Chance of deadly floods in Central Europe doubles due to climate change

Human-caused climate change is doubling and intensifying the likelihood of heavy rainfall that led to devastating floods in Central Europe earlier this month, a new study has found.

Heavy rain from Storm Boris in mid-September hit large parts of Central Europe, including Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany, causing widespread damage. Floods killed 24 people, damaged bridges, flooded cars, left towns without power and required major infrastructure repairs.

The four days of heavy rain were the heaviest ever recorded in central Europe and are likely to be twice as much due to heating from burning coal, oil and natural gas. natural gas, World Weather Attribution, A team of scientists from Europe conducting rapid climate attribution studies on Wednesday found that climate change is also making rainfall 7% to 20% more intense.

“These floods once again highlight the devastating consequences of fossil fuel-fueled warming,” said Joyce Kimutai, a climate researcher at Imperial College in London and lead author of the study.

To test the impact of human-induced climate change, the team of scientists analyzed weather data and used: climate models to compare how such events have changed from colder pre-industrial times to today. Such models simulate a world without the current 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) global warming See how likely it is that such a severe rainfall event will occur on such a world since pre-industrial times.

The study analyzed four days of rainfall events and focused on the most affected countries.

Although the speedrun has not yet been peer-reviewed, it follows scientifically accepted techniques.

“In any climate, you would expect to see the occasional record being broken,” says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College in London who coordinated the attribution study team. But “seeing records being broken by such large margins is actually the fingerprint of climate change. And it’s something we’re only seeing in a warming world.”

Some of the most severe impacts were felt in the Polish-Czech border region and in Austria, especially in urban areas along major rivers. The study found number of deaths The damage from this month’s floods was significantly less than the catastrophic floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. Still, infrastructure and emergency management systems have collapsed in many cases and billions of euros will be needed to fix them.

Last week, European Union Secretary General Ursula von der Leyen pledged billions of euros in aid to countries damaged by floods and infrastructure.

The World Weather Attribution study also warned that in a world that has experienced even more warming since pre-industrial times, specifically a world experiencing 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the probability of severe four-day storms would increase by 50% compared to current levels. The authors found that the intensity of such storms would also increase.

The heavy rainfall in central Europe was caused by what is known as a “Vb depression,” which occurs when cold polar air from the north flows over the Alps and meets warm air from southern Europe. The study authors found no observable change in the number of similar Vb depressions since the 1950s.

The World Weather Attribution group was launched in 2015 largely out of frustration that it was taking too long to determine whether climate change was behind an extreme weather event. Studies like theirs within attribution science use real-world weather observations and computer modeling to determine whether climate change before and after affects the likelihood of a particular event and the intensity of global warming.

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