By Paul Homewood
Back in July, Carbon Brief reported on the “European heatwave” this summer:
A rapid assessment by scientists of the ongoing heatwave across northern Europe this summer has found that human-caused climate change made it as much as five times more likely to have occurred.
The preliminary analysis, by a team of scientists at the World Weather Attribution network, uses data from seven weather stations in Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The team were not able to get sufficient data at short notice to include a UK station.
The findings suggest that rising global temperatures have increased the likelihood of such hot temperatures by five times in Denmark, three times in the Netherlands and two times in Ireland.
The sizeable year-to-year fluctuations in summer weather in Scandinavia makes it harder to pin down a specific change in likelihood for the heatwaves in Norway, Sweden and Finland, the researchers say. However, “we can state that, yes, heatwaves have increased – and are increasing – in Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe”, says one of the scientists involved.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-made-2018-european-heatwave-up-to-five-times-more-likely
In fact, as the report by World Weather Attribution admits, the heatwave was far from being a Europe wide phenomenon:
The summer of 2018 has been remarkable in northern Europe. A very persistent high-pressure anomaly over Scandinavia caused high temperature anomalies and drought there from May to (at least) July.
Southern Europe was unusually wet, with damaging thunderstorms in France in the first half of June. In this analysis we investigate the connection between one aspect, the highest temperatures so far in Northern Europe, and climate change….
Key findings
- The heat (based on observations and forecast) is very extreme near the Arctic circle, but less extreme further south: return periods are about 10 years in southern Scandinavia and Ireland, five years in the Netherlands
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/attribution-of-the-2018-heat-in-northern-europe/
This is neatly expressed by their map:
As we can see, the hottest days were actually cooler than average in southern Europe.
But what about the north, particularly northern Scandinavia? Talk of the Scandinavian heatwave has been widespread this summer, with temperature of 32C close to the Arctic Circle in Sweden, Finland and Norway.
To the general public, such temperatures must seem incredible, simply out of this world. But, as we shall see, they are not.
The study analysed these sites:
So let’s check out the KNMI data (used in the study), which plots daily max temps. The data is up to date to the end of Aug 2018:
As we can see, temperatures of 30C and more are not uncommon in these high latitude sites in Finland. Sodankyla, which is the most northerly, and at 67N inside the Arctic Circle, peaked at 32.1C this summer.
While this is a record, KNMI tell us that temperatures reached 31.7C in 1914, and 31.5C in 1934.
Maybe heatwaves are half a degree hotter these days than a century ago, but the idea that AGW is making the Arctic burn up is fraudulent nonsense.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 13, 2018 at 08:33AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 