Climate change has
made extreme rainfall events of the kind that sent lethal torrents of water
hurtling through parts of Germany and Belgium last month at least 20 percent
more likely to happen in the region, scientists said Tuesday.
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The downpour was
likely made heavier by climate change as well.
A day of rainfall can now be up
to 19 percent more intense in the region than it would have been had global
atmospheric temperatures not risen by 1.2°C above preindustrial temperatures,
according to research published by the World Weather Attribution (WWA)
scientific consortium.
"We will
definitely get more of this in a warming climate," said the group's coleader
Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford.
"Extreme
weather is deadly," said Otto, recalling that she urgently contacted
family members who live in the affected areas to make sure they were safe when
the
floods hit.
"For me it was very close to home." With extreme
weather events dominating news headlines in recent years, scientists have been
under increasing pressure to determine exactly how much climate change is to
blame.
During the last
year alone, scientists found that US drought, a deadly Canadian heat wave and
wildfires across the Siberian Arctic have been worsened by a warming
atmosphere.
The July 12–15
rainfall over Europe triggered flooding that swept away houses and power lines,
and left more than 200 people dead, mostly in Germany.
Dozens died in Belgium
and thousands were also forced to flee their homes in the Netherlands.
"The fact that
people are losing their lives in one of the richest countries in the world —
that is truly shocking," said climate scientist Ralf Toumi at the Grantham
Institute, Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.
"Nowhere is safe."
Although the deluge
was unprecedented, the 39 WWA scientists found that local rainfall patterns are
highly variable.
So they conducted their analysis over
a wider area spanning parts of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
They used local weather records and computer
simulations to compare the July flooding event with what might have been
expected in a world unaffected by climate change.
Because warmer air
holds more moisture, summer downpours in this region are now 3–19 percent
heavier than they would be without global warming, the scientists found.
And the event
itself was anywhere from 1.2 to 9 times — or 20 percent to 800 percent — more
likely to have occurred.
That broad range of
uncertainty was partly explained by a lack of historical records, WWA
explained, and worsened by the floods destroying equipment that monitored river
conditions.
Still, the
"study confirms that global heating has played a big part in the flooding
disaster," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist and oceanographer at the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the
study.
"This is in
line with the finding of the recent IPCC report, which found that extreme
rainfall events have increased worldwide," he added, referring to a UN
climate panel's findings.
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