Massive Flooding in Western Europe Might Very Well Be a Sign of Things to Come

Currently there are massive floods in parts of Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The past few days have seen outpourings of rain that are bigger than what normally falls in the entire month of July. We are talking 150-200 Litres per square metre in some cases. The village where I grew up made the national news as a huge river of water made its way through the city centre. Other villages have been evacuated due to flood risks as dams are at risk of breaching and water basins threaten to overflow. They are the lucky ones. Many people are unable to leave their homes, which are submerged and surrounded by tonnes and tonnes of litres of water from overflowing rivers. In Nordrein-Westfahlen, the region of Germany worst hit by the extreme weather, emergency services struggle to even reach some villages. Over forty people are believed to have died, dozens are missing, and 200,000 are without electricity.

I spoke to my mother, who works as a nurse in Nordrein-Westfahlen, and had just got home from work. She told me that the clinic in Würselen that she works at has had to accommodate patients from the neighbouring city of Stolberg, where the hospital has been evacuated. Because her clinic specializes in dialysis, all the city’s dialysis patients were being sent to them. To accommodate the influx of new patients from Eschweiler they have had to send their own patients home early, so that they would have enough time to prepare everything. “It was already a problem to get patients home last night. Transport services like taxi’s and ambulances were having trouble getting from point a to b due to all the blocked roads and detours.” Last night she had trouble getting home herself as well, as the highway back home had to be closed because it was completely flooded. When she came back the next morning, things were very chaotic. “A colleague of mine from Stolberg had been trying to get to work for three hours. She finally gave up and went home.” When asked about the well-being of the patients, she told me that people that are chronically ill need regularity. “Now they suddenly have to go to a different place, with different nurses. One patient called from Eschweiler because their house was flooded. They had no electricity, no water , and could no longer use their dialysis machines because those were in the living room. So I tried to comfort them and warned them to stay away from the water, because it is full of sewage and who knows what else. Tomorrow we will have a look at how we can get new equipment there. If it turns out we can’t, they will have to be evacuated.” She does not expect the chaos to end any time soon. “What the situation will be like when I get back tomorrow, we will see.”

The huge outpourings of rain are the result of very hot and moist air moving north-eastward from France and the Mediterranean, and the simultaneous flowing of much cooler Atlantic air in the opposite direction. The mixing of these two layers of air brought about storms and rainfall. The low-pressure cool air was trapped by the high pressure air, causing the rains to fall more or less continuously over the same areas. Soils were quickly saturated, rivers and basins could not take in all the water quickly enough, and started overflowing.

This extreme weather, which German newspaper Bild called “catastrophic weather that we have not experienced in 200 years”, is unfortunately something to get used to as the climate crisis deepens. As temperatures rise, highly sensitive weather patterns are altered in complex ways which we are struggling to understand and predict. Air that is warmer takes in more moisture (7% more per degree of warming) and therefore carries more water. This means that it will take longer for the air to become saturated, which can lengthen the time it takes before it rains. And because of all that extra water in the atmosphere, when it does rain, it pours. In Germany, days with at least 20mm of rain have increased by 7% since 1951, and precipitation in the winter has increased by 26% since 1881.

It is undeniable that the climate crisis is no longer some future event, but happening now. Richer countries have long believed themselves to be safe from the effects of human-caused global warming, but events like these are making this stance untenable. To put some numbers on this: a study into storms and torrential rains in southern Louisiana in 2016 conducted by the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that human-caused climate warming increased the risk of heavy rain events by at least 40% and doubled the odds of such storms.

The disconnect between politics and the scale of catastrophe that we are facing is stark, and can only be overcome by mounting pressure from citizens. Maybe now that the consequences are hitting home, people will begin to realise the urgency and severity of our current crisis. Climate change (more accurately, human behaviour) also plays a part in bringing about other crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic (read more about this in the article Pandemics: There Is No ‘Normal’ To Go Back To published a few weeks ago). The plan that was announced this week by the European Union to reduce carbon emissions to 0 by 2050 is a step in the right direction, but it faces an uphill battle the coming years, as its 27 member countries negotiate over its implementation. Critics of the plan say that it is not enough, with Greenpeace’s EU director Jorgo Riss saying that “the whole package is based on a target that is too low, doesn’t stand up to science, and won’t stop the destruction of our planet’s life support systems.”

The European Union has made emergency funds available to the affected regions, and hopefully rescue workers will be able to reach the areas that have been effectively cut off from civilisation. The rains and storms are set to start subsiding the coming days, but the warming of the planet is set to continue for years to come.

Note: This post was first published on www.criticalconsent.com. The included images have been moved to the bottom of this post to improve readability.