Climate change fueled the devastating floods in Germany and northwest Europe (2023 Update)

Cool. That explains our "historic dry summer."

New England is having a historic hot and wet summer, for about the past

Tweets say it is all caused by HAARP. I guess you can make some people believe anything.

The recent German floods seem to mostly be caused by official incompetence.

Am 20.07.21 um 00:55 schrieb John Larkin:

No, the incompetence is is in your comment.

When it starts raining and within a few hours there comes as much water as normally in a year; when a small brook where you could normally walk through is suddenly 10 meters deep, then the competence of the officials just does not matter. When this brook goes through a village that used to adorn it with flowers and children playing in it, and no problems in the last 500 years, but now it will flow through the houses one floor up.

The rise time was in the minute scale, catching people in the sleep. You had lost when you happened to be there. 150 people drowning in such a relatively small rural area has never ever happened before.

And then the weather slowly moved down south/east via Bavaria to Austria. There still were some deaths although it had lost a lot of power. It's not that Belgium and the Netherlands were spared.

The weather IS changing.

Gerhard

Why? Flow models, control dams, building regulation, and soil disturbance are major variables, and deaths are NOT a measure of the flood rise. Deaths might just indicate built-up areas, i.e. regional population pressures.

Not surprisingly, someone in an armchair halfway around the world knows he can blame the victims...

Not the victims, but the politicians. There were forecasts of heavy rain, and some of those towns are in flood plains. A similar thing happened in Texas not long ago.

The Murdoch press can be relied on to print the kind of report that Cursitor Doom would like - he defines the demographic that they want to appeal to.

The Guardian seems to be saying that climate change requires a better flood- and extreme-weather- warning system and while the German authorities are putting one together, they haven't got all the bugs out yet. The 10th September 2020 dry run didn't go as well as had been hoped, and the current disaster has exposed a few more weaknesses. The politicians do seem to have put in quite a lot of effort, but reality has a way of finding weak spots on the best laid plans.

Armchair critics do find it easy to blame politicians and administrators , but they had been working on the problem. It would have been nice if they had come up with a more effective solution, but they certainly hadn't ignored it.

While it is certainly true that the events were unusual and that it is a bad trend likely caused by changing weather, what really went wrong is that warnings from meteorologic institutions bubbled too slowly through federate, state and regional levels of authority to warn the people in their homes about the oncoming danger.

It would have been impossible to avoid the damage, but some 100 lives could have been spared when alerts had been sent. Here in the Netherlands the alerts were sent, and while the water levels were much lower here and cannot be directly compared, we do not have any human loss here, only damage.

This is called cherry picking your sources to match the event. Now, if you want to blame Climate Change on the current dry spell that is happening in parts of the US and a few other places on the planet you ignore the atmosphere holds more water and find a report that says that warm air is hotter than cooler air and thus absorbs more moisture hence droughts.

The climate changes due mostly to changes in solar output, perturbations in Earths orbit, levels of cosmic radiation (super novas likely screw with the weather) and human changes to soil conditions, paving over lots of land, contrails increasing cloud cover, and perhaps a wee bit due to CO2. The CO2 factor that contributes to affecting IR radiation tops out about the current level, so other sources are needed that feed on some people's need to feel guilt, thus look elsewhere.

We don't burn witches any more, we carbon tax them.

John :-#)#

Actual explanations are a little more complicated than that. but if you are a sucker for climate change denial propaganda, you don't get to find out about that.

In reality a lot due to CO2, and a bit more from the extra water vapour in the atmosphere which is a direct consequence of the extra CO2.

Total nonsense. More CO2 in the atmosphere pushed up the effective radiating altitude for wavelengths that CO2 absorbs (and re-emits). The air was colder up there, but isn't any more. This kind of effect doesn't "top out".

The people who don't want to be carbon taxed are lot richer and more powerful than witches ever were, and they are happy to spend some of their money on climate change denial propaganda. You have to be pretty gullible to fall for it, but John Robertson - like John Larkin - is quite gullible enough.

No, actually you observe that (hotter) atmosphere holds more water, and thus will absorb evaporated moisture and move it downwind to a greater extent than in previous centuries...

Whoa! We've not seen 'changes in solar output' on any such scale as would cause our observed warming. And, we've done lots of looking. Someone is lying to you if they said otherwise.

Funny, I was thinking just yesterday about burning heretics. It sure reduced the rate of scientific and technical innovation.

We have patents and peer review now, which are less effective.

(Personally, I think CO2 is great stuff. Plants love it. We need more, and thankfully Australia is shipping it to China and Indonesia to liberate.)

I doubt if it had any effect on technical innovation.

Edward Wightman, a Baptist from Burton on Trent, was the last person burned at the stake for heresy in England in Lichfield, Staffordshire on 11 April 1612.

The Royal Society - formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences -was founded on 28 November 1660, when it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II as The Royal Society.

This is roughly when science got formalised and started generating "scientific innovation", so science wasn't around when burning heretics was popular.

Galileo Galilei lived from 15 February 1564 to 8 January 1642 and was discouraged from disagreeing with the Roman Catholic church's official position on some scientific subjects. It didn't stop him from discovering the moons of Jupiter.

Patents are a device for encouraging people to publish their discoveries. Peer review is a device for keeping obvious rubbish out of the scientific literature. It doesn't do a perfect job, but it does get rid of a lot of nonsense - I've done enough refereeing to be well aware how much.

Plants use it. But if you give them more, their leaves have few stomata so the plant can get the same amount of CO2 while losing less water. This isn't demonstrating passionate attachment.

Actually, we don't. The fossil carbon extraction industry wants to keep on making loads of money out of digging it up and selling it as fuel, so they are willing to spend so of the profits on climate change denial propaganda, and John Larkin is silly enough to be suckered by it.