Anthony Watts: culture kills. The European heat wave 2003

Anthony Watts has written a very long article about the 2003 European heat wave and its deadly effect (archived here, latest here). Actually, he didn't write most of it. Anthony doesn't write much these days (did he ever?). He just copied huge slabs of text from Wikipedia, followed by a copy of a press release about a new paper in Environmental Research Letters.

Death spike in the European heat wave

In the paper, the UK team of authors wrote about the impact of the 2003 European heat wave on mortality. Below is a chart from the paper, showing the unreal temperatures in June July and August. The only comparable summer so far was that in 2012.

Figure 1 | Mean summer temperature anomaly (relative to 1985–2010) in observations (CRUTEM4; black line) averaged over a region covering the Mediterranean [21]. The box and whisker plots show the median, interquartile range, 5%–95% range and more extreme data as + symbols over the same region for the (red) Actual scenario and (blue) Natural scenario. Horizontal dashed lines show the 5%–95% range of the modelled data. Year 2003 is marked with an orange arrow. Source: Mitchell16

Record-breaking hot years almost impossible without humans - and Anthony Watts' conspiracy theory

Recent record hot years are almost impossible in the absence of human-induced forcings, a new study shows once again.  A multi-national team of scientists led by Andrew King from the University of Melbourne did a study of hot weather years, and found human influences on heat extremes going back to the 1930s globally, and earlier in some places. The new paper has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Anthony Watts, a climate conspiracy blogger at WUWT, didn't read the paper, but he decided it made unfounded claims (archived here). Anthony decided, in his foolishness, that the team, led by a University of Melbourne scientist, and including other researchers from Universities in Melbourne, South Korea, Switzerland, Oxford UK, New Zealand and the New South Wales, must be wrong because Professor Chris Turney (not an author) led an expedition on a ship that got caught in the ice in Antarctica a couple of years ago. Need I say more about the weirdness of science deniers?

Record hot years influenced by human activity - going back to the 1930s globally

The authors weren't looking at heatwaves (a duration of days), they restricted their study to timescales of at least a month. They performed an analysis of hot years looking at the globe as a whole and selected regions. They found that by using the technique knows as Fractional Attributable Risk (FAR), they could determine years in which there was a detectable anthropogenic influence on especially hot years globally and in different regions of the world.