The Backyard Science of the New York Times - By Denis Boyles - The Corner - National Review Online

Anyway, these are Yankee dog days. From where I sit in western France, the worry again this summer is whether we’ll get enough hot, sunny climate change to redden a decent Roma. A visitor here from South Carolina promised to send me his wife’s secret for making great fried green tomatoes, because that’s all we get lately. We’re entering a second week of temps in the mid-60′s and low 70′s. This happened last summer and the summer before. In fact, that’s sort of been the trend — with the exception of 2003, when Europe got hit by a heat wave just like the one now affecting the U.S.

There’s really not much in the op-ed piece about European weather — the piece seems to assume that a hot summer in Kansas is a global phenomenon — though we do get a little shout-out by recalling that “infamous European heat wave that killed more than 30,000 people.” The contributing factor to all those deaths? “Heat-trapping pollution,” claims Heidi Cullen. I assume 30,000 people haven’t died in the current American heat wave, but at least in France, where most of those deaths took place, it wasn’t the “heat-trapping pollution” that did them in. Actually, they died because the government-run health-care service collapsed, overtime had been banned by the unions, the Chirac government refused to acknowledge the extent of the emergency, and nobody knew to skip their August vacations to take care of their grandparents. In Paris, the stricken elderly couldn’t even find relief in a hospital waiting room, where temperatures were about the same as outside, because there was no air conditioning. Cooling the air in hospitals had been deemed unfriendly to the environment. So there’s a pretty good example of a man-made weather disaster. According to the op-ed, we may face one of these disasters every ten years, especially if we can make the American health-care system more like the French one.

Climate Change Capital may reconsider investments

LONDON (Reuters) - The low-carbon Climate Change Capital fund postponed investment in a Scottish wind farm on Wednesday and a spokesman said it would consider withdrawing from other projects due to "difficult market conditions."

When asked whether the company was going to reconsider other project investments, the spokesman said: "It's something that we will consider."

The Sizzle Factor for a Restless Climate - Warmist Heidi Cullen - NYTimes.com

The next time NOAA calculates its new temperature normals will be in 2021 — when there will be about another billion people on the planet. Lady Gaga may no longer be hot. But the climate almost surely will be.