http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=471145
The Independent
08 December 2003
Britain heads
for hottest year since 1659
By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Editor
This year is likely
to prove the hottest recorded in Britain,
The Independent can reveal.
It will also be memorable
for continental Europe's hottest summer,
which exceeded previous records by such an enormous amount that
one of Britain's leading climate scientists is now prepared
to attribute its extreme heat directly to global warming.
Even though three weeks
of temperatures have still to be
registered, 2003 - already notable for Britain's hottest
day on 10 August, when the thermometer registered 38.5C (101.3F)
at Faversham in Kent, is on course to be the hottest year as a
whole in Britain in nearly 350 years of reliable records.
Data maintained by
the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the
University of East Anglia in Norwich show that, unless
we are hit by a sustained freeze of Arctic proportions
in the next three weeks, the current 12 months will prove
the hottest in the whole of the Central England Temperature
Record, which goes back to 1659. The year's expected final
average temperature of 10.65C will beat the previous records
of 1990 (10.63C) and 1999 (10.62C).
The Continent was even
hotter, and the three months of June,
July and August were the warmest recorded in Western and
Central Europe by a considerable degree. Over a huge area
of land from France to northern Italy, the average temperature
was above the norm by 3.78C - far in excess of anything
recorded before.
Professor Phil Jones,
co-director of the CRU, said this
could not be accounted for by natural climate variability,
and can be attributed to global warming caused by human
actions. It is unusual for a leading scientist to make
the link so directly. "The temperatures recorded in Europe
this year were out of all proportion to the previous record,"
he said.
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