This shock runs deep.
Far beyond the west and south-west of the country, the terrible images of the storm and the raging floods of the last few days will get under your skin, the dead and unfortunate rescuers who lost their lives in the water will pass into the collective memory.
This catastrophe makes you think. Persistent rain, heavy rain - this is by no means unusual. But rain masses, which create tidal waves and floods overnight, tear the houses away and make the homeowners fight for their belongings to the point of desperation over large stretches of land, such monstrous weather phenomena can no longer be left alone today, no matter where they "hit" grasp the innocent concept of natural disaster.
It's also a climate catastrophe.
To be more precise: To regard the disaster in the Eifel as an isolated and accidental storm, as it were as a subset of historical natural events, ignores a crucial state of knowledge in recent research history.
Namely the inevitable connection between man-made climate change and the increasing number of extreme weather conditions.
The logic of acceleration
Of course, it would be premature to describe the catastrophic consequences of the low “Bernd” as a direct or even sole consequence of global warming without careful analysis. But the result does not change the empirical evidence. It is the laws of thermodynamics that nature, climate and weather follow. Every degree of warming accelerates the water cycle. Roughly speaking, one degree of warming means almost seven percent more water in the atmosphere, and this more water has to rain down sometime and somewhere. Together with the planetary currents that are changing due to global warming and are increasingly driven by ice melting, an almost compelling logic can be derived from this.
It's the logic of acceleration. These patterns of climate change are often reflected in the climate models and meteorological analyzes of recent years. All over the world, climatically accelerated storms leave ecological and meteorological fingerprints - documented in various global data sets such as those of the German Weather Service, in which extreme weather conditions are compared with historical catastrophe sequences. Likewise in studies in which supercomputers are used to estimate the statistical probability of extreme weather phenomena. The bitter reality that can be deduced from all these analyzes can no longer be denied. The case of a disaster always contains our own signature. The laws of nature and physics cannot be tricked by us.
This applies to climate change as well as to landscape change.
The sealing of the surfaces worsens the consequences of the extreme precipitation, and it is also involved in microclimatic processes that put us under additional stress during heat waves - the other pole of extreme weather.
Heat, drought and fires like these days on the North American Pacific coast are not at odds with the accelerated dynamics of the global water cycle.
Because they also appear in the analyzes, much more impressively than the precipitation peaks, more and more often as a result of the climatic shifts on our planet.
Climate stability is a feel-good factor
Two things can be derived from this for our future: more social resilience must be built up and any further escalation prevented as quickly as possible. Adjustments are urgently needed now, with the average temperature 1.2 degrees higher. This means that everyone is asked to be a planner in their own area of life. On the other hand, arming yourself does not mean capitulating to the inevitable. Climate action is rightly a priority today. But climate protection has a delayed effect, this must be considered - even if it is politically promoted, as is now the case with the European “Fit for 55” climate package. And it only works in a global context. In any case, the big drivers of the heating up are not only coming from Europe.
Recently, greenhouse gas emissions have been anything but reduced in the promising climate protection era before and after Paris. Globally, they even increased by a whopping eleven percent between 2010 and 2018. There are bright spots only in the energy sector. For traffic and in the building sector, on the other hand, more and more climate-damaging greenhouse gases are generated almost worldwide and as a matter of course - because, as the Berlin climate research institute MCC noted, "people in rich countries are more and more on the move and require more living space". The recent storms should have made everyone aware of how important the stability of the climate is as a feel-good factor.