Did you ever read that quote “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it”? (afaik by Perthsire Mags on the dead bird site)
Well, here I am
©Giliell, all rights reserved
This is our village centre. If you want a reference: Normally, if you jump off that bridge, you’ll fall for 3m and then break both your legs. On Friday, heavy rain started falling in the southwest of Germany, especially my Bundesland, the Saarland. While there had been warnings, it was even worse than foreseen as the rain just didn’t move on. Within 24 hours, more than 100 l of rain fell per square metre, in the capital more than 150l , which is twice the amount we usually get during the whole month of May. The situation evoked bad memories of the Ahrtal flooding three years ago, when hundreds of people died, but at least they seem to have learned from that and the crisis management worked really well, with just one person injured and no deaths.
Personally, I’m fine, our house sits above the wetlands that are there to absorb the rain and our village wasn’t that badly hit, though the people next to the river had flooded basements. Other places are much worse off, with evacuations and water up to the ground floor. Rebuilding will take time and money. Oh, do I need to mention that the same day we were hit by this, the legislative finally gave green light to gutting our climate protection laws?
That looks and sounds absolutely awful. And long-term forecasts warn about an extremely hot and dry summer. It looks like in many places the average precipitation might not change much, but its distribution does -- instead of steady drizzles a few times a year we get droughts interspersed with flash floods.
And even after multiple years of droughts and tepid warm and snowless winters there still are politicians who adamantly assert that climate change is not real and we can continue to burn fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow.
Yes, when you are having 100 year flooding events every few years, climate change is the obvious cause.
At least there was an effective plan for mitigating the danger and hundreds didn’t die this time.
It would be nice if some monster rain storms could pass over Canada and extinguish the fires that are still burning from last year. They spent the winter smoldering away in the peat, and we’ve already had some days where the air is hazardous from the smoke.
I was thinking exactly what Charly wrote:
Just a few weeks ago, the weather here switched from the “rainy” mode to “sunny” mode. It increasingly seems to stuck in one of the for months on end. The summer has barely begun, after a long and miserably wet/icy/snowy winter, and it’s already too warm for my personal comfort and the farmers are already worrying about drought.
Still wondering why the Greens don’t run on the slogan “Wir haben es ja gesagt” (or whatever the proper way to say that is).