Climate change is making floods in Central Europe more severe and more likely to occur, scientists say

Human-caused climate change doubled the chances and intensified the heavy rains that caused devastating floods in Central Europe earlier this month, a new study found.

Heavy rain in mid-September from Storm Boris lashed much of central Europe, including Romania, Poland, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany, and caused extensive damage. The floods killed 24 people, destroyed bridges, submerged cars, left towns without electricity and in need of critical infrastructure repairs.

The four-day torrential rain is the “worst” ever recorded in Central Europe and is likely doubly due to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who conduct rapid climate studies, said. , said Wednesday from Europe. Climate change has also increased rainfall by between 7% and 20%, the study found.

“Nevertheless, these floods highlight the devastating effects of fossil fuel warming,” said Joyce Kimutai, lead author of the study and a climate researcher at Imperial College, London.

To assess the impact of human-caused climate change, a team of scientists analyzed climate data and used climate models to compare how such events have changed from pre-industrial cool times to today. Such models simulate a world without the current 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since pre-industrial times, and see how severe the precipitation event would be in such a world.

The study analyzed four-day rainfall events, focusing on the worst-hit countries.

Although the rapid study was not peer-reviewed, it followed scientifically accepted techniques.

“In any climate, you can expect to occasionally see records broken,” said Friederike Otto, of Imperial College, London, a climate scientist who coordinates the research team. But, “to see records being broken by huge margins, that is actually a sign of climate change. And that’s all we see in the hot world. “

Some of the worst impacts were felt in the Polish-Czech and Austrian border areas, especially in urban areas near major rivers. The study noted that the death toll from this month’s floods was significantly lower than during the region’s catastrophic floods in 1997 and 2002. However, infrastructure and emergency management systems were overwhelmed in many cases and will require billions of euros to repair.

Last week, European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen pledged billions of euros to help countries that have lost infrastructure and housing due to floods.

The World Weather Attribution study also warned that in a warming world – more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, the likelihood of four-day severe storms would increase by 50% compared to current levels. Such storms will grow stronger, too, the authors find.

Heavy rain across Central Europe is caused by what is known as a “Vb depression” which occurs when cold polar air flows from the north over the Alps and meets warm air from Southern Europe. The study authors found no significant change in the number of similar Vb depressions since the 1950s.

The World Weather Attribution Group was founded in 2015 out of a long-standing frustration with determining whether climate change was the cause of extreme weather events. Studies like theirs, within descriptive science, use real-world climate observations and computer modeling to determine the likelihood of something happening before and after climate change, and how global warming affects its intensity.

-Suman Naishadham, Associated Press