With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

the norm. In parts of the city, there was a three-week wait for funerals. More
than 400 bodies were never claimed by relatives.
It wasn't just the mortuaries that were rewriting their record books. This
was the first single weather event that climate scientists felt prepared to say
was directly attributable to man-made climate change. In the past, the
assumption had always been that any individual weather event could be the
product of chance. But the 2003 heat wave was different, says the Oxford
University climate scientist and statistician Myles Allen. "The immediate
cause, I agree, was a series of anticyclones over Europe. They always raise
temperatures in summer, and we can't say those were made any more likely
by climate change. But we can say that climate change made the background
temperatures within which those anticyclones
operated that much higher."
There is no doubt that average temperatures have been rising strongly for
years. In much of Europe, the summer average at the start of the new
century was 0.9 to 1.8°F warmer than it was in the first half of the twentieth
century. In the summer of 2003, temperatures averaged 4.1 degrees warmer.
Judging from past averages, the heat wave was probably a
once-in-a-thousand-years event. But, says Allen, "small changes in average
temperatures make extreme events much more likely."
One of the nicest confirmations of how exceptional the summer of 2003
was came from a study published at the end of 2004. The French
mathematician Pascal Yiou, of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de
l'En- vironnement, had collected more than 600 years' worth of parish
records showing when the Pinot Noir grape harvest began in the Burgundy
vineyards of eastern France. There is a clear relationship between summer