Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses. Share the link of this article with your facebook friends

 

Severe Heat, Droughts , Wildfires, Crop Shortages, and Energy Restrictions Are Wreaking Havoc Across the Globe

Vox, August 22, 2022

 

Lake Serre-Poncon in French Alps, as water level decreased 14 meters due to the drought, August 21, 2022	French firefighters were joined by European counterparts to put out a blaze in the southwest of the country, August 14, 2022

 

Severe heat and droughts are wreaking havoc across the globe

Wildfires, crop shortages, and energy restrictions are putting pressure on governments, and people.

By Ellen Ioanes  Aug 21, 2022, 5:42pm EDT

A picture taken on August 21, 2022 shows boarding pontoons on lake Serre-Poncon in Ubaye Serre-Poncon in French Alps as water level decreased 14 meters due to the drought.  Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

The summer of 2022 has seen significant, sustained drought across the globe, from Europe to China, to the US and Africa, and has brought with it serious ripple effects, from energy shortages to severe food insecurity.

Places like California in the US have suffered from droughts for years, with statewide restrictions on water use becoming the norm. But record droughts in other areas of the world like Europe and Asia are affecting everything from agriculture to energy transport. Many places now suffering from severe heat and drought — like the UK — don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to deal with such weather extremes. And when rain does eventually fall, it’s likely to cause flooding due to sustained heat and dryness, as well as the sheer amount of built-up precipitation released at once.

This summer’s widespread drought doesn’t paint a particularly hopeful picture for our collective climate future, and though some places like China are turning to creative approaches like cloud seeding to at least protect agriculture, heat waves are likely to get more severe in the future — contributing to further drought. That means more wildfires, more challenges for agriculture, particularly in poor countries, and more displacement and famine.

Droughts are everywhere, and they have a variety of causes

Droughts aren’t unprecedented events; they’ve happened throughout history and have contributed to devastating effects like famine and displacement. In the US, the most severe drought incident on record is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, in which low rainfall, extreme heat, and severe financial distress caused by the Great Depression, among other factors, intersected to cause crop failure, poverty, and displacement in parts of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.

The droughts now plaguing parts of North America, the Horn of Africa, China, Britain, and wider Europe don’t necessarily have just one cause. In many cases, droughts are a combination of particularly low rainfall and high temperatures. When temperatures rise, water evaporates more quickly, and when it does fall, it’s more likely to fall as rain instead of snow due to those same high temperatures, as Vox’s Neel Dhanesha explained. In California and the American West, snowpack — layers of snowfall kept frozen due to temperatures below freezing, which then melt as temperatures rise — is a significant source of water. Less snowpack due to higher temperatures, then, means that water sourcing is less reliable, and probably will continue to be in the coming decades — contributing to drought.

As Vox’s Benji Jones wrote, agriculture in parts of California and Arizona is suffering due to drought in the Colorado River and low water levels in two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Farmers are the primary users of water from the Colorado River, and while some have already cut their supply, the drought isn’t likely to subside any time soon — meaning that future cuts will be necessary. That will be a problem for many Americans already reeling from high food prices due to inflation, Jones wrote:

When farmers use less water, they tend to produce less food. And that could cause food prices to go up, even more than they already have. Winter veggies, like lettuce and broccoli, could take a big hit, as could Arizona’s delectable wheat. More concerning still is that the shrinking Colorado River is just one of many climate-related disasters that are threatening the supply and affordability of food.

In the Horn of Africa, low rainfall for four successive rainy seasons has caused the region’s worst drought in 40 years. In the region, which comprises Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, occasional droughts were to be expected, and something communities could prepare for; in 2022, the twice-yearly rainy seasons have failed to materialize yet again, pushing millions toward famine. In 2020 and 2021, the spring rain season which is called the gu and typically lasts from March to May, came up short. In 2021 the deyr, which lasts from October through December, failed as well, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. “These back-to-back blows are hard for the farmers to take,” Ashutosh Limaye, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said in January. “The challenge is not just the soil moisture or the rainfall anomalies; it is the resilience of the population to drought.”

China’s droughts in Hubei and Chongqing have combined with heavy rainfall in other parts the west, the Washington Post reported. In Chongqing, temperatures have reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit; in the county of Xinwen in the Sichuan province, temperatures reached 110°F this past week. That extreme heat has turned parts of the Yangtze River — a vital waterway and the longest river in China — arid. The drought has caused extensive crop damage and limited access to drinking water in the Hubei province, according to the local emergency authorities, and electricity from the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest — has fallen about 40 percent from last year, Bloomberg reports.

Though coal powers electricity in many provinces, the heat and drought in China has caused energy rationing in Sichuan, with authorities forcing factories to shut down to conserve energy. The province is a critical hub for solar panel and semiconductor manufacturing, as CNN reports, but residential and commercial air conditioning use has spiked due to the heat wave, straining the electricity grid, and the drought has depleted hydroelectric power.

China is also turning to cloud seeding — charging clouds with silver iodide to form ice crystals, resulting in precipitation — to try and save crop yields, as the Associated Press reported. While several countries, including the United States, have cloud seeding research programs, the technology has been around since the 1940s, as Laura Kuhl writes for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. However, according to Kuhl, this isn’t a permanent solution; for starters, it doesn’t address the underlying cause of climate change, nor does it promote other mitigation efforts. Furthermore, there may be as-yet-unknown impacts from cloud seeding, like toxic buildup from the silver iodide commonly used to create condensation, and experts don’t fully know its efficacy or how it will affect long-term hydrological patterns.

Europe, particularly Britain, is also suffering from record heat and drought. Temperatures in the UK reached 104°F last week and nearly 109°F in southwestern France, according to Axios. Wildfires have been ravaging parts of France, Spain, and Portugal; rivers in Italy and Germany are at levels so low they are exposing battleships and bombs sunk during World War II, Reuters reports.

Double heat waves have combined with record rainfall shortages to produce drought in some parts of England, as the New York Times reported last week. It’s the first official drought in Britain since 2018; while droughts are not unheard of in this part of the world, the combination of record temperatures and low rainfall also contributed to fires in July and August in London, which the London Fire Brigade was ill-equipped to combat due to staff and funding cuts, emergency services union officials told the Times.

Europe, already feeling the strain of energy cuts due to sanctions on Russian fuel exports, is facing further challenges due to the drought, the New York Times reports. In Germany, ships carrying coal can’t safely navigate the shallow rivers, and Norway’s hydropower output, which provides some 90 percent of the country’s energy supply, hasn’t been so low in more than two decades.

“We are not familiar with drought,” Sverre Eikeland, chief operating officer of the Norwegian energy company Agder Energi, told the Times. “We need water.”

What do these droughts say about our climate future — and what can we do?

Although extreme heat, droughts, and floods have historical antecedents and intersecting causes, weather patterns during the summer of 2022 have been exacerbated by the human behavior, primarily industrialization and fossil fuel use, that causes climate change.

According to the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international consortium of climate scientists who study the causes of extreme weather events, the temperatures seen in the UK this July — as high as 40.3 degrees Celsius, or nearly 105 degrees Fahrenheit, were “extremely unlikely” to have happened without human-made climate change. “While Europe experiences heatwaves increasingly frequently over the last years, the recently observed heat in the UK has been so extreme that it is also a rare event in today’s climate,” the study found. That study, which combined observational and modeling analyses, found that human-caused climate change made the excessive temperatures at least 10 times more likely.

“The first truth is that we live in a nightmare,” NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel told Axios regarding the extreme heat in Europe. “This is exactly what climate models projected was going to happen: intensifying extreme weather, severe public health consequences, and incredibly frustrating Congressional inaction. There is no reasonable scenario where the warming stops at 1.2°C, so it’s definitely going to get worse.”

Governments and aid organizations are trying to cope with drought and the resulting famine, energy cuts, wildfires, water shortages, and other crises with strategies like water and energy rationing and aid distribution, but the time has already passed for aggressive action to mitigate climate change. In fact, trends seem to be going in the opposite direction, with Europe once again turning to coal power due to sanctions on Russian fuel, as well as increased greenhouse gas emissions in the US last year, after years of stasis or decline, according to a report from the Rhodium Group.

There isn’t just one quick solution, like cloud seeding, to the problem of heat and drought; it took hundreds of years to reach the crisis level playing out in the world right now, and it will take significant, committed effort to produce any mitigating effects. Recent legislation passed in the US takes strides at making clean energy and electric vehicles more available to more people. It’s just a start, though — and if this summer’s droughts are any indication, there’s no time to waste in enacting more serious measures.

Severe heat and droughts are wreaking havoc - Vox

***

5 unexpected impacts of drought in Europe

World Economic Forum, Aug 19, 2022

Drought has led to a dried-up dam near Barcelona in Spain, where a ninth-century Romanesque church has re-emerged still intact.

Record-breaking droughts are being declared around the world. Europe has experienced prolonged hot weather and heatwaves, which have impacted lives and livelihoods. From nuclear power plants that can't be cooled to unexploded WW2 bombs discovered on riverbeds, drought means more than just a water shortage.

Drought has been declared across the globe, from the Horn of Africa, to China and England, as climate change continues unabated.

More than 18 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya face severe hunger, after four consecutive years of lower-than-average rainfall.

Prolonged periods of hot weather and heatwaves are taking their toll on livelihoods in more developed countries as wildfires have scorched swathes of land and crop failure is predicted.

But drought is also having some unexpected impacts in parts of Europe.

1. Salt production in France

France is experiencing its worst drought on record, which has affected its maize production - with only half of the crop in a ‘good or excellent condition’ on 8 August.

But temperatures have also accelerated salt water evaporation, meaning the salt farmers of the country’s Guerande region are due record production of Fleur de Sel, which forms in crystals as the water evaporates from the salt marshes.

Producer Francois Durand told Reuters this year’s yield could be nearly double the average of 1.3 tonnes per year.

France is experiencing its worst drought on record, which has affected its maize production Image: European Space Agency.

2. Shipping delays on the Rhine

In Germany, the lack of rainfall has meant its major shipping artery, the Rhine, has dropped to such a low level, less freight can be transported, leading to delays and higher costs.

The Rhine flows through Germany’s industrial heartland, from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea carrying everything from grains, to chemicals and coal. But boats have been loaded to only 30-40% capacity to avoid running aground.

The disruption could impact the country’s economic growth by as much as half a percentage point, according to economists.

3. Drought impacts electricity generation

In the midst of an energy crisis, drought is also putting pressure on the power supply.

Hydropower generation, which relies on water to produce electricity, has fallen by 44% in Spain, according to the BBC, and 20% overall.

Water is also needed to cool nuclear power plants - and some nuclear plants in France have had to reduce output as the rivers have been too low and warm to cool the plants, according to the Guardian.

4. A World War Two bomb in Italy

As rivers and lakes dry up, the dropping water levels are exposing previously submerged artefacts, including an unexploded World War Two bomb on the bed of the River Po in Italy, near Mantua.

Some 3,000 local residents were evacuated - and traffic on the river and nearby roads and railway was stopped - so the bomb could be removed and then destroyed in a controlled explosion.

"At first, some of the inhabitants said they would not move, but in the last few days, we think we have persuaded everyone," Francesco Aporti, the mayor of nearby Borgo Virgilio village, told Reuters.

5. Ancient ruins in dried-up dams

Meanwhile, at a dried-up dam near Barcelona in Spain, a ninth-century Romanesque church has reemerged still intact.

And at the Buendia reservoir to the east of Madrid, the ruins of a village and bathhouses have reappeared, Reuters drone footage showed.

Perhaps most surprising of all is the emergence of a prehistoric stone circle - dubbed the Spanish Stonehenge - in the Valdecanas reservoir, in the central province of Caceres.

Known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the circle of dozens of megalithic stones is believed to date back to 5000 BC - and archaeologists are racing to study it before it gets submerged again.

It was discovered by German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier in 1926, but the area was flooded in 1963 in a rural development project under Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

These are some of the unexpected impacts of drought in Europe | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

***

Europe set for record wildfire destruction in 2022

DW, August 14, 2022

Nearly 660,000 hectares of European land have already been destroyed by fires this year, according to EU data. The scale of the destruction this year would be the worst since records began in 2006.

French firefighters were joined by European counterparts to put out a blaze in the southwest of the country

Europe is on course for record land destruction from wildfires in 2022, the AFP news agency reported Sunday, citing data from the European Union.

The warning comes as the continent experiences a severe summer heat wave and drought, which scientists say is a result of climate change caused by human activity.

How much land has been damaged?

Nearly 660,000 hectares (1,630,000 acres) of land have been ravaged by the blazes between January 1 and August 13, figures from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) showed.

That's 56% higher than the previous record set over the same period in 2017, when 420,913 hectares burned.

If 2022 follows a similar trajectory as 2017, Europe is on course to see more than a million hectares of land destroyed. In 2017, it reached 988,087.

The scale of the destruction would be the worst since records began in 2006.

"The situation in terms of drought and extremely high temperatures has affected all of Europe this year and the overall situation in the region is worrying, while we are still in the middle of the fire season," EFFIS coordinator Jesus San-Miguel told AFP.

Since 2010 there had been a trend towards more fires in central and northern Europe, with blazes in countries that "normally do not experience fires in their territory", he added.

They include Romania, Austria and Germany, the EFFIS data showed.

Wildfires are increasing in countries outside the Mediterranean high risk zone, including Germany

Spain suffers more than neighbors

Spain has been the worst affected so far this year. The fires have destroyed 244,924 hectares of land, followed by Romania (150,528 hectares) and Portugal (77,292 hectares).

EFFIS uses satellite data from the EU's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).

CAMS warned Friday that a large proportion of western Europe was now in "extreme fire danger."

It labeled several areas of Spain as high risk including Andalucia, Castilla y Leon, Castilla La Mancha, Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia regions.

CAMS said the daily total fire radiative power —  a measure of a blaze's intensity — was "significantly higher" than average in France, Spain and Portugal during July and August.

France, Portugal, Czech Republic quell fires

On Saturday, France said it had halted the spread of a huge wildfire near Bordeaux in the southwestern Gironde region of the country.

Over a thousand French firefighters were supported by teams from across Europe, as well as trucks and waterbombing aircraft, which continued to arrive Saturday.

Some 10,000 people had been evacuated from their homes and a stretch of highway was closed.

1:34 min

Firefighters in France battling to contain eight major wildfires

Large fire crews are still fighting blazes further north in Brittany, as well as in the Jura region in the east.

More than 60,000 hectares have gone up in flames so far in France this year, six times the full-year average for 2006-2021, EFFIS data shows.

Portugal too said it brought a wildfire under control Saturday in the UNESCO-designated Serra da Estrela natural park, which had been burning for a week.

A wildfire that had been raging on both sides of the Czech-German border was put out on Friday.

Last month, thousands of firefighters spent two weeks trying to put out Slovenia's largest wildfire in its modern history.

Warning to expect regular heat waves

Successive heat waves have sparked wildfires across Europe this summer, throwing the spotlight on the risks to businesses and livelihoods from climate change.

Both the heat waves and subsequent drought have had severe consequences for farmers and ecosystems already under threat.

The drought is causing a loss of agricultural products and other food at a time when supply shortages and Russia's war against Ukraine have caused inflation to spike.

Italy's popular Lake Garda is at its lowest level ever recorded, while the water level along Germany's Rhine River was at risk of falling so low that it could become difficult to transport goods — including coal and gasoline. Traffic has already slowed to a trickle.

Forecasters warn more frequent and longer heat waves can be expected.

mm/jcg (AFP, AP, Reuters)

Europe set for record wildfire destruction in 2022 | News | DW | 14.08.2022

***

Share the link of this article with your facebook friends