4 ms·

Flash floods cause havoc across Europe – in pictures

25 points by thg 5y ago

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
> At least eight people have died and dozens of people are missing in Germany after heavy flooding turned streams and streets into raging torrents, sweeping away cars and causing some buildings to collapse. I really don’t know what to make of these understatements here… The official number of victims (deaths) is already at 140, and that’s the number from yesterday. Also, it’s not “some buildings” – at least some villages do, for all practical purposes, no longer exist in their entirety.
- x3ro 5y ago
  The article is dated Thursday, 15th. I'm assuming that's part of the reason? E.g. Tagesschau [1] reports "at least 110 dead", but that's from this Sunday 18th at ~5:30 CEST. [1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hochwasser-105.html https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hochwasser-105...
  - ManuelKiessling 5y ago
    Ah, sorry, I falsely assumed it’s a very recent article and didn’t check its date.
- loopz 5y ago
  These floods affect village centers first, which are often built surrounding a river or in flood-prone area (ie. beneath a dike or dam). So these centers may be boliterated or severely damaged when it rains as much as in one month during the night. However, most of the houses on the hillsides may be totally OK in this case. These are extremes that climate scientists attribute partly to climate change, as such events will become more impactful and numerous. Climate change doesn't mean hotter weather everywhere, but more chaotic weather pattern disruptions, changed jetstreams, even changes to oceanic streams may at some point be triggered. Large changes happening so fast will always be catastrophic, especially to species on the top of the food pyramid while dependent on infrastructure. However, just because these events become more probable, doesn't mean we can expect them every year, just that we will keep experiencing them faster and meaner as time goes by. Looking at past 10K years, both CO2 and temperature have been remarkably stable, allowing civilization to rise. We have now moved away from that goldilocks zone, which will have planet-wide consequences. It seems a remarkable bet some are willing to take, with no facts to back up their assertions with, but who knows, right?
mkesper 5y ago
Sadly more than 100 people have died now in Germany alone. Many others have lost everything (insurance against elementary damage is always optional). There's a donation page here: https://www.tagesschau.de/spendenkonten/spendenkonten-129.html https://www.tagesschau.de/spendenkonten/spendenkonten-129.ht...
zamalek 5y ago
I feel like the climate is falling apart orders of magnitude faster than we thought it would. Heat waves, greek-lettered hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events were supposed to be decades out. Are we really going to get ahead of this thing?
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  Just to state this as clearly as possible: I’m writing this as someone who 100% acknowledges that climate change is real, it’s man-made, it’s already causing trouble, it will cause terrible problems in the future, and we must act quickly and swiftly now (well, actually, yesterday) etc. etc. However, from what I understand e.g. from what DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) says, we cannot attribute the current events to climate change, at least we cannot be sure. Then again, it doesn’t really matter: we DO have to expect that these kinds of extreme events will happen more regularly in the future due to climate change. My personal opinion is that the devastation and suffering caused by this event is much less a question of climate change and/or weather extremes themselves, but one of insufficient preparation, villages built in stupid places (yeah, hindsight, I know), and stupid infrastructural developments of the past decades. What we did to our rivers and the way we sealed way too many surfaces must stop and be reversed, and we must find much better and intelligent solutions. In Germany, there’s a lot of talk about how our infrastructure must be changed to create “sponge-like” villages and surroundings that are able to suck up the huge amounts of water resulting from these kinds of weather extremes. And yeah, also do everything that needs to be done to avoid them from occurring even more often due to climate change! But no matter what we do on that front – the amount of extreme weather events will never be zero!
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  IMO there is a lot of misattribution happening where any anomalous weather event is immediately blamed on climate change when it could just be a rare event. After all we had record breaking events before climate change. I saw this flawed attribution from virtually every newspaper headline claiming the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave was caused by climate change despite there being no evidence to establish such strong causality and no continuous pattern of such events (Seattle last had triple digit temperatures in 2009). The same attribution issue also happens with wildfires even though the main reasons wildfires are worse in modern times, at least in the western US, is due to how forests have been logged, regrown, regulated, and managed (see https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...). Leaving that aside, warming (as a planet wide average) is happening and will have big impacts. It won’t be a threat to the species however - that is it won’t be an existential threat. So whether we get ahead of it is a somewhat subjective question. If we experience millions of deaths but most of humanity is fine, will we consider ourselves to be ahead of it? We probably don’t need to go to extremes to mitigate the worst of future climate change impacts. There is a lot of focus on personal transportation for example, resulting in bans on petrol cars that don’t make sense to me. If we instead more widely adopt nuclear power, and also hold populations within some limits, we can probably avoid a lot of the impact while continuing to retain a modern standard of living.
chrisseaton 5y ago
I’m never going to buy property that isn’t on a hill.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Yeah if you aren’t within 10m height from the sea level or any rivers you should be fine (from direct damage - your road and food supply is of course still disrupted). It’s not even a hill it’s just “not the beach and not the plain by the river”.
- pan69 5y ago
  You might still have to live on that hill because you might not be able to afford anything else. Entire countries are in situations like that, take e.g. Bangladesh: https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-country-underwater-culture-move https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-country-underwater-c...
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > You might still have to live on that hill because you might not be able to afford anything else. Why's that a problem? And doesn’t that article actually say the opposite of what you’re saying?
- rambojazz 5y ago
  And then your hill slides.

25 points by thg 5y ago

> At least eight people have died and dozens of people are missing in Germany after heavy flooding turned streams and streets into raging torrents, sweeping away cars and causing some buildings to collapse. I really don’t know what to make of these understatements here… The official number of victims (deaths) is already at 140, and that’s the number from yesterday. Also, it’s not “some buildings” – at least some villages do, for all practical purposes, no longer exist in their entirety.

x3ro 5y ago
The article is dated Thursday, 15th. I'm assuming that's part of the reason? E.g. Tagesschau [1] reports "at least 110 dead", but that's from this Sunday 18th at ~5:30 CEST. [1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hochwasser-105.html https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hochwasser-105...
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  Ah, sorry, I falsely assumed it’s a very recent article and didn’t check its date.
loopz 5y ago
These floods affect village centers first, which are often built surrounding a river or in flood-prone area (ie. beneath a dike or dam). So these centers may be boliterated or severely damaged when it rains as much as in one month during the night. However, most of the houses on the hillsides may be totally OK in this case. These are extremes that climate scientists attribute partly to climate change, as such events will become more impactful and numerous. Climate change doesn't mean hotter weather everywhere, but more chaotic weather pattern disruptions, changed jetstreams, even changes to oceanic streams may at some point be triggered. Large changes happening so fast will always be catastrophic, especially to species on the top of the food pyramid while dependent on infrastructure. However, just because these events become more probable, doesn't mean we can expect them every year, just that we will keep experiencing them faster and meaner as time goes by. Looking at past 10K years, both CO2 and temperature have been remarkably stable, allowing civilization to rise. We have now moved away from that goldilocks zone, which will have planet-wide consequences. It seems a remarkable bet some are willing to take, with no facts to back up their assertions with, but who knows, right?

mkesper 5y ago

Sadly more than 100 people have died now in Germany alone. Many others have lost everything (insurance against elementary damage is always optional). There's a donation page here: https://www.tagesschau.de/spendenkonten/spendenkonten-129.html https://www.tagesschau.de/spendenkonten/spendenkonten-129.ht...

zamalek 5y ago

I feel like the climate is falling apart orders of magnitude faster than we thought it would. Heat waves, greek-lettered hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events were supposed to be decades out. Are we really going to get ahead of this thing?

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
Just to state this as clearly as possible: I’m writing this as someone who 100% acknowledges that climate change is real, it’s man-made, it’s already causing trouble, it will cause terrible problems in the future, and we must act quickly and swiftly now (well, actually, yesterday) etc. etc. However, from what I understand e.g. from what DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) says, we cannot attribute the current events to climate change, at least we cannot be sure. Then again, it doesn’t really matter: we DO have to expect that these kinds of extreme events will happen more regularly in the future due to climate change. My personal opinion is that the devastation and suffering caused by this event is much less a question of climate change and/or weather extremes themselves, but one of insufficient preparation, villages built in stupid places (yeah, hindsight, I know), and stupid infrastructural developments of the past decades. What we did to our rivers and the way we sealed way too many surfaces must stop and be reversed, and we must find much better and intelligent solutions. In Germany, there’s a lot of talk about how our infrastructure must be changed to create “sponge-like” villages and surroundings that are able to suck up the huge amounts of water resulting from these kinds of weather extremes. And yeah, also do everything that needs to be done to avoid them from occurring even more often due to climate change! But no matter what we do on that front – the amount of extreme weather events will never be zero!
throwawaysea 5y ago
IMO there is a lot of misattribution happening where any anomalous weather event is immediately blamed on climate change when it could just be a rare event. After all we had record breaking events before climate change. I saw this flawed attribution from virtually every newspaper headline claiming the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave was caused by climate change despite there being no evidence to establish such strong causality and no continuous pattern of such events (Seattle last had triple digit temperatures in 2009). The same attribution issue also happens with wildfires even though the main reasons wildfires are worse in modern times, at least in the western US, is due to how forests have been logged, regrown, regulated, and managed (see https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...). Leaving that aside, warming (as a planet wide average) is happening and will have big impacts. It won’t be a threat to the species however - that is it won’t be an existential threat. So whether we get ahead of it is a somewhat subjective question. If we experience millions of deaths but most of humanity is fine, will we consider ourselves to be ahead of it? We probably don’t need to go to extremes to mitigate the worst of future climate change impacts. There is a lot of focus on personal transportation for example, resulting in bans on petrol cars that don’t make sense to me. If we instead more widely adopt nuclear power, and also hold populations within some limits, we can probably avoid a lot of the impact while continuing to retain a modern standard of living.

chrisseaton 5y ago

I’m never going to buy property that isn’t on a hill.

alkonaut 5y ago
Yeah if you aren’t within 10m height from the sea level or any rivers you should be fine (from direct damage - your road and food supply is of course still disrupted). It’s not even a hill it’s just “not the beach and not the plain by the river”.
pan69 5y ago
You might still have to live on that hill because you might not be able to afford anything else. Entire countries are in situations like that, take e.g. Bangladesh: https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-country-underwater-culture-move https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-country-underwater-c...
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > You might still have to live on that hill because you might not be able to afford anything else. Why's that a problem? And doesn’t that article actually say the opposite of what you’re saying?
rambojazz 5y ago
And then your hill slides.