A virus brought the world to a halt and now global climate change is tossing it around. The deadly deluge has thrown life out of gear in parts of India as well as in both China and Germany, a stark reminder of deteriorating climate change across the planet.
At least 25 people died on Tuesday in the central Chinese province of Henan, including a dozen people trapped in a city subway as the regional capital Zhengzhou was flooded after days of torrential rains.
Last week, floods killed at least 160 people in Germany and 31 others in Belgium.
In Europe, climate change is likely to increase the number of large, slow-moving storms that can last longer in a region, and Germany and Belgium, according to a study published June 30 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Can deliver the type of deluge seen in. .
As the atmosphere warms with climate change, it also holds more moisture, which means that when rain clouds break, more precipitation is released. By the end of the century, such storms could be 14 times more frequent, the researchers found in the study using computer simulations.
While the floods that devastated wide areas of western and southern Germany occurred thousands of kilometers from the events in Henan, both cases highlighted the vulnerability of heavily populated areas to catastrophic floods and other natural disasters.
Strengthening dikes and climate-proofing housing, roads and urban infrastructure will cost billions. But the cost of doing nothing became clear from the dramatic mobile phone footage of people drowning in chest-deep water in Zhengzhou or crying out for fear of mud and rubble flowing through medieval German cities.
Koh Tih-yong, a weather and climate scientist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, said a holistic assessment of rivers and water systems would be needed in areas most vulnerable to climate change, including cities and farms.
“Floods are usually caused by a combination of two factors: one, higher-than-normal rainfall and two, the insufficient capacity of rivers to release the collected excess rainwater,” he said.
In both China and north-western Europe, disasters dumped a year’s worth of rain in just three days, the equivalent of the Chinese case, after a period of unusually heavy rains, completely affecting flood protection.
After several severe floods in recent decades, buffers were strengthened along major German rivers such as the Rhine or Elbe, but last week’s extreme rains turned even smaller tributaries such as the Ahr or the Schweist into catastrophic torrents.
In China, built-up urban areas with inadequate drainage and large dams that modify the natural discharge of the Yellow River basin may also have contributed to the disaster, scientists said.
But measures such as improving the resilience of buildings and raising river banks and improving drainage are unlikely to be sufficient by themselves to avert the effects of severe flooding. As a last resort, the warning system, which was heavily criticized in Germany for giving people insufficient time to react, would have to be reformed.
Meanwhile, at least 134 people suddenly died in the Vancouver area of Canada last month, according to figures released by the city’s police department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Vancouver Police Department alone said it had responded to more than 65 sudden deaths, most of which were “heat-related.”
Dubai also had to anticipate the rain for itself. Using a new method of cloud seeding in which they charge clouds with electricity, this UAE city has found some respite after battling temperatures in excess of 50 degrees Celsius. Cloud seeding has been around for some time now and has been used on several occasions in India to mitigate drought.
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