when felt. We knew that summer 2003 was
remarkable: global warming at last made itself unmistakably Britain experienced its record
high temperature and continental Europe saw forest fires raging out of control, great rivers
drying of a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how remarkable is only
now becoming clean
B
The three months of June, July and August were the warmest ever recorded in western
and central Europe, with record national highs in Portugal, Germany and Switzerland as
well as Britain. And they were the warmest by a very long way Over a great rectangular
block of the earth stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in Switzerland and
southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months was 3.78°C above
the long-term norm, said the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia
in Norwich, which is one of the world's lending institutions for the monitoring and
analysis
of temperature records.
C
That excess might not seem a lot until you are aware of the context - but then you
realise it is enormous. There is nothing
like this in previous data, anywhere. It is
considered so exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director, is prepared to
say openly - in a way few scientists have done before - that the 2003 extreme may be
directly
attributed, not to natural climate variability, but
to global wanning caused by
human actions.
D
Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high
temperatures are consistent with predictions" of climate change. For the great block of
the map
一
that stretching between 3 5-5 ON and 0-20E - the CRU has reliable
temperature records dating back to 1781. Using as a
baseline the average summer
temperature recorded between 1961 and1990, departures from the temperature norm, or
"anomalies': over the area as a whole can easily be plotted. As the graph shows, such is
the variability of our climate that over the past 200 years, there have been at least half a