Guest essay by Eric Worrall
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has wasted no time attempting to pivot her government’s disastrous failure to act on warnings about the flood disaster into a climate change propaganda campaign.
Angela Merkel calls for climate change action as she surveys deadly flood damage
“The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here,” Chancellor Angel Merkel said.
July 19, 2021, 1:30 AM AEST
By Claudio Lavanga and Isobel van HagenHEIMERSHEIM, Germany — The train station has been reduced to rubble, wrecked cars lie on the tracks and uprooted trees line the riverbank.
Hundreds in the village of Heimersheim were still without power as police combed the wreckage left by receded water on Sunday to look for bodies and potentially flammable material.
There were similar scenes across western Germany and other parts of Europe where the cleanup from last week’s disastrous floodingcontinued. At least 180 people have died, officials confirmed Sunday, thousands more are missing.
As the waters rose from the Ahr river, Zinat Hamsoro, 41, who lives in the normally tranquil Heimersheim, told NBC News she had been forced to climb and spend the night on a hill near the village.
“It happened so fast, and we weren’t warned,” she said Sunday. “The city council posted a warning message on its Facebook page, but by then it was too late.”
…
“The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here,” she said.
She said the force of the storms suggested they had “something to do with climate change,” adding, “We have to hurry, we have to get faster in the fight against climate change.”
…
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/angela-merkel-calls-climate-change-action-she-surveys-deadly-flood-n1274310
I wonder what the provision was for residents who don’t use Facebook? Was there any actual plan in place, for how to respond to an imminent flood, like a hotline for contacting local media outlets? Were there no emergency teams ready to deploy flood control measures? Or was posting on Facebook all the city council could think of on short notice?
And the biggest question, why did Merkel apparently expect someone to call her, to warn her? Why didn’t her government proactively monitor the situation, by maintaining daily contact with meteorologists and reaching out for up to date information? There was plenty of warning, all Merkel’s government had to do was pick up the telephone and ask the right questions.
The German Government’s excuses echo a trend in African countries, where politicians sometimes attempt to blame Climate Change to camouflage their own incompetence or corruption.
For example, the Nile Delta Regional Governor in Egypt tried this trick in 2015, claiming the flooding of the Nile, which led to severe flooding of Alexandria, was due to climate change. But furious critics in the Arab press pointed to poor maintenance of drains, and made sure ordinary people were aware that the real problem was incompetence.
… His resignation, which comes less than a year after he took charge of Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, was announced Sunday by a government spokesman amid widespread criticism over the city’s response to the deluge.
“We are drowning in negligence,” read the front-page headline of Al-Youm Al-Sabaa daily newspaper. “The government drowns in Alexandria,” read the banner headline at Al-Shorouk, another daily.
Alexandria’s frail infrastructure, particularly its drainage systems, likely aggravated the flooding and resulted in the deaths of five people who were electrocuted by a fallen power cable, according to local media. The downpour was five times the amount of rain the city normally experiences in all of October.
Some people pointed to climate change as a major culprit. Missiry called the flooding an “environmental catastrophe” shortly before resigning.
Such flooding could become the norm in Alexandria, the World Bank has warned. It put Alexandria among the five cities across the world most at risk of flooding by 2050 as a result of climate change. The other cities the World Bank lists include Barranquilla, Colombia; Naples, Italy; Sapporo, Japan; and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. …
Read more: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/10/26/climate-change-to-increase-alexandria-flooding.html
Even if you believe climate change is making floods worse, surely this means governments should have planned for this, and made more effort to prepare. Politicians are accountable for how their governments respond to disasters, regardless of the cause of those disasters.
Let us hope the German people can at least match the fortitude and political wisdom of the people of Africa, reject the pathetic excuses of their leaders, and demand the resignation of the politicians whose incompetence or worse contributed to visiting this disaster upon their lives.
Update (EW): h/t Bellman, Zig Zag – Zinat Hamsoro is a resident of Heimersheim, who said “we weren’t warned”. Me bad sorry, I didn’t make it clear – some readers are conflating this with my suggesting Merkel just sat around waiting for a warning, instead of being proactive.
Correction (EW): h/t Antonis Christofides – The original title “German Chancellor Angela Merkel Falsely Claims “We Weren’t Warned” about the German Floods” was incorrect – it was German resident Zinat Hamsoro who said “we weren’t warned”.
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Germany Y2006, after 2002 flood: ” it was recognized that floodplains had been reduced to one third of their original extent in Germany and to 10 to 20% along large rivers and should thus be reactivated;”
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol21/iss2/art51/
Well the Dutch town which flooded had had a restored flood plain and millions of Euros of flood defences after a 1990 flood…
And there is no flood plain reinstatement on earth which would have coped with 2 months rain in 48 hours.
The villages and towns damaged have been there for centuries. Those buildings are mostly not new. They have flood defences, they have not been hit like this in living memory and beyond… The dams have withstood up to a century (or more) of winter flooding…
This is about an exceptional rainfall, an exceptional climate change caused disaster.
De biggest damage happened in Valkenburg, which was on a Meuse tributary the Geul. The Meuse valley damage was minimal thanks to the works carried out after the nineties’floods. Facts griff, facts.
And the Ahr river in Germany floods <b>every</b> century, so this was a disaster waiting to happen.
And why do you think flood plains are called “flood” plains?
The mere fact that there have been bigger floods in the same area in the past means nothing to griff, because the sacred models have declared that this flood was caused by CO2. (Despite the fact that the model makes have proclaimed that the models are worthless for regional forecasts, much less local ones.)
Hey Griff, a couple of days ago, we had 5 inches of rainfall in one day. We handled it just fine. How may inches dropped in Germany? How exceptional was it?
You’re impervious to evidence griff.
In which time period would you prefer to live your life?
[__] Benign low CO2 1675-1750
[__] “Dangerous” CO2 1950-2025
[__] Really nice CO2 1325-1345
When the actual biggest flood occurred in 1392.
Griff talking about a Dutch town, on a flood plain, flooding! Too funny! Hey Griff, what is another name for Holland/Netherlands? Why it’s Pays-Bas which means “low lands”.
Eric, thanks for fixing the title. I really appreciate that.
To answer your questions about the notification of people via Facebook: A few years ago there was a forest fire in Attica, Greece, which engulfed a village and killed about 100 people. The opposition party organized a great talk by a professor who explained what happened and what could have been done differently. He did not blame anyone; his purpose was to identify why the system failed and what procedures should be established to avoid such failure in similar future cases. (The leader of the opposition was present at the talk, and next year he became Prime Minister, and when he went to the world climate conference he used that fire and its death toll as an example of an effect of climate change, but this is another story.)
Anyway, I learnt a lot by watching that talk. Notifying citizens is the Civil Protection Agency’s job. A common and effective way of notifying is SMS. However, even if you don’t have a notification mechanism in place, just making a decision is way better than doing nothing. If you make a decision to, e.g., evacuate an area, the news people will pick it up and broadcast it, and it will reach the residents via television and word of mouth.
I don’t believe the city council is responsible for such action. I’m guessing here, but if Civil Protection didn’t do its job, the city council might decide to warn people, and since it’s not their normal job, it’s also OK that they don’t have a notification mechanism in place. They would have posted the warning on their web site, on their facebook page, and wherever else they could.
And, by the way, it’s not the government’s job either. Especially in a well-organized state like Germany, the government’s job should be to organize and help Civil Protection before a crisis, and stay out of its way during the crisis.
It’s a pity the German Civil Protection (and the German government) didn’t attend that talk.
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Attica_wildfires
The talk, in Greek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPUEyNh7-0
If the mayor calls the local media and informs them that the council is asking people to evacuate, I’m pretty sure the media will broadcast that announcement.
Even if they don’t have the authority to force an evacuation, telling people that they should evacuate would get a lot of them moving.
They might as well have claimed that it was a punishment from God.
That’s the std get-out clause.
No, no, no.
The new standard get-out clause is CAGW. Just like the gods, it can’t be proven wrong, it absolves you of all responsibility, AND it lets you increase taxes!
Look over there , its raining , its pouring , now its flooding .
Climate change is killing us all
Climate change is fast , we couldn’t possibly have evacuated .
Merkel will print some more Deutschmarks and be a hero .
Nope, Euros
Germany hasn’t seen flooding like this in centuries (and then it WAS climate change – onset of the Little Ice Age).
This flood was in summer, with record rainfall (record exceeded by 50% at Cologne)… unlike winter floods usually seen in the region it ripped through houses. In the Netherlands it flooded a town which had had millions of Euros of new flood defences after 1990 winter flooding.
The lesson Watts readers need to take from this is the truly exceptional timing and scale of the flooding, the truly exceptional amount of rainfall.
This is, unfortunately, exactly as predicted by climate science. With this happening in a N Hemisphere heatwave year, there’s no way this is ‘just weather’.
This is climate change as it affects N Europe and I think you all know it. Certainly every last German now does: climate skepticism died in Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium last week.
Millions spent on flood defenses!!! We have the same in the UK. It just moves the flooding further along the river…
Err – examine your first sentence, and have a good hard think.
So….
Cold causes increased flooding!
And…
Warm causes increased flooding!
Way to have your cake and eat it!
Thanks! I was wondering about how the LIA caused flooding and CAGW causes flooding, too. The answer is cake!
Griff The river Ahr floods every century “like this” (1910, 1804), so why is this disaster climate change?
Because this time griff has a religion to defend.
But per CAGW, there is also supposed to be great droughts. Maybe Merkel bet on the droughts part and ignored the rain part? Anyway, since Climate Change causes everything, it gets a tad difficult knowing what to plan for, but it does seem true believers should be planning for both and certainly not ignoring weather reports as seems to have been done here.
When one lie doesn’t work, make it bigger.
Standard griff tactic.
There was nothing unusual about the amount of rainfall. Storms like that fall once or twice a decade in that region. It’s just that the actual location varies every time.
Follow the history and you find serveral summer floods
The only thing “exceptional” is your ignorance. It is unusual, but still, it is just weather. Unusual weather happens all the time, always has, always will.
“This is climate change as it affects N Europe and I think you all know it.”
No, we don’t know it. There is no evidence that CO2 had anything to do with this weather situation. You are just seeing what you want to see, not what is there.
In the United States, we have weather forcasters on every television channel, all day long, and if severe weather is coming, anyone watching tv will know about it.
Don’t Germans have television meterologists? Do Germans watch daily weather reports? How could they not know something unusual was coming their way?
It’s starting to sound like griff is getting giddy with Schadenfreude, doesn’t it? Something that happens each century and will have worse effects when moronic regulations prevent proper precautions, seems like it can fool more people. The joy!
Self-contradiction is no problem for the propagandist. The onset of cold caused floods in the past, but now mirabile dictu, it’s global warming doing the deed! CO2 was not to blame back seven centuries but now it’s the whole cause!
Please griff, get a therapy appointment!
In which time period would you prefer to live your life?
[__] Benign low CO2 1675-1750
[__] “Dangerous” CO2 1950-2025
[__] Really nice CO2 1325-1345
Excellent Griff, glad to see you just admitted that there was a LIA and therefore the “hockey stick” is a fraud.
Glad to see you are coming around.
Five minutes from now he will deny the LIA if it suits the narrative. He will not blush.
Haha, excellent! Inevitably, Griff has lost track of all his lies, and contradicts himself.
Dresden 2002? In my books that’s 19 years ago, not “centuries”. And the last time I checked the city was still in what remains of Germany after two Allied invasions.
German floods caused by climate change?
How did that happen? Well, the dominant greenhouse gas H2O apparently changed phase, and all of it over parts of Germany suddenly came down as rain.
The German politicians concerned about CO2 should really get moving and introduce taxes on water vapour Taxing water will surely make the climate crisis go away (sarc warning)
Why do skeptics fall for the cheap Orwellian “climate change” trick? If you mean anthropogenic or man-made, say so. It’s climate change denial.
Don’t think for one moment that germany’s Merkel the Jerkel et al has put an end to that country’s generational evil.
I think there’s something to be said for the theory that German culture is susceptible to believing in abstractions and acting on them unreasonably.
But that’s an unfair comment to call Germans evil. Individuals born decades after the end of WW2, can’t be blamed for their grandparents and great-grandparents actions.
I wonder if the German TV and radio stations were broadcasting flood warnings prior to these incidents?
In the UK, we only need a bit of very heavy rain forecast and the TV / internet weather forecast goes into overdrive to warn people about potential flooding in their areas.
I wonder to if the Germans have the equivalent of our river level warning system. I am sure they do.
UK here: https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/river-and-sea-levels
Here it is:
Quote:”And the biggest question, why did Merkel apparently expect someone to call her, to warn her? Why didn’t her government proactively monitor the situation, by maintaining daily contact with meteorologists and reaching out for up to date information”
See what’s there:
all those people have tuned out. The incessant warnings warning warnings have been too much. They’ve all been wrong so far so why listen, why inflict ever more guilt inducing depressive finger-wagging noise upon yourself for no good reason?
Nobody is actually listening anymore. Nobody believes any more
Hence we see the over-reaction = a perfect case of :
The Lady Doth Protest Innocence a Little TOO Strongly
They give themselves away soooo clearly – as The Human Animal always does
Nice one Ma Nature – I luvs ya 2 bits
x
(The folks who perished were/are martyrs – carve their names in stone to mark a turning point)
PS
Re: The words
Patently nobody around here actually speaks English.
>English is universally understood by everyone everywhere at all times.
If, sometimes this does happen, a ‘misunderstanding’ occurs, the Great Joy of English is that you make yourself understood simply by speaking more loudly.
It Works Every Time
Except with The French – hence why we’re constantly at war…
and luvvin it 😀
Because that (the French) way you earn respect, Genuine Respect and thereafter, Shit Like Climate Change never gets a chance to proliferate and grow.
Its called a GSOH and is what EVERY girl is this world is looking and, by watching any dating site, they simply cannot find. any more
Hence why it is Ma Nature – not Mr Nature
In the spring of 2019, the UK midlands experienced heavy rainfall. It resulted in severe flooding of the Severn flood plain and its contributing water courses.
The scene and amount of water was biblical. It resembled an inland sea.
The prime cause of the devastation, was the failure to dredge the drainage and water courses over the previous 20 years. That failure to dredge was due to official EU rules and regulations that made dredging unaffordable. They had defined spoil from dredging as industrial waste that must consequently be paid for to dispose of it at controlled landfill. The prior habit of spreading dredge spoil on adjacent fields to the water course, was banned.
As this was the situation in the UK, I am wondering, was the failure to dredge and clear water courses in Germany, a contributing factor to the extent of the flooding and the speed at which the water rose?
I have friends who live in Dusseldorf, and hope they are safe..
blame on climate change?
this does not help their defense at all.
If you believe in disastrous weather events due to climate change, all the more reason to put in place effective severe weather warning and reaction systems.
Stop making sense…this is Merkel after all
How can the weather forecasters predict the weather in 30 years time when than cannot predict the weather in 3 days time?
State of the Art Models!
Because … you, and everyone else remember the 3 day prediction, and the errors. While 30 years out is either forgotten, or modified to 60 years out.
Except they did!
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/germany-knew-the-floods-were-coming-but-the-warnings-didnt-work-cn99wjxzs
“Over the next few days a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by “extreme” flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena.
Yet despite at least 24 hours’ warning that predicted, almost precisely, which districts would be worst afflicted when the rains came, the flood still caught many of its victims largely unawares.”
“How can the weather forecasters predict the weather in 30 years time”.
They cannot of course BUT they can give expected trends based on increasing energy in the climate system.
Thus:
It is far far easier to project the linear fit (climate) than the noise (weather) along it.
The trend of the fit rather than any point on the “noise”.
You genuinely believe there is such a thing a a global temperature and a global climate?
In the sense that you can average out a GMST – yes.
And in the sense that is all that can be done with a reasonable amount of certainty at the moment.
Is it meaningful – Not other than that, and that’s it’s predicated on our Fossil carbon emissions and can be quantified as a metric going back to pre-industrial.
But as supercomputers get more powerful, then trends can be picked out in regional variations of said GMST in terms of weather.
They managed to evacuate 45,000 people before the 2013 floods.
https://www.air-worldwide.com/Models/Flood/Mapping-the-2013-Floods-in-Central-Europe/
In the UK one big factor that caused flooding was the EU environmental directives.
Simply put, rewilding is a lack of any management, be that clearing banks and dredging etc. After the flooding in the Somerset levels, they soon started managing the waterways again.
As we say, it was a colossal own-goal.
In 2013 the River Elbe flooded. I had booked to stay at a hotel in Königstein, south of Dresden but the hotel was flooded and had to be closed. Fortunately the hotel was able to partially re-open by the time I was due to stay there. The interesting thing is that I was told that Königstein was given warning by river authorities in the Czech Republic and the residents had some time in which to prepare for the flooding.
We had a little flooding here in Michigan about a year ago. Things are very hush hush about it at the moment. The think politicians are having a hard time trying to blame climate change. I am thinking that the computer models are having a hard time linking the raising of lake water levels, dead clams and lake front property owners with the rainy season.
After the Flint water crisis I have come to the conclusion that the words “government” and “failure” are interchangeable.
Joe
PS. If anyone commenting on this site has any info about the food please share. I can find nothing with recent dates.
Gee, I wonder what Merkel will do if this turns into A Permanent Thing. And how long can she keep her job if people finally wise up to her stupidity? Are class action lawsuits allowed in German courts?
Even if one thinks the flooding was caused by climate change and that immediate action is required to mitigate such things in the future, it should be painfully obvious that the effects of such mitigation efforts are a very, very long way off, which makes it very clear that blaming climate change is just an excuse.
A true disaster is almost by definition something that goes beyond a plan or planned response. Sometimes there is no plan, sometimes the plan fails. Hence insurance.
There are limited resources and almost limitless potential disasters. People have always liked to live by rivers, rivers flood, sometimes suddenly, sometimes higher than ever remembered or recorded. (Similar floods occur on seacoasts). If you want to be safe from floods, build well above the highest known flood line – not near a river or ocean. If you like to live or build near water, buy insurance and have your own evacuation plan.
This type of failure is a feature for those who prefer limited government.
No scumbag quite like an East German scumbag. Again, why is she not in prison for life for all her crimes as a member of STASI?Oh, yea, none of them were punished, they just got fat paying jobs in the new government. Never mind.
Do nothing about it, let the disaster occur and get people screaming about it, and then blame climate change so you need to “do something”, which inevitably means greater regulation and restrictions on the populace. And it seems to be working.
Wasn’t climate change meant to cause more droughts and food shortages.
Everyone here knows that cold causes catastrophic weather, cold environments are always worse.
This has been an exceptionally cold year for Europe, we are simply seeing the results.
As to forecasters, here i am in southern Saskatchewan, yesterday the prediction was 36C today and so we planned accordingly.
Here at 1:30 PM is is 19C.
Not quite 50% off but very close.
Yes, weather and climate models are so awesome
Been a cold year here, too. I’m still wearing thermals so that I don’t have to turn the furnace on in the AM.
The village of Heimersheim is built on the flood plain next to the river Ahr and even has a stream meandering through the middle of it, as can be seen on this image, that splits off from yhe main river just above the village and rejoins it again just below.
This valley has seen flooding for hundreds of years and the floods have been studied. The conclusions were that floods greater than those that occurred during the 1800s and 1900s had occurred previously and if similar floods occurred now the impacts would be worse due to the changes in land use.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24365169