Dozens killed after record rain in Germany and Belgium | Hacker News Reader

Dozens killed after record rain in Germany and Belgium

bbc.com

88 pointsthibautg42 comments

My in-laws live on a mountainside overlooking one of the flooded towns.

It's a devastating sight, especially knowing that direct family had to be evacuated, while you are sitting in "watching" distance in more or less absolute safety.

The reactions of our politicians are not inspiring much confidence, but I guess at this point it is to be expected.

How many extreme outlier events per year do we need before we can stop saying “linking any single event to global warming is complicated” in every article?

It's not about how many events, but how many years. We can say that climate change would be expected to cause these weather events, but weather isn't climate until it's observed for much longer than we have so far.

There's no doubt climate change can and will produce these effects, so the best articles will just say that A) these events are extreme, and B) we will see many more of them until they become the new normal.

While caution is laudable, it's also frequently an excuse for inaction (not by you). As a person of middle years who has regarded CC as An Issue for ~25 years now, I'd say the new normal has arrived.

Yeah, environmental concerns, including climate change is part of what inspired Al Gore to run for Congress in 1976.

So, is like 45 years enough? And that's the thing about incremental change, it creeps up on you. So yeah, last year wasn't that much different from last year, but compared to 5 years ago, 10, 50?

There's always an excuse to do nothing.

I understand your point, but I don't consider it to be "caution" so much as "accurate".

Scientists (and journalists) should tell the truth about science, even if they think it will negatively impact behavior. Otherwise they'll lose credibility later (see: CDC and "don't wear masks" ca. March 2020).

They already do, and go to great lengths to qualify and quantify their uncertainty. But you seem to be arguing that onl retrospective knowledge is valid. If there's a large fire going on on in a room of your own, you can't say with total certainty that the rest of the structure will catch fire. But if you insist on delaying judgment because it's not yet accurate to say your house/apartment building is on fire, how is that going to work out for you?

You can't take 1 year of events and extrapolate climate change from that, you have to include many years and you get a probability and not a definite, that's the way patterns work when you have incomplete information. While I believe climate change is a thing you can't say "but look at what happened last year!" and draw any conclusions. We have floods and heat waves every single year.

Yeah this article says “climate change causes an increase in flooding and this was a flood therefore it was likely caused by climate change.” which is circular.

I found an article seems to imply that frequency and severity of flooding in Europe has been increasing.

I couldn’t find anything specific to Germany or Belgium.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2249489-recent-decades-...

The argument turns circular because while climate models predicts climate change, they have variations and do not predict local weather. They can imply higher risk and using statistics you can say there's a very low chance these events (magnitude and number), is due to normal weather alone. However, statistics won't tell the whole story. Since everything is changing permanently, there's only one time a dam will collapse.

The best people to ask would be credible climate scientists who publish in peer-reviewed journals. For example:

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

If determining wether a bridge is sound or not: Do you run statistics over how many people get safely across, and run trends on random internet searches? Or do you invite specialists to assess the bridge?

By that logic, you'll never reach any conclusions: any weather pattern is possible, theoretically. If one year of California being on fire for 4 months can just be a coincidence, so can two years. Or twelve.

One day of beating the temperature record by +5 deg F can also be less likely, and therefore better evidence of global warming, than, say, two separate events each breaking the record by +2 deg F. The magnitude matters. Here, some towns saw 150 mm of rain in 12 h. Previous monthly record (since 1945) was 200 mm.

But really this is all silly. Look at that temperature color stripe and try telling anyone that the last 20 years are drawn from the same distribution as those before: https://ml1ohkphn9q1.i.optimole.com/Qi2pur4-vTGg4qbd/w:1080/...

The denial was silly even a decade ago, which is about the time the political right switched to accepting warming, but rejecting a human contribution. By now everyone has noticed that's equally silly, since it'd be quite something if science predicted warming a decade in advance with surprising precision while getting the mechanism completely wrong.

So that's where we are today, and the last remaining refuge really is to debate the magnitude of the problem and the value of trade-offs: who should do what against it, i. e. "...but cars in Texas are just 5% of global CO_2, it does not matter if we stop buying SUVs". That's really about values and not entirely accessible to rational arguments, so the remaining hope is that some of the harms just randomly hit the people opposing any action, and either kill or convince them.

I'm deeply pessimistic. The whole world (each in their own way) is basically saying "Yes, let's tackle climate change but you go first, I'll wait".

GPs logic in his post seems sound to me, he said "you get a probability" he didn't say you have to be 100% sure before you can draw any conclusion. I think it is important that we are precise in our language, because any impression can be exploited as a way to undermine the overwhelming evidence, that man-made climate change is real.

Btw, that was part of the my school curriculum in the 90s in Germany, so I can't fathom why there are still so many people in the USA who deny it.

What I am missing is the move to start mitigating climate change as well as trying to prevent its progress. City planning, infrastructure planning, home building has to change in order to prepare for more extreme waether conditions. Even app development should really start to consider whether an always connected cloud is really necessary. Almost, everything our societies rely on has to become more decentralized. Of course we can't simply go back to the state before centralization/globalization because it provided tremendous improvements in efficiency.

I don't think this is right. You can calculate the probability due to pure chance of having a certain number of extreme events in a year, given their variance since records began. If we suppose the probability is 10%, then seeing the same or worse year on year would get us to 0.0001% after just 5 years.

I don't know the numbers are or if they're even this drastic, but at some point they will be and we'll be able to say with confidence that climate change is the cause.

It's always probabilistic, but With the current North American heatwave, the idea that it is "unrelated to global warming" has been calculated as being unlikely to the point of being "virtually impossible"

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-americ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/climate/climate-change-he...

I'm looking at a picture of Altenahr flooded: https://twitter.com/WxNB_/status/1415629704472760324 https://twitter.com/Zersorger/status/1415654344184188932

Isn't that a floodplain? We know what that name means, right?

When did this plain last flood?

Sadly, "unprecedented" floods should now not also be "unexpected".

What a condescending comment. You realize how many millions of people live in flood plains, and how climate change means that existing mitigations are not sufficient anymore?

>You realize how many millions of people live in flood plain

Yes? Building on flood plains has been a bad idea for a while now. (1)

> how climate change means that existing mitigations are not sufficient anymore

Is that not implied by what I already said: "Sadly, "unprecedented" floods should now not also be "unexpected"."

1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-51712267

it actually is a floodplain, right? Calling it "condescending" to mention that many people are in that known bad situation, will not in itself make them safe, will it?

I am very sorry if my comments came across of callous or dismissive of tragedy, that was not my intent.

But, we also need to talk about known risks, and how they are getting worse, and how it was known that they would get worse. And failure to plan. A floodplain is one of these risks.

Looking at Guardian and BBC coverage all flooded areas are either flood plains and old river beds where people diverted river to make a bend and build a small town in its place.

It looks like Altenahr has been there for centuries (1)

I apologise for the tone of my above comment, it might come across as dismissive. Not to ignore the tragedy, but it's not striking at an entirely random location. A floodplain is at risk.

We also should talk about known risks. And how they are getting worse. And how it was known that they would get worse. And failure to plan for that. What's been safe for centuries might not be safe any more.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altenahr

Wow.

70 deaths in these countries just from flooding seems like... a lot in the year 2021

Note: I am fully aware of the dangers/extreme power of fast moving water/flooding

Yes, it's quite the horrific number, and I expect it to rise still ... here in Germany it's currently 59 confirmed, that number was lower a few hours ago - and apparently this doesn't even include bodies they know exist, but couldn't get to yet. And 1300 missing currently.

This village was essentially completely destroyed - this is the best visualization of this I've seen, from /r/europe: https://i.redd.it/9fdhwvte8fb71.jpg

We have apparently no statewide warning mechanism or even if we had, had the foresight to evacuate this region - now, there are calls for evacuation for other, not yet flooded, regions.

I have most of the info from this German article: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2021-07/unwet...

I had a warning for 'extrem erbiebigem dauerregen', I think since sunday or monday in the Nina app. So something like extremely plentyful sustained rainfall. I think putting 1 and 1 together, you could expect some flooding to occour. But of course the details (where do we actually need to evacuate) are more complex. It seems for example my city, while inside the region wasn't hit nearly as hard as a few years back, which was already a once in a century flooding, but not so widespread.

This is a shocking picture; as if the whole town was built on top of an ancient river.

Yup. There's clearly a former oxbow there.

Europe was basically all deforested farmland at one point. As it industrialized the last places farming was economically viable were the most fertile land which is going to be the floodplain and the river's former oxbow and resulting swamp.

Then a developer probably comes along (say 1910 or 1920 or something) and builds on the easiest to build land, which is the already cleared land of the last farm to croak. Then 100yr later we get a record rainfall and the river takes it all back for a couple weeks.

And actually ancient, the specific village was first mentioned in 1074[1], and a nearby city was at least a settlement in 1000-500 BC[2].

So it's not like extreme floodings there are common, which makes it even worse.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimerzheim

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Neuenahr-Ahrweiler#Antiqui...

Could they use GPS or another elevation measuring device to create a elevation and flood map?

To do what exactly? People aren't going to abandon their homes and build a new house somewhere else just because there is a flood risk. In the UK it's estimated 1 in 6 homes are at risk of flooding.

https://www.safesitefacilities.co.uk/knowledge-base/areas-mo...

Such a map could and should be used to inform the building of new houses and zones for houses in the long term. I am living just 100 km away from that area and the risk of flooding was one factor I considered when buying my current house. (Spoiler it is near the top of small hill with a slow rising slope)

Such maps exist (called "Hochwassergefahrenkarte" in Germany), but comparing the picture of Altenburg linked elsewhere in this topic and the map, the flooding has significantly exceeded even the "HQ extrem" (= extreme flooding, defined as a 200-year-or-rarer flood) level.

And officially designated flood plains with associated legal restrictions are usually based on a 100-year flood.

They almost certainly have this data already. I live in Dresden, a city in East Germany that also has its fair share of floods from the Elbe river [1]. The city has an interactive map where you can display flood maps for various levels. It actually has an English version as well, so you guys can try it if you want: Go to [2], switch to English in the upper right corner if it does not autoselect English for you, enter "flood" in the search box and select one of the overlays like "at 900 cm at Dresden Gauge".

[1] The last "Jahrhunderthochwasser", floods of the century, were in 2002, 2006 and 2013, so yeah, that label does not stand up to scrutiny anymore.

[2] https://stadtplan.dresden.de/

It exists, like on the geoportal [0] of the Walloon Region (south of Belgium), but this time it's really unprecedented. I'm working for the Belgian railways and it's apocalyptic.

[0] https://geoportail.wallonie.be/catalogue/9c55d236-8d98-4964-...

A few examples of such deaths:

- An older man was found dead in his flooded basement. Presumably he went to check the status but exact circumstances and cause of death are not clear yet. - Another older man tried to remove some branches from a clogged drain pipe. When he succeeded he got dragged along with the sudden surge of draining water and has not been found since.

- A twenty-something guy got the idea to go 'play around in the water with some kind of floaty toy'. He got dragged away.

- A fire brigade rescue boat got into trouble during a mission. The three elder people they had rescued went overboard and have been missing since. Two of the five firemen on the boat also went overboard but managed to secure themselves until they were rescued.

It's a tragedy. Flooding of this scale has not been seen here. People don't know the dangers. And culturally a house is quite important for most people (the saying is that we "are born with a brick in our stomach") so they often refuse to leave their house.

The last decade or so there have been improvements to give rivers more space, open up streams again that got covered up, make available basins that can be flooded to buffer water, increase/strengthen dikes and embankments, ... But what we've seen now was of a different order of magnitude: we've had locations that got like 100L+ of water in 24h whereas they would normally receive 800L in a whole year.

A 20 meter wide river turned into 200 meter wide river. This damaged several villages along the river. A huge area hit by heavy rainfall.

Are we just leaving a 10.000 year old equlibrium with nature, an equilibrium specially suited to agriculture and domestication (please compare graphs for 10K years in link below)?

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

What exactly are you asking?

(And English universally uses a full stop as a decimal point, not a thousands mark. 10.000 means 10 with three digits of precision.)

Width means little without knowing the slope of the land. The river's main route is narrow (because erosion happens 24/7) and the flood plain is broad (because erosion happens rarely).

This is obviously some of alot of infrastructure that today reside in harm's way from chaotic climate change. The flood moved cars, houses and eradicated buildings. So that should tell something of sudden erosion too.

> Dozens

Death toll is 80, according to the latest reports

https://www.bild.de/news/2021/news/unwetter-news-im-live-tic...

sad news, can't believe this happened in 2021

Wait until you see 2022.

Or 2023, 2024, 2025, 202…

It was the most extreme year so far, and one of the least extreme ones for decades to come...

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