Europe is in the midst of what has been called the worst drought in 500 years. According to a drought expert with the European Commission in comments last week [bold, links added]:
“We haven’t analysed fully the event (this year’s drought), because it is still ongoing, but based on my experience I think that this is perhaps even more extreme than 2018. Just to give you an idea the 2018 drought was so extreme that, looking back at least the last 500 years, there were no other events similar to the drought of 2018, but this year I think it is really worse than 2018.”
While a full analysis of the ongoing 2022 European drought remains to be completed, so too the drought itself, which is clearly exceptional if not unprecedented. In this post, I take a close look at the state of understanding of the possible role of climate change in this year’s drought.
Specifically, I report on what the most recent assessment report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and underlying literature and data say about the detection of trends in Western and Central European drought and the attribution of those trends to greenhouse gas emissions.
The figure below shows the specific region that is the focus of this post, which includes all of Germany, most of France, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia among other nations. …
…For Western and Central Europe, and especially for Germany and Northern France, which are the subject of considerable news coverage right now, accurate representations of the current state of scientific understandings of drought are typically absent.
Instead, we see many confident claims by journalists and some scientists that this year’s drought is a signal of (or, if you prefer — fueled by, linked to, evidence of) human-caused climate change.
Let’s take a look at what the peer-reviewed literature and the IPCC actually say about drought trends in this region and their possible attribution to climate change.
One recent study — Vincente-Serrano et al. 2020 — looked at long-term trends in drought in Western Europe from 1851 to 2018, with a focus on precipitation deficits. (Note that their geographical definition of Western Europe differs slightly from that of the IPCC).
The figure below shows trends aggregated for the region as a whole. They conclude: “Our study stresses that from the long-term (1851–2018) perspective there are no generally consistent trends in droughts across Western Europe.”
The paper goes through a number of different metrics of drought for various subregions across Europe. The authors are careful to note that there are other metrics of drought which may show different results:
We emphasize that our findings should be seen in the context of the drought metric applied. Our assessment of drought characteristics is based on SPI, which is a precipitation-based metric. For a long-term assessment of drought in the region, it is not possible to use metrics that employ other important variables (e.g., streamflow, soil moisture, or AED).
Another recent study — Oikonomou et al. 2020 — looked at more recent trends, from 1969 to 2018, and inclusive of all four of the IPCC European sub-regions. They found overall:
Seemingly, one of the central outcomes of this research is that there is little change in drought characteristics for 1969–2018. It also seems, no particular tendencies for more or less frequent droughts in the two major geographical domains of Europe are present. This reinforces the stochastic nature of the drought natural hazard.
Of course, as the studies above acknowledge, trend analyses can be sensitive to start and end dates. One reason for this sensitivity is the fact that climate varies a great deal even without the presence of human forcings — and this variability is of course one of the challenges facing the detection of long-term trends, especially for rare events.
For its part, the IPCC AR6 — which summarizes a much broader literature than the two papers cited above — classifies drought into three categories: meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural/ecological which emphasize respectively precipitation, streamflow, and soil moisture.
With respect to hydrological drought in Western and Central Europe the IPCC could not be stronger in its conclusion:
“in areas of Western and Central Europe and Northern Europe, there is no evidence of changes in the severity of hydrological droughts since 1950”
For hydrological drought the IPCC is also quite strong in its conclusions:
Low confidence: Weak or insignificant trends
The IPCC lumps WCE in with many other global regions in its conclusion that: “Past increases in agricultural and ecological droughts are found on all continents and several regions” which it expresses with medium confidence, a qualitative judgment that is typically interpreted as about a 50-50 chance of being true.
Read rest at The Honest Broker
The Dust Bowl back in the 1930,s was because of the Drought and the way the plowed their fields that’s why the Soil Conservation Service was created no one was blaming it on Global Warming/Climate Change because that word did,nt exist at the time and Gore the Bore was yet to be born
That would be 500 “Eddy cycles”, not 500 interglacial phases.
Our science illiterate media has no clue that life on earth is carbon based. No clue that every species of life on our planet is composed of little carbon sacks of water called cells. Life was born in CO2 concentrations more than twenty times those of today. Any level of CO2 below 2,000ppm (four times today’s levels) is a STARVATION LEVEL LOW OF CO2. Every greenhouse grower knows this. They add CO2 to their plants to make them greener, stronger, larger, and more drought tolerant. There are enough actual problems to deal with in life. More CO2 is not one of them. Recycling the basic ingredient of our carbon based life on earth with fossil fuel use is not one of them. Dummy up media and schoolteachers. Climate remains well within its natural 12° C temperature range of the last three million year ongoing Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age. The coldest temperatures since multicellular life evolved nearly 600 million years ago. This 12°C temp range is caused by a regular shift in the shape of earth’s orbit caused by our solar system’s large gravity neighbors. It’s called Milankovitch Eccentricity. We’ve known about it for a hundred years. During our latest interglacial phase of this ice age (the latest of about 500), the Holocene, temperatures also rise and fall naturally. Dr. Judith Curry calls this 4°C nine hundred year climate cycle within a cycle, “Eddy cycles.” The latest iteration of the warming half of the “Eddy cycle” we are in has had us warming since the little ice age in the 1600s. When you could ice skate on the Thames at London. And the squad want to abandon 85% of the energy that has made us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed because of a little more CO2? Regressive nonsense.