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

Telegraphing climate facts is unhelpful to Eric Worrall at WUWT

In the land of deniosaurs, facts are most unhelpful, don't you know. As you might have gathered if you've read any denier blogs like WUWT, anyone who talks about the science of climate change is at best an "alarmist", if not full of "hate" (one of Anthony Watts' favourite words when describing climate hawks).

Today Eric Worrall decides that it's "alarmist" to lay out the facts (archived here). I'm thinking he probably doesn't know the difference between "alarmist" and "alarming". Or maybe he does and he just doesn't want to face the facts. Eric is an odd little chap who's been a science denier for some time. Maybe forever - I wouldn't know. Certainly since he started commenting on climate blogs.

Anyway, Eric thinks it's "alarmist" of Myles Allen to state the obvious (at the Telegraph):

"Normal weather is actually a bit of a thing of the past."

"Here in Oxford we maintain the world’s longest daily weather record, we just beat the previous record by a whopping two and a half degrees and that record was set back in 1852."