Reposted from the NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin on 6. June 2021
Continued claims of a German drought have become preposterous.
During today’s Sunday walk, I observed how much rain we’ve been getting here in northwest Germany lately – see photos below.
Many of the farmers’ fields have become flooded, streams and rivers are at high levels and ditches are full of water.
Yet, some alarmists out there would like to have us believe Germany is still reeling from drought and that it’s too early call off the alarm.
In spring 2021, Germany received 175 l/m² precipitation compared with the mean of 171 l/m² for the 1991 to 2020 reference period. While March and April came in too dry, May saw unusually high precipitation compared to the previous years. The start of June has also been wet.
But in its most recent report, the German DWD national weather service again highlighted the ancient, wetter 1961-1990 reference period, because it allowed them to say spring came in drier than normal for the eighth consecutive year. The DWD want us to think there’s still a drought and that all that water out there should just be ignored.
Germany in drought?
Another trick the alarmists use is a color chart depicting the drought intensity in across Germany – for 1.8 meters soil depth! And here the data are not even actually measured, but rather are modelled, as explained here.
Here’s what they want us to think the situation is like in Germany (June 4, 2021):
Chart source: UFZ
“Oh my God!” many people might think when they see the chart. “It’s dry out there!” The media love using the above chart because of all the computer model-generated red color.
But what’s the reality?
Yet, when we check the chart for plant-available water development from June 4th, 2021, the uppermost 25 cm of soil, the story looks very different:
It’s wet! But the media never report on the above chart.
Photos of the German “drought”
Today I made some photos of the “drought” in Northwest Germany to show you just how dreadfully dry everything has gotten – because of fossil fuels of course. (Attention: sarcasm).
Below, entire sections of crop fields are under water from recent heavy rains:
Photo: P. Gosselin
But hey, our models tell us the ground is really dry – 1.8 meters deep – that’s what really counts!
What follows is not a picture of some Southeast Asian rice field. It’s Germany suffering drought conditions, the media like to tell us. Another soaked field:
Photo: P. Gosselin
The tree in the next photo is definitely suffering from drought stress – due to manmade climate drying:
Photo: P. Gosselin
White asparagus (Spargel) is a German favorite at this time of year. But this year’s harvest is being severely hampered by the North German drought now taking place (2 meters under the ground, models say):
Photo: P. Gosselin
Yes, German farmers are praying day and night for badly needed rain because their fields are so parched (sarcasm):
Photo: P. Gosselin
No, the following is not the Garden of Eden. It’s what drought-stricken North Germany looks like right now. Just ignore all the green color and damp appearance:
Photo: P. Gosselin
The windmills still aren’t working to rescue the climate – just look at how parched this field is:
Photo: P. Gosselin
The drought is getting worse!
Yesterday was drier than today. Today is drier than it will be tomorrow.
Does that count as dry humor ?
Truth is all wet, apparently.
The IPCC’s AR4 Chapter ten Page750 tells us:
Mean Precipitation
…
Globally averaged mean water vapour, evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase.
But the Climate Crusaders do so love to scream drought so much that they ignore what their treasured bible says.
If CO2 is really the climate control knob they need to have a water vapour feedback, since they know that WV is dominant and CO2 is an insignificant GHG. As you say, they violate their own rules to blame all bad weather on “climate change”. They’re a bunch of simpletons that appeal to the simple minded nature of the general public.
Steve,
Even more up to date-
SPM1 of Summary for Policymakers AR5 (2013)-
“Heavy Precipitation events.
Increase in the frequency,intensity,and/or amount of precipitation:
Assessment that changes occurred (typically since 1950 unless otherwise indicated)-
Likely more land areas with increases than decreases (2.6):
Assessment of a human contribution to observed changes:
Medium confidence.(7.6, 10.6)
Likely more land areas with increases than decreases:
LIKELY over most land areas.
And then under the heading “Assessment of a human contribution to observed changes:
Medium confidence. More likely than not.”
Translation of all this: A modestly warming world means more precipitation not less!
Up to date in IPCC speak means: Obfuscate facts we can’t hide.
After a short search of the AR5 I didn’t find that load of BS (Bureaucrat Science) Do you have a Chapter & Page # for it? It’s the sort of thing I like to save to my ever growing file of factoids quotes & smart remarks.
The OP did say “SPM”, most of the text is from “Table SPM.1” on page 5 of the WG1 report (AR5, 2013).
Summarised in a bullet-point under section B.1, “Observed Changes in the Climate System : Atmosphere”, at the bottom of page 3 :
What is it with this “likely” crap? It either has or it has not.
Unlike journalists, activists and (random / anonymous) Internet posters, scientists do not (usually …) indulge in “absolute guaranteed certain” rhetoric such as “will (not) happen” or “is (not) happening”.
“Science”, with a capital “S”, talks about “likelihoods” and “probabilities” instead, heavily laced with concepts such as “error ranges” and “uncertainty intervals”.
The IPCC even has set of “Guidance Note for Lead Authors […] on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties” (the one for AR5 is dated “6-7 July 2010”).
This is summarised in footnote 2 at the bottom of page 2 of AR5’s SPM (with only minor editing for readability) :
Spargel schmeckt gut.
Wouldn’t mind some to go with that steak on the other header.
NA in UK…
Droughts, floods and heatwave are made up relative terms.
Different jurisdictions have total different definitions for the above.
AFAIK there isn’t a quantitative definition of droughts for Germany.
The concept for drought will be different for each region based on the crops.
Here in Australia a drought is considered to commence when a region has three months with a combined rainfall in the lowest decile. But this may be irrelevant to a farmer depending on his access to water ( dams, rivers, bores).
This allows alarmists to claim “droughts”
It isn’t about what fell recently, but about what’s in the water table, reservoirs, lakes, rivers… and I point out that rain tends to pool on the surface of fields when they are dried out…
Griffy, don’t be such a grump. You know that it’s just your mental illness causing you issues with cognition and problems with communication. As you should perfectly well know, every definition of drought characterises it as a lack of rainfall, nothing else. The height of the water table is far more usually a characteristic of drainage, streams/rivers and lakes (positive contributions) and water extraction (negative contributions).
Water tends to POOL on fields when they are saturated, griffy. If they’re dried out, it soaks right in.
What planet do you live on?
Presumably the planet that has heavy inpenetrable clay soils that don’t allow surface water to soak in and bake hard like bricks in the summer?
In NC they’re telling us we’re in a drought because of the lack of rain, despite the fact that our ponds & lakes are still so full they’re almost overflowing.
Gosh … you don’t say. That can’t be right! The German people would never fall for such obvious propaganda or their government lying to them to suit a political agenda. Surely they’re not that credulous and easily fooled. It’s not in their nature.
As we were also told to be short of drinkwater, the fear is near
Federal Office warns of drinking water shortage in Germany
Falling groundwater and consumption in agriculture could endanger the supply of drinking water in the medium term: According to the Federal Office for Civil Protection, precautions must already be taken now.
As our garden isn’t linked to any grid, water and electric power, we use to pump our (ground-) water out of a depth of 7m.
As at the end of summer 2019 or 2018 we had a some minor problems, I looked for the level in the standpipe, it was around 20 / 30 cm, really not so much.
As I started the installation of the pump equipment last week, I looked for the actual level, I saw it at about 1,50 m – more than enough 😀
How do you like using well water? I was on well water when I lived in Britain. It was wonderful. A few drops in my favourite single malt rewarded me with sheer bliss. Friends on village water would drop by for jugs of it to brew their tea,
When our city friends visit, many of them walk in the door and ask for a glass of water first thing!
As we are surrounded by wineyards and some agriculture, our groundwater is no drinkwater because of nitrate.
Beside that, the hardness grade is at a high level.
I’m sorry to hear that. Well, I hope you make up for it by getting some nice Riesling from your neighbours, in compensation … 🙂
The original posts 1st picture is of German mapped drought monitor; which shows no drought coloring (red tints) in the north/northwest. (The 2nd picture shows plant available water; which shows notable water blue tint colorings.) O.P. features photographs of wet fields/greenery and discusses north Germany. Well, those details are consistent with what the German maps indicate as hydrated conditions (notably) in the north/northwest. This does not mean the O.P.’s dismissive language has managed to contradict official German assertions there are notably dry conditions in significant parts of the country that are cause for concern.
By the way, the 2nd picture of plant available water coded in shades of blue has a legend below it that describes at which pale coloration the map is indicating drought stress (among other classifications). A few places show up as already being at the wilting point (red coloration for top 25 cm of ground), but I don’t know Germany well enough to infer from the map utilized to know if those are prime agricultural sectors.
Crops, especially vegetables, ideally are watered before wilt. Drought stress occurs before wilt.
When the soil feels dry it’s moisture saturation is about 40%. That still provides potentially a further 10-15% more water extraction for plants with established roots.
Looks like a “green drought”.
Marriage is no longer what it used to be. Free speech is no longer what it used to be. Infrastructure is no longer what it used to be. Bipartisanship is no longer what it used to be. Drought is no longer what it used to be.
Don’t forget California is back in drought…
‘Truly an emergency’: how drought returned to California – and what lies ahead | Climate crisis in the American west | The Guardian
“Just two years after California celebrated the end of its last devastating drought, the state is facing another one. Snowpack has dwindled to nearly nothing, the state’s 1,500 reservoirs are at only 50% of their average levels, and federal and local agencies have begun to issue water restrictions.”
“Drought is not unnatural for California. Its climate is predisposed to wet years interspersed among dry ones. But the climate crisis and rising temperatures are compounding these natural variations, turning cyclical changes into crises.
Drought, as defined by the National Weather Service, isn’t a sudden onset of characteristics but rather a creeping trend. It’s classified after a period of time, when the prolonged lack of water in a system causes problems in a particular area, such as crop damages or supply issues. In California, dry conditions started to develop in May of last year, according to federal monitoring systems.”
It is dry in California and a lot of the western US.. but it is plenty wet in the Southeastern US where I live. You see, California and the southwestern US are what are classified as arid and semi-arid, which means it rains not a lot out there both currently and historically. Where I live is classified as sub-tropical and it can rain a lot. Different regions, different climates.
So if you live in an arid or semi-arid climate, there will be times when it just doesn’t rain much at all, which is right now. In fact, they get almost no rain on the west coast during the summer and fall so they are dependent on what falls during the winter/spring in terms of mostly snow. Arizona, Utah and New Mexico get summer rains primarily from the heat.. yes the heat causes rising air which sucks in humid air from the Gulf of Mexico. It is referred to as a monsoon although I don’t think technically it is one. All natural and every cycle we’ve seen in the current and past few decades have been shown to occur many times in the past.
It’s just as will you state a trend of rain in rainforrest regions.
I think I heard the weatherman say California and the other regions in the Southwest are due to get some rain soon.
Everything east of New Mexico is getting plenty of rain right now.
What “climate crisis”? Temperatures have remained more or less static in the US for over two decades. Unless you are saying the current weather is unprecedented, which it demonstrably isn’t, you’re perpetuating a lie. The only real problem in that region is over cultivation, drawing down natural aquifers that take centuries to refill.
Your sarcasm, PG, is most satisfactory.
Rainfall are not just about mathematical statistics.
There must be a physical phenomena where more CO2 leads to a hotter climate which then leads to more or less rain..
The phenomena that impacts Germany is likely to be the same as France, Italy and other neighbours.
Alarmists have not been successful in matching the physical mechanism with the statistics.
“it’s too early call off the alarm”
You hear this a lot these days. It’s the tyranny of the precautionary principle.
I realize that England is not Germany, but the weather used to be pretty much in sync, and Harry’s farm video seems to be doing a bumper crop in a few areas. A travel diary from Harry on his other channel showed heavy rain and snow in Belgium and Germany earlier this year. This video is from Germany, no narration, and labeled March this year, looks pretty lush for spring in what I’m guessing is the North East (sandy soil, plains).
Maybe the problem isn’t rain, but regulation? German farmers protesting in Berlin dated February — too much tariff and regulation, high fuel prices, but also showing lots of rain and snow. Interesting how Harry says his crop in England is exempt frpm tariffs and is encouraged to plant and harvest. Those English cattle looked pretty sustainable to me.
And by the way, the permanent drought in Texas is over, again, too. A relative has a lakefront home, 21 inches of rain just in the past two weeks, and water lapping at his porch steps, normally 50 feet from shoreline.
The record for green goon drought predictions is not at all good. Maybe they should leave it to the meteorologists?
Another insightful article by Pierre Gosselin, thank you Pierre.
Excerpt:
“Another trick the alarmists use is a color chart depicting the drought intensity in across Germany – for 1.8 meters soil depth! And here the data are not even actually measured, but rather are modelled,”
I recall a conversation with my good friend and co-author, veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo about warmist climate scientists. Joe observed that “These people live in a virtual world”, meaning that warmists continue to cite their models as evidence of human-made global warming, even when it is obvious that their models strongly conflict with actual observations!
This is of course true of the climate computer models, which are repeatedly cited by the IPCC and other climate alarmists, even though all but one of the dozens of bogus climate models they cite grossly over-predict observed warming!
Perhaps in this imaginary “virtual world” the climate alarmists have created, we should all be “virtually afraid”, but it is only a computer game, like Super Mario Bros – sane people don’t get permanently lost inside Super Mario.
This “virtual world” of runaway global warming computer models is a scary fiction – it is NOT a suitable venue for the creations of false alarm, the imposition of destructive carbon taxes and unreliable green energy schemes; it is especially NOT suited to the fabrication of false alarm among our children, causing them needless trauma.
In the real world, there is no real “climate emergency” – it is actually a false fabrication created by leftist elites for financial and political gain – it is their BIG LIE that has cost us trillions of wasted dollars and millions of wasted lives. It is a fifty-year corrupted fraud that is long past its due date, concocted by wolves to stampede the sheep. It is the modern world’s longest-living global-scale scam. It is incredible that so many people could be so easily fooled for so long, a reflection of how stupid the average person is, and how half of them are stupider than that (h/t George Carlin).
The reality is that every very-scary climate prediction by global warming alarmists has failed to happen – 48 such failed scary climate predictions had expired by end 2020, that is, they passed their due date – the probability against that being mere random stupidity by climate alarmists is about 281 trillion to one – this is not just climate alarmists being stupid – they’ve been deliberately lying to us for ~50 years about their bogus climate crisis – now the warmists themselves are long past their due date – for anyone with a modicum of intelligence, the global warming alarmists and their very-scary stories are fully expired.
Utilizing the term “drought”, or even “extreme drought” appears to be the latest scare-mongering tool in the CAGW collection. In Lane County, Oregon, the state officials declare “extreme drought”, even though snowpack in the Cascade Mountains is above average/normal and my family reports they need to water their large vegetable garden less because it’s raining a lot. I wonder what they attribute floods too? CAGW seems to work both ways!
There is a saying: “One swallow does not a spring make.” Of course the English language is somewhat torturous and in the original context swallow refers to a bird.
…and spring to the time of year (also ambiguous in English!). Maybe “it’s not already spring because one swallow has returned from the South”. Anyway, the gist is: “Don’t think that a big thing must be following behind the small things you see!” Wise advice to Alarmists of any kind 🙂
Who are you going to believe, models or your lying eyes?
I think I’d better model that first, then reply….
I don’t live in Germany, but the sight of the stupid windmills in those pictures is obnoxious.
The droughts are getting droughtier, and the floods are getting floodier, all due to the magic of “carbon”. Science!
Be careful. You could drown while waiting for official word.
The drought monitor you showed is for the full soil column. If you look at the one for the top 25 cm (10 inches), there is virtually no drought in the entire country. And, if you go down on the page, you can see how, even the total column drought has been diminishing. It takes time for the water to percolate into the soil. https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=37937
So that’s where my rain went? I wondered!
Rain is bad about that.
Here in NC we’re technically in a drought too – not 1.8m down, but we have had lower rainfall than average lately.
But we had so much rain over the winter that our ponds are still nearly overflowing. They’re still higher than I remember seeing in quite some time.
Those are clearly pools of CO2 tainted dry water, and not suitable for agriculture.
Bureaucrats gain power by declaring disasters and emergencies, and once declared they are reluctant to declare the crisis over because they lose that power. As we have seen with COVID–some state governors in the U.S. are still desperately holding on to their emergency powers even as rational people are going back to normal life. And Fauci still thinks he is running something. It’s pathetic. The problem is not the declared emergencies anymore, it is power-hungry government bureaucrats.
The 1.8 m soil depth is important for most conifers – and you might have noticed that these are nearly always the ones which constitutes the pictures of dead trees.
But they were just planted where they don’t belong initially starting in the LIA. Now they are getting in trouble.
If you have to plant conifers than take deep rooting mediterranean ones.
Most deciduous trees have been completely fine.
Especially in SW Germany north of the black forrest deciduous treee are sufferning form the drought, the one which according P.Gosselin does not exist. Watching rivers in the NW-German lowlands does not give you the full picture.
Fortunately there was more rain than usual in May and early June in Germany. Unforutnatly there were some heay raiin falls wihch filled rivers but not so much the gorund water storage.
All in all, P.Gosselin is spreding his own view which is not representing the facts for all Germany.
So many planet saving windmills what could go wrong?
We have good friends in Germany who are so indoctrinated we cannot even discuss the weather. Fact is, most Germans are kooks.
The best story I have heard – maybe I read it here – is that Berliners use so little water domestically that their sewers have to be flushed by the utility to keep them functioning. This obsession with water conservation persists despite the fact that Berlin sits practically in the middle of a swamp (okay, I exaggerate). Still it is a damp part of the world.