Almost half of Europe’s soil is dryer than normal

I have just received an environmental report for a property I am hoping to buy, which flagged up increased risk of subsidence. This is due to clay in the soil - which expands/contracts depending on temperature and water content.

This is very common in south of the UK, and usually doesn't have too much risk involved (especially if the foundations were built under soil considerations) but I wonder what impact this might have in the close future, with temperatures soaring and so many old buildings/homes over 100 years old.

Climate change will impact on things that don’t even cross our minds.

The headline is a meaningless tautology.

In a "perfectly normal" year half of soil would be drier than normal, half would be wetter than normal, and none would be exactly normal.

The most reasonable way to interpret the headline would be to say soil is slightly wetter than normal, which is obviously not the intended message.

I have some issues with takes like this headline.

It's not "dryer than normal". It's "dry like the new normal". Also "lower end of dryness of tomorrows normal".

Climate change is happening. It's a bad take to make it sound like something's going back to a "normal" that will probably never happen again. What is "normal" is changing and we need to think how to deal with this, not consider it an anomaly.

I see that Greece's soil is wetter than normal, that must be because we've been getting atypical rains, almost tropical (including an unprecedented hurricane!).

At least we haven't been getting heat waves, I guess.

If you would like additional context, here’s the U.S. drought monitor which shows very little drought currently in the United States. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

For me no data analysis is necessary to come to a similar conclusion. My parents have a farm in the Netherlands and they are reminded of the lack of rain daily. The most clear example is of the channel ('gracht' in Dutch) around the house. The channel is almost drying up this year. This has never occurred before while my parents or my grandparents occupied the farm.

It was also clear on a recent visit to family in Poland. The corn, potatoes and beets looked yellow and awful for all fields except the parts where somehow there was some water (for example, valleys).

Here's some context of what the consensus science says about drought: https://wg1.ipcc.ch/presentations/Sbsta_drought.pdf

• Low confidence in an observed global-scale trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the 1950s, due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends;

• High confidence that the frequency and intensity of drought since 1950 have likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa (although 1970s Sahel drought dominates the trend) and likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia;

• Low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends;

• High confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions.

Surprised to see that there are places in Cyprus where the soil is wetter than normal. I thought i live in a semi-desert. In addition, the climate is wetter in the southwest areas here (near Paphos) and dryer northeast, map shows it other way around. For example, bananas are commericaly grown around Paphos but won't be a viable cash crop east of Limassol.

Most of these dry areas on the map are pretty mountainous/significantly higher elevation. Have no idea how that makes things different, but it still strikes me as a significant point to consider when interpreting the data.

Personally, I've reached a point where I think changes are irreversible - there is no point trying to persuade the world to down tools, because the developing world is not going to listen (understandably so) and it's probably too late anyway (changes originally predicted by models to happen around 2070 are already here). From now on, we just have to put our collective minds to preparedness and countering: we will have to manage the excess water and heat as best as we can, and accept populations will be displaced.

Unlike with medieval plagues, we understand this problem and most of its effects. We can deal with it, as long as we don't deny it nor use it to push unrealistic beliefs.