It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even harder. Naturally, this causes a lot of people to speculate, or to outright declare, or to outright deny, that the frequency and severity of heat waves has been increased by man-made climate change, also known as “global warming.”
I decided to study a single location in Europe, the daily high temperature in a small region near the town of Beaune, France, known for centuries as an outstanding wine-making region.
I retrieved data from the ERA5 reanalysis, and for each year I isolated the data for summer, which is defined as the months of June, July, and August. Then I computed each year’s summer average temperature, giving this:
Open Mind 