It seems increasingly a waste of blog time to point out papers that show the planet’s warming. We already know that, right? So apologies for wasting your time, nothing really new to see here, move along. Today’s paper of the day comes from Paul Della-Marta and the University of Bern and colleagues:

[O]ver the period 1880 to 2005 the length of summer heat waves over western Europe has doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled.

I’m being facetious, because this is an example of the sort of ongoing climate science research that has relevance beyond settling the unsettleable climate wars debates – giving folks at a regional scale useful information about their changing environment. From the AGU press release:

“These results add more evidence to the belief among climate scientists that western Europe will experience some of the highest environmental and social impacts of climate change and continue to experience devastating hot summers like the summer of 2003 more frequently in the future,” Della-Marta said.