Human Activity to Blame For 2003 Heatwave

Dirak writes "The temperatures of the summer of 2003 were almost undoubtedly the highest in Europe for over 500 years. New research shows how human influence, mainly fossil fuel burning, can be blamed for increasing the risk of such a heatwave and by the middle of this century every other summer could be even hotter than 2003."

Comments

Re:But what's the point?

[lxdbxr]

What difference does a report like this really make?

It could be used to establish liability - just like the research into smoking causing cancer; before there was good research the tobacco companies could avoid liability (even though they knew fairly well that smoking caused various diseases), once the research was public they could reasonably be sued for carrying on their activities. Imagine Exxon getting sued for those excess 30,000-50,000 deaths per year due to anthropogenic global warming.

Don't think this is likely? The SCO nonsense should convince you that lawyers will do absolutely anything. On the example of the tobacco company lawsuits, I doubt such action would succeed, but it could cause serious costs and embarrassment to oil companies, car companies, etc., who fail to take action to moderate their impact.

Re:Fawed Research

[Savage-Rabbit]

So -- using that old razor of Occam's -- either the entire world and every observable natural system is on the brink of an unheard-of disaster, or there is a noticable (and understandable) trend in scientific research to a) follow the herd, and b) doomsay.

True enough, Up here in the arctic the change in temprature is really noticable. Over the last few years all sorts of plants and animals that would hardly ever bee seen in here just 10-15 years ago have become common place. They do concede in this article that the climate is still colder than it was during the middle ages when people were able to grow wheat in quantity as far north as sub arctic Norway, Sweden and in Iceland: "...the temperatures of summer 2003 were almost undoubtedly the highest in Europe for over 500 years." So I'm still not convinced that this isn't just a natural fluctuation in the climate, althought is is probably not completely unaffected by human activity.