It was a week like no other – so far – for the rich world. Astonishing scenes played out on 14th and 15th of July 2021 in western Europe, where raging waters inundated vast swathes of land as river after river in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland burst its banks. At least 229 lives were lost and insured losses of €2.55 billion recorded, with the total damage costs likely to be much higher.
The world watched the YouTube clips in horror as cars and even houses were picked up, shaken around and smashed into pieces on ancient bridges. Thousands of people were left without drinking water, electricity and gas in Germany – services that would have been taken for granted in Europe’s richest country. Rebuilding the 600km of railway tracks and 80 stations that were rendered impassable could take years.
The cause of this mayhem? A ‘cut-off low’ that stalled a heavy rain system over the area, dumping two months’ worth of rainfall in two days. Slower moving weather systems like this are becoming one of climate change’s signatures. Witness Hurricane Harvey’s prolonged presence over Houston in August 2017, Tropical Storm Imelda’s leisurely lingering above the Texas coast in September 2019, and Hurricane Dorian’s delayed departure from the Bahamas in September 2019.
It’s not that we did not have these weather systems before – I remember the massive damage done by a cut-off low in the Laingsburg floods in January 1981 in South Africa – but they are becoming more frequent. The floods in Germany are linked to the slowing of the predominant westerly wind circulation, as a result of massive warming of the Arctic. Leading German climate scientists stated, “the question in 2021 is no longer whether global warming — caused mainly by the use of fossil fuels — will influence the occurrence of extreme weather events, but in what way and to what extent”.
I don’t know exactly why the floods of July were so calamitous in Germany and Belgium – why were more people not evacuated in time from the soon-to-be-deluged districts? Did the early warning systems not work? Were they not in place, in some of the areas? Or were they simply not triggered by what may have been as a seemingly innocuous low-pressure system, that had a horrible trick or two up its sleeve? As prosecutors open investigations into possible negligence, more details are emerging about how digital warnings did not reach many people in high-risk areas.
Back in the developing world, in 2020 Bangladesh evacuated more than 2.4 million people in a couple of days before Cyclone Amphan made landfall off the Bay of Bengal on 20th May. Amphan flooded 4,000 kilometres of land and damaged more than 200,000 houses. But, out of the 2.6 million people affected by the ‘super cyclone’, there were only 26 deaths.
Bangladesh has ramped up its early warning and disaster management systems at scale since the days when similar cyclones caused casualties in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The country can now activate more than 12,000 cyclone shelters in low-lying areas along the coast, compared to only 42 in 1970. Schools train children on the early warning systems and a range of alerts are provided – from people on bicycles with megaphones to social media and digital methods. Bangladesh is still highly vulnerable to longer-term climate change, but it has a mature and effective response to climate-related disasters.
Six years ago, climate change expert Karen O’Brien commented to me that she questioned whether rich countries like Norway, her home, truly were well prepared or had high levels of capacity to deal with climate change impacts. That point did not make it into my blog on our ‘conversation on climate’, but July’s floods in western Europe, and the nightmare fire seasons over the past five years in California, validate her perspective. Not to mention Australia’s angry summer of 2012 – 2013, and almost every Australian summer since then.
Across the Atlantic from a watery western Europe, in that memorable week in July, wildfires devoured swathes of the state of California. The Dixie fire, the second largest in state history, has consumed 198,296 hectares since it began on 13th July. Its location in the Sierra Nevada near Paradise, the site of the devastating Camp Fire of 2018, has resulted in soaring levels of anxiety for residents: as Rick Carhart, a spokesman for Cal Fire in Butte County, told the New York Times, “There really is so much — there’s no other word for it — PTSD”. Twenty-eight days later, with renewed hot and dry conditions forecast this week, the furnace that is Dixie continues to burn. Along with at least 108 additional large fires in the USA.
California’s rapidly lengthening fire season is wreaking havoc on its renowned outdoor activities and winelands. Some Napa Valley wineries are now uninsurable. Smoke taints the valuable cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes and renders the red wines worthless. Shiraz – not grown in the Napa Valley – is one of my favourite red wine varietals and is relished for its aromatic notes of smoke. But this has to be subtle – think of a distant wisp of smoke on a calm autumn evening, not a thick blanket of haze that blocks out the sunlight.
Oh, and meanwhile, during that fateful week in July, several provinces in my homeland of South Africa raged and burned. This time the climate – or rather our destruction of it – was not to blame. Rather, a toxic brew of political machinations came together with widespread deprivation and poverty to ignite a conflagration – fanned by the ‘normalisation’ of looting that we have witnessed at all levels for some time.
In a week of mayhem in mid-July, 112 shopping centres were looted and damaged, countless factories burned, and 40,000 businesses impacted. Many of these were destroyed and will never open again. Groups on the rampage wrecked 1,223 ATMs, 269 banks and 3,931 stores, and destroyed more than 90 pharmacies. Numerous Covid19 vaccination sites had to close, more than 330 people died and 50,000 informal traders were affected in the wave of violence. Rage and desperation are tinder-dry kindling for the sparks of political opportunism.
The non-climate events added to the apocalyptic nature of the week. Particularly as the people who were supposed to be the grown-ups in charge – the police and our political leaders – stood by watching, as though powerless. Were they too frightened, or cynical, or complicit, or all of the above, to act?
I ended the ides of July with a tightness in my chest and a feeling of general malaise that has not left me. Long Covid? Not the culprit. It is what I only half fancifully describe to myself as a bruised heart, a pummelled chest cavity. Not yet broken, but sorely inflamed. It is a visceral response to the human and natural brutalities we are witnessing on a daily basis.
After all, there is only so much smoke on the palate that you can endure.