Climate change doubled likelihood of Central European flood catastrophe, scientists say – POLITICO

“Unless we stop burning fossil fuels, this rainfall and the associated flooding will only get worse,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study. 

The analysis, published by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium of scientists specializing in rapid disaster attribution studies, also found that the rainfall that triggered the floods was “by far” the heaviest ever recorded in the region. 

To determine the role climate change played in the flooding, the WWA group used peer-reviewed methods to compare how four-day heavy rainfall events across Poland, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have changed. 

The study found that in today’s climate — which is about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial age, largely as a result of humanity’s continued use of fossil fuels — similar intense downpours have become not only twice as likely, but also 20 percent more intense. 

In the future, such disasters will become even more ferocious. At around 2 C of warming, which Earth is currently on track to reach in the 2050s, similar events will become 50 percent more likely and dump 5 percent more rain than at present, the analysis found. 

“But that’s probably an underestimation,” Otto said, “so we need to prepare for even more heavy rainfall than what is predicted from these models.” 

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