Nature: Human activity implicated in Europe's 2003 heat wave

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Human activity implicated in Europe's 2003 heat wave

Roxanne Khamsi

Greenhouse emissions doubled the risk of a high temperature summer.

The 2003 heat wave triggered thousands of extra deaths, as well as forest fires that caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
Man-made pollution during the past century doubled the chances of the heat wave that hit Europe last summer, say climatologists. It's the first time that a study has estimated how much human activity increased the risk of a specific weather event.

The sweltering temperatures of August 2003 left many people, particularly the elderly, struggling to cope. The heat wave caused many thousands of extra deaths, while forest fires ravaged large areas of land, causing $1.6 billion worth of damage in Portugal, for example.

A model climate

With information collected from ice cores and tree rings, scientists had already worked out that the summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe for 500 years. Some saw this as evidence for man-made climate change, but until now no one had attempted a rigorous attribution of its causes.

Peter Stott of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Reading, UK, turned to computer programs that could predict temperature trends across Europe from 1920 to the present, on the basis of certain starting conditions.

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http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041129/full/041129-6.html