The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer...

We analyze the first representative series of individual measurements of the height of Swiss conscripts for the years 1875–1950. We find that average height followed a general upward time trend, but the economic downturn in the 1880s slowed down the increase in rural average-heights while the...