Misrepresented

Everyone has their own spin on things, but its still not nice to be misrepresented, especially in support of someone elses agenda. RP Sr would like the 2003 heat wave to be unrelated to GW. It may well be; it was such an exceptional event that it would remain outside the stats even if you factor in GW. Rather than looking at sfc T, which seems to be the natural thing to do, Chase et al (inc RP) looked at 1000-500 hPa depth, which is a broad measure of temperature in this layer. They find that by this measure that 2003 in Europe wasn't exceptional: similar anomalies have occurred elsewhere. I agree. But to say Recently, William Connelly [sic] tested our claim and confirmed our conclusions is wrong; I replicated their results but then found that if you looked at surface temperature you got a totally different picture: that 2003 is indeed exceptional. Once you've agreed that 2003 was indeed exceptional you can then look at why; sfc drying seems likely; which of course raises the obvious question as to why the sfc was dry.

You can read my preprint if you like.

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My understanding of RP reasoning is that if the 2003 heat wave had been a direct consequence of CO2 forcing, temperature anomalies aloft should have been larger than at the surface. Apparently they were not. The heat wave may have been an indirect response to CO2-induced drying of of the surface, but this conflicts with soil moisture series in Russia and UKraine, which shows a long-term moistening (see .e.g. papers by Robock and co-workers)

Viento, that may or may not be, but the issue is whether it was exceptional, and since most of the people who died were at the surface, the issue is whether the temperature excursion at the surface was exceptional.

i just wonder what's the point of saying 2003 summer heat wave was exceptionnal or not. if it wasn't, then people died out of..what ? carelessness ? (sorry, my french english can't think of other words); if it was, then what ? does it prove anything with respects to global warming ?
can any seasonnal event in the climate system be directly related to the anthropogenic radiative forcing?
RP writes "since this heat wave was not even due to global warming" - can he cite any heat wave due to global warming ? this is irrelevant.

["since this heat wave was not even due to global warming" is RP taking things further than they can plausibly be taken. But knowing if 2003 was exceptional is useful info, at least scientifically. It would be *less* exceptional under a warming trend -W]