http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=471135
The
Independent
08 December 2003
The
four degrees: How Europe's hottest summer shows global warming
is transforming our world
By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Editor
It was the summer,
scientists now realise, when global warming
at last made itself unmistakably felt.
We knew that summer
2003 was remarkable: Britain experienced
its record high temperature and continental Europe saw forest
fires raging out of control, great rivers drying to a trickle
and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how remarkable
is only now becoming clear.
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 in 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
3.78C 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 leading institutions for the
monitoring and analysis of temperature records.
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 warming caused by human actions. 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 - that stretching between 35-50N
and 0-20E - the CRU has reliable temperature records dating
back to 1781.
Using as a baseline
the average summer temperature recorded
between 1961 and 1990, 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 dozen
anomalies, in terms of excess temperature - the peaks on the
graph denoting very hot years - approaching, or even exceeding,
2C. But there has been nothing remotely like 2003, when the
anomaly is nearly four degrees.
"This is quite
remarkable," Professor Jones told The Independent.
"It's very unusual in a statistical sense. If this series
had a
normal statistical distribution you wouldn't get this number.
The return period [how often it could be expected to recur]
would be something like one in a thousand years.
"If we look at
an excess above the average of nearly four
degrees, then perhaps nearly three degrees of that is natural
variability, because we've seen than in past summers. But the
final degree of it is likely to be due to global warming,
caused by human action."
The summer of 2003
has, in a sense, been one that climate
scientists have long been expecting. Until now, the warming
has been manifesting itself mainly in winters that have been
less cold than in summers that have been much more hot.
Last week, the United Nations predicted that winters were
warming so quickly that winter sports would die out in
Europe's lower-level ski resorts. But sooner or later
the unprecedented hot summer was bound to come,
and this year it did.
Over a large swath
of the western part of the European
continent, records were broken in all three months, not
just monthly averages, but for daily extremes and the lengths
of spells above thresholds. New national records were set
in at least four countries. Britain experienced its record
high on 10 August when the mercury registered 38.5 C(101.3F)
at Faversham in Kent - the first time the British Isles had
recorded a three-figure Fahrenheit temperature.
Germany had a new record
of 40.8C (105.4), Switzerland one
of 41.5C (106.7F) - Swiss data show the summer as the hottest
since at least 1500 - and Portugal a quite astonishing 47.3C
(117.1F).
Although France did
not see a new national record - that
still stands at the 44C (111.2F) registered at Toulouse
on 8 August 1923 - the country suffered severely from
La Canicule, the heat wave, which was headline news for
most of the late summer. In southern and eastern France,
according to Professor Jones, 29 sites recorded temperatures
exceeding 40C (104F) during August, with the record being
42.6C (108.7F) at Orange in the Rhône valley.
One of the most dramatic
features of the summer was the
hot nights, especially in the first half of August.
In Paris, the temperature never dropped below 23C (73.4F)
at all between 7 and 14 August, and the city recorded
its warmest-ever night on 11-12 August, when the mercury
did not drop below 25.5C (77.9F). Germany recorded its
warmest-ever night at Weinbiet in the Rhine valley with
a lowest figure of 27.6C (80.6F) on 13 August, and similar
record-breaking night-time temperatures were recorded in
Switzerland and Italy.
The 15,000 excess deaths
in France during August, compared
with previous years, have been related to the high night-time
temperatures. The numbers gradually increased during the first
12 days of the month, peaking at about 2000 per day on the
night of 12-13 August, then fell off dramatically after
14 August when the minimum temperatures fell by about 5C.
The elderly were most affected, with a 70 per cent increase
in mortality rate in those aged 75-94.
For Britain, the year
as a whole is likely to be the warmest
ever recorded, but despite the high temperature record on
10 August, the summer itself - defined as the June, July
and August period - still comes behind 1976 and 1995,
when there were longer periods of intense heat.
At the moment, the
year is on course to be the third-hottest
ever in the global temperature record, which goes back to
1856, behind 1998 and 2002, but when all the records for
October, November and December are collated, it might move
into second place, Professor Jones said. The 10 hottest
years in the record have all now occurred since 1990.
Professor Jones is in no doubt about the astonishing
nature of European summer of 2003. "The temperatures
recorded were out of all proportion to the previous
record," he said. "It was the warmest summer in the
past 500 years and probably way beyond that. It was
enormously exceptional."
His colleagues at the
University of East Anglia's Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research are now planning a
special study of it. "It was a summer that has not been
experienced before, either in terms of the temperature
extremes that were reached, or the range and diversity
of the impacts of the extreme heat," said the centre's
executive director, Professor Mike Hulme.
"There were impacts
on health in France, on hydroelectricity
in Spain, on agriculture in southern Germany and on transportation
in Italy.
"It will certainly
have left its mark on a number of countries,
as to how they think and plan for climate change in the future,
much as the 2000 floods here revolutionised the way the
Government is thinking about flooding in the UK.
"The 2003 heatwave
will have similar repercussions across Europe."
A taste of
things to come
How the land suffered:
first the fields dried and turned
yellow, then the forests burst into flames. The rivers
disappeared; the glaciers melted; the old died.
Although in Britain
we dream of hot weather, across Europe
the heatwave of last June, July and August was too much for
most people.
The heatwave was record-breaking
in its extremity, with
temperatures exceeding 100F (37.78C) across a vast area
of Europe, and the prolonged period of drought made it
worse. Parts of eastern France had been without rain since
February, the longest spell in a century. There was no feed
for livestock; nothing was green any more.
In Feurs, in the Loire
département, a 34-year-old man was
arrested for killing his horse in public, cutting it in
four pieces and putting in his freezer. He said the drought
had shrivelled all the grazing and he had no more grass or
feed to keep the animal alive.
In France's south,
the tinder-dry brush went up in flames
at the hint of a spark and by the third week of July,
40,000 acres were burning between Toulon and Saint Tropez;
the Massif des Maures, the chain of hills that form a noble
backdrop the Riviera, was burnt to a cinder.
Two Britons, Margaret
Timson, 63, and her granddaughter,
15-year-old Kirsty Egerton, from Wigan, Greater Manchester,
were killed when they tried to escape from the fires,
close to La Garde-Freinet, near Frejus, by car. Other
tourists from the Netherlands and Poland also lost their
lives.
Rivers dried across
the continent; in Spain and in Italy
there were electricity shortages as hydroelectric power
stations ceased to function when the flow dropped.
The Po, Italy's greatest
river, was reduced to a trickle.
As the rivers began to vanish, so did the Alpine glaciers.
Many Swiss glaciers showed dramatic retreats, melting at a
rate 10 times that of a normal summer. Italians scientists
estimate that their own country's glaciers are now 20 per
cent smaller than they were in 1987.
And the old and the
infirm, at the heatwave's height
in early August, simply keeled over. The French estimate
an extra 15,000 deaths during the summer period across
the country, but with the largest numbers in Paris.
In Britain, we celebrated;
we ate outdoors, we wolfed
down ices. But continental Europe in summer 2003 had
a taste of what global warming will really be like:
unpleasant and dangerous.
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